Brandon's movie memory

Antonio Banderas (first movie of his I’ve watched since Once Upon a Time in Mexico) invents an insect-and-heat-repellent artificial skin, which he’s tested on a beautiful woman who seems to be imprisoned in a room of his house. But the artificial skin is a distraction from the real story – the fact that the girl may be fireproof is sadly not integrated into the plot. Mainly the movie wants to tell us more about Vera, the woman in the room (Elena Anaya of Mesrine), and how she got there, with bonus sub-plots about Dr. Antonio and his family.

Firstly, his housekeeper/chef (Marisa Peredes, star of Flower of My Secret) is secretly his mom, and her misfit son Zeca comes to the house dressed as a tiger, ties up his mom and rapes the girl upstairs before Antonio comes home and shoots him to death, while mom watches on the monitors downstairs. Some of the most intense shots in the movie involve those monitors, Antonio, his mom and Zeca interacting with Vera’s image.

Backstory: Antonio became obsessed with artificial skin after his wife was disfigured in a burning car (crashed by Zeca, with whom she’d been cheating) then threw herself out the window to her death in front of their young daughter, who became a psychological wreck from the experience. Years later Antonio takes his daughter Norma on a rare trip outside her mental hospital to a party, where she’s nearly raped by party-crasher Vicente in the garden. Soon the daughter commits suicide and Antonio kidnaps Vicente, gives him an unwilling sex change and alters his whole body to resemble that of Antonio’s dead wife before her accident.

So, back in the present, it’s no wonder that soon after Antonio starts letting Vera/Vicente leave her room, she starts planning revenge – grabs a gun from his desk and kills Antonio and his mom. Movie ends with a tearful reunion, the beautiful Vera in her family’s shop for the first time in six years telling her mother “I’m Vicente.”

Almodovar will never top the Caetano Veloso interlude in Talk To Her, but he gives us a couple of passionate performances by Concha Buika, just one of the details that lifts this movie above its sordid story.

I meant to rewatch Eyes Without a Face before going to this, but forgot.

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The Skin I Live In blu-ray

Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the title on the print, and IMDB calls it Histoires extraordinaires. An anthology film with three shorts based on Edgar Allen Poe stories, its reputation is of a brilliant Fellini film saddled behind a harmless Malle and terrible Vadim – but I like the Vadim (and I watched it twice, so I’m sure) and found the Malle unpleasant.

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Metzengerstein (Roger Vadim)

Started watching this on DVD in French with bad dubbing – I noticed Jane Fonda was mouthing the words I saw in the subtitles, though I was hearing French voices. So after this segment, I started over with the British blu-ray, which has a great picture-quality advantage even if some of the voices are still dubbed. IMDB claims Vincent Price is narrating, but it sounds more like Rod Serling.

Jane Fonda, happiest when someone is getting hanged:

Frederique (Jane Fonda a few months before Barbarella) is a countess who wears outrageous clothing and hangs out with her rich friends and exotic pets (a blue/gold macaw, a baby leopard) taunting the peasants, sometimes to death. She meets a distant relative who lives on neighboring land (Fonda’s actual brother Peter, between The Trip and Easy Rider). She’s infatuated with him, but he doesn’t fall for her power trip, so she orders his barn burned down and he dies trying to save his prize horse. Just then a black horse appears at her castle, and she becomes obsessed with riding it, finally riding into some burning fields to be with her deceased cousin. It’s not much of a story, but I liked its mix of gothic brooding and 1960′s decadence. Also I liked Peter’s baby owl.

Francoise Prevost, a conspirator in Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round, plays “friend of countess” – not sure if that’s the friend Jane was fondling naked in a bathtub or not. The Poe story (in which the Jane Fonda character was male) was filmed again in the 1970′s by some French people I’ve never heard of.

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William Wilson (Louis Malle)

Opens with the jump-cuttiest scene of a man running intercut with a rag doll falling off a church tower. Alain Delon (year after Le Samourai, two before Le Cercle Rouge) barges rudely into a confession booth and subjects a priest to his flippantly-dubbed flashbacks. First, as a psychotic young boy (fun fact: 27 years later, the actor playing young Delon would appear in Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak), Wilson was tormenting his classmates when another boy named William Wilson showed up, frustrating him. “Several years later I entered the school of medicine out of curiosity,” and as a psychotic young man, he rapes and tortures some girl on the autopsy table in front of his colleagues, again is frustrated when another William Wilson (now clearly played by Delon himself) shows up. Finally as a psychotic adult, Wilson is cheating a rich woman (Vadim’s ex-wife Brigitte Bardot, a few years before her retirement) at cards then whipping her (!) when Other Wilson arrives and reveals the fraud.

That’s the autopsy girl, not Bardot:

I don’t know what Wilson wanted the priest to do about all this, and I’m not sure if he’s just bringing up a few specific examples of the many times WWII turned up in his life, or if the guy only arrives once a decade. WW goes running outside, fights his doppelganger in a duel, and either stabs himself or leaps off the church tower, it’s hard to tell which. Good. It’s a misogynistic little film with diabolically bad dialogue. The Poe story (which has less nude-woman-torture, and fewer leaps from atop church towers) was filmed before in the silent era with Paul Wegener and again with Conrad Veidt, and I can tell just from its wikipedia entry that the original story is better than Malle’s visualisation.

William the Second:

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Toby Dammit (Federico Fellini)

A drugged-out British actor arrives in Italy to appear in a film, for which he has been promised a ferrari. After suffering through his flight, cast and crew meetings and a party (haven’t seen it in a while, but looks like they’re partying on the set of Satyricon), he gets his hands on the ferrari and drives through the confounding Italian countryside, finally leaping an out-of-order bridge but failing to notice the steel wire just at neck level.

A decadent little film – every shot is crazy and imaginative and essential. Terence Stamp (year after Poor Cow) was so good in this, that it will now be necessary for me to watch everything he did between it and The Limey. Creepiest is the devil girl with a white ball who alternately torments and provokes the volatile Stamp without any dialogue. The Poe story actually features a character named Toby Dammit’s bridge-jumping beheading – though not in a ferrari, obviously.

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Bonus image – a Jean Cocteau snowball fight:

Spirits of the Dead Blu-ray

“All is illusion. Set us free of this world.”

A badger on the road is run down by a small orange car driven by Lily, hiding her identity beneath a hat and bulky coat, driving through the midst of a literal battle of the sexes (with tanks and machine guns). She runs from her car after being discovered, chills for a while with snakes, millipedes and mantises before spying a unicorn then following a woman on horseback and a group of naked children running with a pig towards an old house in which she finds a bottomless glass of milk, a semi-talking piglet and rat, and an old woman with a C.B. and an alarm clock collection. So it kind of sounds like a kids’ movie, if not for all the nudity and brutal warfare, and were there some dialogue or a condescending narrator to help the viewer along.

Enter two more characters named Lily, a brother and sister played by Joe Dallesandro (the year after Dracula) and Alexandra Stewart (Mickey One, The Fire Within), both of whom I liked very much. Maybe it’s because they’re so silent, while the main Lily (Cathryn Harrison, who was 15 and had already appeared in Altman’s Images and Demy’s Pied Piper) and the old woman (Therese Giehse, in Malle’s Lacombe Lucien the year before) were hampered by the dubbing in their dialogue scenes.

nearly the full cast:

The old woman dies amidst an alarm clock catastrophe, but is alive again when the siblings come up to feed her (she sucks one Lily’s breast while Joe Lily tickles her ear). Main Lily remains in the old woman’s room for a while. A bird flutters around the room (prefiguring a later scene), and the woman talks with her rat friend (named Humphrey) and her radio, watches and mocks the girl, who eats the ant-infested christmas cheese and braves bureau snakes to flip through a photo album. Meanwhile the war outside makes itself known from time to time, and Lily finally escapes to seek the unicorn. She gets no help from the siblings, finally manages to hold an unsatisfying chat with the unicorn after ripping up some flowers as they scream in pain.

Lily plays piano while the children, some of them clothed now, sing along operatically, then is frightened by a painting of a male swordsman chopping a hawk in half while a woman weeps. Enter a hawk through the window, and Joe Lily with a sword. I hope that beautiful hawk (and the badger, and the lamb, and the snake) wasn’t actually hurt or killed by the film crew. This leads to a painful-looking sibling battle. Finally, Lily, alone in the woman’s room except for the unicorn, baring her breasts to feed it.

If there’s meaning to all this, it’s not readily apparent. The old woman outright tells Lily that she imagined the unicorn and the war, but the woman herself disappears at times. If Lily herself, or anything at all, is supposed to be “real” and imagining these events, perhaps while playing outside, or playing piano, the movie presents no evidence of this. Lily, or Louis anyway, has your mid-1970′s fascination with nature and nudity (see also: Wicker Man, Holy Mountain, Deliverance). The internet figures it’s somehow related to Alice In Wonderland, as must be every fantasy story with a young girl lead.

Luis Buñuel’s daughter-in-law helped with the dialogue, shot by Bergman buddy Sven Nykvist. “Old Lady” Therese Giehse died before this came out. I thought it was a funny misprint when the IMDB said “Director Paul Verhoeven died during the eulogy he delivered for her,” but it’s true – and this was a different Paul Verhoeven.

Movies I’ve seen by Louis Malle include noirish jazzy thriller Elevator to the Gallows, zany comic Zazie dans le metro, suicide drama The Fire Within, epic travel doc Phantom India, and now this 70′s fantasy with little story or dialogue. None of these things is like the other. I guess Malle was one of those filmmakers who liked to constantly try new things, not one who always made variations of the same movie.

Buy from Amazon:
Black Moon (Criterion Blu-ray)

A making-of-itself filmmaking rabbit-hole containing mysteries with no answers. It’s hilarious to me that I leave my movie-filled laptop and go to the theater to see a movie that opens with a DVD-R entitled Road to Nowhere inserted into a laptop, with a looong slooow zoom into the screen – a zoom that will be repeated into a digital photograph over the closing credits, and which reminds me that one of the last times I was at this particular theater was to watch Wavelength. Very pleasing countryish music by Tom Russell over key scenes. All shot digital, I assume. Strange, intriguing movie in many ways.

Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan, Methyl from Little Dizzle) is directing the within-film, also called Road to Nowhere and also shot digitally, with local gossip and other details provided by blogger Natalie (Dominique Swain, title character in the Jeremy Irons Lolita) and carpenter Bruno (Waylon Payne, Jerry Lee Lewis in Walk the Line). Their movie stars Cary (Cliff De Young of movies I remember from cable like F/X and Dr. Giggles and Pulse – the one where the house’s electricity comes to life and wants you dead, not the one where Japanese ghosts come to life and want you dead) as Tachen together with Laurel (Shannyn Sossamon, the cute pink haired girl in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) as the doomed amour-fou couple of a small town.

But are they doomed? And is Laurel in fact Velma Duran, the very girl she’s portraying in the movie? And is Bruno in fact an insurance investigator who’s on to Velma’s scheme, trying to retrieve the hundred million dollars that she and the real Tachen stole when they died/disappeared? And is Mitchell, as the dialogue and the dialogue-within-the-dialogue both proclaim, in over his head? The movie doesn’t directly say, but rather shuttles between present filmmaking reality, the scenes being shot, and flashbacks which could be real or imagined. I was surprised then, given all the mystery, that the road doesn’t lead to nowhere like Lost Highway but to a definite ending, the girl shot to death by Bruno and Mitchell in jail. I guess all the noir elements and the in-too-deep stuff had to explode eventually, but I enjoyed the ride more than the conclusion.

Written by Steven Gaydos, a longtime Hellman collaborator who cowrote Iguana and helped produce Cockfighter.

NY Times:

Road may also be as significant to the indie feature as Avatar is to the popcorn movie: the entire film was shot on what is essentially a still camera (the Canon 5D Mark II), while looking like a mega-million Hollywood production. “The great thing about this camera is you don’t need permits because no one knows you’re shooting, said Mr. Hellman. … They shot in the streets of London, in Verona, in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome, in front of Michelangelo’s Moses and the tomb of Pope Julius II – permitless. “They thought we were tourists,” Mr. Hellman said.

This completely lived up to expectations. I’ve been a big Malick fan since The Thin Red Line, and this movie showed plenty of his current style (whispered voiceovers about pained relationships as the camera pans up through the trees) while forging a whole new one, had the boldness to turn a man’s memories and inner life into a visual montage of the history of the planet Earth. It shows small moments, real and imagined, and becomes almost completely untethered to plot. It’s almost unbelievably gorgeous in the way it looks and moves through time. But all this is what I expected, from reading vague reports of the film’s genesis as Malick’s intended follow-up to Days of Heaven, to its winning the top prize at Cannes last month, to the rapturous critical acclaim it’s been receiving upon release. I expected the best, most ambitious movie of the year, by a long shot, and that’s pretty much what I got, so I’m gonna have to process it for a while.

Jack and his brothers live in a quiet Texas town with proud, hardass father Brad Pitt (representing Nature in the film’s mythology) and pure, uncritical mother Jessica Chastain (representing Grace), both of them loving in their own way. Years later, Jack is Sean Penn working at a giant, modern architecture firm, looking world-weary. He chats with dad on the phone (we don’t get to see Brad pull out the Ben Buttons old-age makeup), but Katy guesses that mom has died, maybe recently. Oh, also there’s the history of the universe and of life on earth, with CG dinosaurs. The movie scatters its narrative for so long, it’s like a two-hour trailer for a life-length feature (or perhaps just the rumored six-hour cut). It’s like nothing else, ever, not 2001: A Space Odyssey or Malick’s earlier movies or anything else it’s being compared to.

Production design by “man in the planet” Jack Fisk (all five Malick features, four by Lynch plus There Will Be Blood and Phantom of the Paradise), shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (The New World, Sleepy Hollow, all the Alfonso Cuarón movies), music (very good, sometimes too large and overpowering) by Alexandre Desplat (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Birth) and edited by a bunch of guys (including, counterintuitively, Jarmusch’s buddy Jay Rabinowitz).

It’s not hard to find people walking about Tree of Life, but it’s surprisingly hard to find film critics as unhesitatingly impressed by it as I was. Suppose they’re doing their job, hesitating to fully recommend the most narratively unhinged major film of the year. I haven’t been recommending it around much myself. P. Bradshaw in The Guardian calls it “a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy.” The movie has no built-in defense against people who snicker at the cartoon dinosaurs and the whispered voiceovers and the biblical metaphors. It takes itself very seriously and demands that you do the same, or the whole thing could fall apart.

Easily my favorite Ruiz feature to date. At first it seems to have cranked up the surrealistic randomness of The Golden Boat, but with the constant visual interest of the short Le Film a Venir – which would be enough of a recommendation for me. But it just gets deeper and more fascinating as it goes on, while retaining enough of a plot and character structure to keep from becoming pure, confusing symbolism. Even if it turns out to be a huge allegory that I completely misunderstood, it’s still highly enjoyable on its own, full of meaning and ideas. Before I go seeking out others’ interpretations, a simple story rundown:

Stills from the remarkable first ten minutes:

The film’s subtitle looks like Latin, “Rusticatio Civitatis Piratarum,” translated as Pirates’ Exile. Set in “Overseas Territories, one week before the end of the war.”

Isodore (Anne Alvaro of Wajda’s Danton) lives with her parents in exile, who have a missing son (“he would be nine”). They see signs, abandon the house, are visited by cops who make reference to the Isle of Pirates. The girl finds an orphan boy (Melvil Poupaud, who became a Ruiz regular, most recently as the rescued colonel Lacroze in Mysteries of Lisbon) hiding at their new house.

Isidore considers drowning in the surf (her father: “Finally!” then when she falls for a mustache man and decides against suicide, “Ah! How I hate her!”). Pierre, the little boy, is discovered to have killed his whole family, now kills Isidore’s parents, then castrates the mustache man who shoots himself. All of this is done in a low-key way, with nobody getting too upset. Ruiz characters are never shaken when their families are killed.

Off to the Isle of Pirates, where her 10-year-old fiancee Pierre (aka Malo) abandons Isidore and she’s held prisoner by a guy named Toby (Hugues Quester, Binoche’s dead husband in Blue, also in Rohmer’s Tale of Springtime) with multiple personalities. “The defeat of Spain is inevitable… and with that, the feast of blood begins.” Isidore begins to doubt her identity, kills Toby with a knife (everyone is killed with a knife).

She’s visited in jail by her mother (not dead?) and the two cops from earlier. “Know this: this wonderful child who delivered you to the Isle of Pirates is our prophet, Don Sebastian. He’s known around the world. In England, he’s called Peter Pan … He reappears every ten years. He kills with joy his entire family. He shows us how to die. But, much more importantly, he shows us how to kill.”

“We, soldiers of the great battle of the world: we swear to die and to kill in order to introduce the army of corpses for the greater glory of our country, our cemetery. We swear to be reincarnated and to have the honor of dying again for the greater glory of our fathers, of the country of worms. We promise to pursue our struggle for the triumph of Death in order to perpetuate our glory in no other things.”

Isidore is back on the island talking to Toby, referring to Sebastian as their son. Sebastian, looking feral with a knife in his mouth, kills them both. Ends with Isidore and her mother looking at the Isle through their window, the ghosts of her father and Sebastian lurking around. “Everything begins again,” one of the women repeating “We are here… we are here.”

P. Hammond wrote an article for Rouge, hammers out a bunch of the film’s references, influences and allusions.

Surprise, invention, paradox are Ruiz’s touchstones. He believes in affirmation through irony, the clarity of enigma, deferred resolution, outlandish change of mood. He moves forward by staying in the same place. The tales his characters tell echo each other in certain details, enough to suggest an occult order behind discrete events.
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What binds Ruiz’s lost souls to each other’s desire is an Oedipal, narcissistic quest for identity.

D. Cairns writing about a different film:

Keats spoke of “negative capability,” the power to enjoy things without understanding them, to relish mystery without requiring a solution, and to appreciate art without being able to fit it into a rational box. Although, there’s always a frustration with movies where one is shut out of the linguistic side, since you know you’re not getting the full experience. It’s like pan-and-scan, only with words.

I’ve found the cover image for one of his Poetics of Cinema books.

Every year I look forward to the Atlanta Film Festival, getting increasingly excited until some offensive act causes me to sit out the second half. This time I was thrilled to see Ruiz’s five-hour Mysteries of Lisbon on the program, but pissed once it started that they were projecting it from DVD. What kind of rinky-dink festival thinks that is an acceptable practice, and without even an apology or excuse? Picture was muddy and macro-blocky, the color desaturated compared even to DVD screenshots I found online. When I complained about the same issue two years ago after a screening of Beket, an AFF official left a comment counterintuitively stating “screening 35mm prints is cheaper for us to do than any other format we use.” I hope he returns this year to explain the Lisbon situation. Also, the dude from Turner who introduced the film called Ruiz, the seventy year old director of over a hundred films “up and coming,” with no knowing wink or chuckle to imply he wasn’t serious.

The movie was very good, worth taking the time off at 1:00pm on a weekday to see in its entirety, but not my favorite Ruiz movie by a long shot, lacking the anarchist humor of That Day and the shorts I’ve seen. If not for a well-placed deep focus shot here, an anamorphic lens-twisting there, I could’ve believe that any of a handful of dedicated European art directors had adapted the 150-year-old novel into this massive period costume miniseries.

Young Joao is having a fit, deathly ill, dreams he sees his mother, whom he’s never met. When he awakens, Father Dinis of the orphanage begins to tell him about his mother, Countess Angela who lives nearby, forbidden by her domineering husband from even seeing her illicit son. The movie takes on a flashback structure that reminds me slightly of The Saragossa Manuscript, even with the storytellers interrupting themselves to go to sleep, then resuming the next day. It seems Angela was in love with a young man (Don Pedro) whom her father wouldn’t let her marry, she got pregnant, and the baby was to be killed – but the assassin (Knife Eater) cut a deal with a passing gypsy (the priest in disguise) and sold the child.

Mysterious gypsy, left, with Knife Eater:

Back in the present, an outspoken Brazilian (Alberto de Magalhaes, formerly known as Knife Eater) is entering high society. Awesome scene when some guy demands a duel and Alberto straight kicks his ass, the fight shot through the window of the priest’s passing carriage. Angela’s husband, who’d married her despite the priest’s ghostly warning that he would be marrying “a dead slave” since her heart was lost to the murdered father of her stolen child, had become a tyrant who openly carried on an affair with Eugenia the maid and locked Angela in a single room. But the husband gets sick and dies, repenting first to the priest. Oh, and priest, while you’re here, an old monk named Alvaro wants to talk to you, reveal that he’s your father and give you the skull of his wife Silvina, your mother, to take home with you. Flashing back to a scene of the priest’s birth (and mother’s death), we get an excellent long take, following the nervous father from room to room. Knife Eater, in an unexplained coincidence (probably detailed in the miniseries version), marries the housekeeper who once tormented Angela.

I can’t remember who this is – found the screenshots online:

Another sidetrack story, as Elise de Montfort (Clotilde Hesme of Regular Lovers and Love Songs) arrives, and the meddling priest visits to tell her about her mother Blanche, who was adored by the priest, and also Benoit (son of the nobleman who watched over the priest) and a colonel whose life the other two men had saved, Ernest Lacroze (Ruiz regular Melvil Poupaud) – Benoit wins, marries the girl and they have two kids – Elise and her brother who died recently in a duel. A grown Joao, now called Pedro da Silva, loves Elise, but she says to earn her love he needs to avenge her brother’s death, caused by the wicked Alberto de Magalhaes. He returns to Lisbon from France after hearing of his mother’s death in the convent where she’d been living since her husband died. Joao/Pedro challenges Alberto, who won’t fight, tells Pedro that Alberto was the would-be assassin the day Pedro was born, who reformed and turned the money the gypsy/priest had paid for the boy’s life into a fortune, says Elise is always sending infatuated young men to kill him.

Poor Joao’s mother, with priest in the background:

Anyway, probably some other stuff happens, and Pedro gives up and sets sail for Tangiers – seems to be dying at the end, dictating his life story, the movie looping back to his illness at the beginning, making me think perhaps he died in the orphanage never meeting his mother, imagining the whole rest of the movie in a five-hour fever dream. Also in both bookend scenes is his puppet theater, which the movie uses to illustrate the scenes or to set up new ones, and a painting that comes to life in a weird Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting tableau moment.

One of my favorite recurring events in the movie is that during many of the major scenes, the lead characters’ servants are shown blatantly listening in, sometimes in the foreground while the conversations are distant from the camera. I’m not sure what it added up to, all the shifting identities and vendettas and love affairs and parental secrets, besides being an entertaining bunch of stories. And for a movie with Mysteries in the title, everything is pretty well explained by the end.

Lots of writing on this online. More than one mention of Great Expectations, which occurred to me too. M. Koresky’s article is my favorite:

The nun who was a countess. The priest who was a soldier. The nobleman who was a thief. The poet who was a bastard. Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon is a costume drama in more ways than one. … Though it may seem daunting, the size of the film is its chief pleasure. There’s so much room to parry and maneuver, so many doors (some literal) to unlock, secrets and coincidences to be in thrall to. … Whether we’re seeing a death or a regeneration, a dream or a remembrance, the final images of Mysteries of Lisbon, filtered through an amber haze of memory, unites all of the film’s disparate strands in one delirious, cinematic consciousness.

A quality ending to the trilogy. I liked the timely references (waterboarding, gov’t using Echelon to track keywords spoken over cellphones) and new actors – David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck) as the new evil bureaucrat and Paddy Considine (same year as Hot Fuzz) as an intrepid reporter. Unfortunately, by Strathairn’s orders, Considine gets a bullet in the head.

Evil David Strathairn:

Julia Stiles and Joan Allen take Bourne’s side, and a wide-mouthed Albert Finney plays a haunting evil from Bourne’s past, proving that all women are friendly and craggy-faced old men are wicked.

Evil Albert Finney:

An informant in Madrid is blown up by a CIA hit man. Bourne fights two of those guys but only kills one, at most. He’s like Arnold in Terminator 2 now, a killing machine that doesn’t want to kill. The action is surprisingly comprehensible except for one hand-to-hand fight edited for maximum headache potential.

Buy from Amazon:
The Bourne Trilogy [Blu-ray]

“Men like you are my specialty. You know, men of violence.”

Ruffalo, Leo and Norm in front of a crazy fake sky:

I don’t usually try to outthink a movie, to suppose what will happen next, but when I know in advance that it’s a twist-ending movie I’ve got no choice. What’s the twist ending? Will hallucinogenic drugs be involved? Who here is actually evil? Did the missing patient never exist? And if not, what is Leo supposed to be investigating? And so on, but it turned out to be the twist I’d guessed from the trailer, that Leo was mad all along. Seems his wife Michelle “Wendy & Lucy” Williams killed their kids, so he killed her and got committed, and now he wanders the asylum/island with a plastic gun pretending to solve crimes. Lead doctor Ben “Death and the Maiden” Kingsley assigns Leo’s own doctor Mark “Zodiac” Ruffalo as Leo’s “partner” and sets Leo loose for a couple days to run his “investigation” and see if he figures out the truth about himself.

Leo with dead wife:

Leo with imaginary friend:

Opens with Leo puking on a boat, then being greeted on the island by Norm from Fargo, which is distracting. Kingsley sets our detectives looking for a girl whose name is an anagram for Leo’s dead wife’s name – alternately played by Emily “Young Adam” Mortimer and Patricia “Station Agent” Clarkson (I liked the Clarkson version better – all suspicious survivalist in a cave). Things get more impossible and surreal from then on. Leo has some psychologically obvious dreams, Scorsese reverses the film (cigarette smoke, not as awesome as the snow in Bringing Out The Dead), and Jackie Earle “Little Children” Haley tells Leo “You’re not investigating anything. You’re a fucking rat in a maze.” It’s totally clear about halfway through the movie, and increasingly afterwards that something is happening which is not happening. At this point, if it was a crappy movie I’d be impatiently waiting out the twist ending so I could go home, but this stayed fun to watch through all the ludicrous turns.

Clarkson on fire:

Starts to remind me of The Game. More star power: Max “holy cow, The Seventh Seal was over 50 years ago” von Sydow as a doctor, Ted “lotion in the basket” Levine as a tough-looking warden and Elias “Thin Red Line” Koteas as a figment of Leo’s imagination. Not a lot of women in your movies, eh Marty?

Von Sydow in danger:

I hardly ever watch movies with headphones, just assumed they’d sound pretty professional, but this one had some clumsy-ass dialogue editing. Fine music, though. Written by Steve’s old Avatar buddy, who’s not as smart a writer as Steve probably would’ve been, and by Dennis “Gone Baby Gone” Lehane. Shot by Robert Richardson, who worked with Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino and shot two of Marty’s more outlandish looking features, The Aviator and Bringing Out The Dead. I like this guy.

Kingsley patiently explains the twist ending to us:

Leo can’t believe this shit:

Buy from Amazon:
Shutter Island DVD
Shutter Island blu-ray