by ·Comments Off on The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, Philip Kaufman)

Lot of recent references to spa town in films: Road to Wellville, Cure for Wellness, Days, now this. In the late 1960s DDL meets Juliette Binoche on a business trip but he’s already with hat girl Lena Olin, wants to keep both girls and for everyone to be friends. He’s a professional surgeon and casual writer, Juliette’s getting into photography, and when the Soviets invade Prague, his story gets him in trouble, and her photos of street protests get a hundred protestors in trouble. They escape to Switzerland but Juliette returns and he follows her, arriving smugly principled to a fallen society, where he’s demoted from brain surgeon to general practitioner to window washer, until they decide to live the rest of their (few) days with a friendly pig farmer. Director and actors (esp. Lena) do their best to save the movie from its clunky script, which is somehow by Bunuel’s writer and also got an oscar nomination.

by ·Comments Off on The Right Stuff (1983, Philip Kaufman)

Watched because I thought this might illuminate Ferrari, but it would’ve paired better with Oppenheimer – long entertaining stories about historical situations where Americans lived in makeshift communities in the desert trying to achieve great feats. It’s a bunch of tough guys and their suffering wives until Harry Shearer and Jeff Goldblum show up as a comic team – the addition of humor and absurdity helps immensely. Good work by Jordan Belson on the space visuals.

I wonder if this winning best picture led directly to Top Gun:

Oppenheimer needed them:

by ·Comments Off on Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Philip Kaufman)

Wasn’t planning it this way, but I guess my viewing of Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers, and last year’s SHOCKtober screening of the 1956 original (and I suppose The Invasion) were all prelude to this wonderful Alamo screening of the best Body Snatchers movie. It loses the 1950’s prudishness, ramps up the energy and paranoia (and humor, when Jeff Goldblum is onscreen) and lands on an even bleaker ending than the original tried to imply. It could almost be a sequel instead of a remake – the 1956 ends (not counting the dumb framing story) with Kevin McCarthy screaming on the highway, unheeded, and early in this version McCarthy appears on a city street yelling “We’re in danger – you’re next!” just before getting killed.

“A disquieting paranoid thriller informed by the conspiracy theories of the period and the jaded cynicism that followed the death of the counterculture movement,” per Adam Cook.

Donald Sutherland is our new McCarthy, a San Francisco health department investigator and the boss of Elizabeth (Brooke Adams: The Dead Zone, Shock Waves). Donald likes Liz but she’s married to Art Hindle (lead dude in The Brood), who is the first to be invaded – not counting their psychiatrist guru friend Leonard Nimoy, who was probably a pod from the start. While uncovering the plot and figuring out what to do about it, they huddle with friends Goldblum and his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright, in The Birds as a teen, later Alien and Witches of Eastwick).

The Shaun of the Dead trick of pretending to be a zombie and walking among the others seems to work, until Donald and Liz get shocked by something and scream. Donald spotted a pod next to a homeless dude (and his dog) and kicked it – a few scenes later the dog is walking around with the dude’s face. As in the original, Liz is only left alone for a few minutes when she falls asleep and gets replaced, melting in Donald’s hands as her pod version rises up, telling him to join them.

Screenplay by W.D. Richter, later director of Buckaroo Banzai with Goldblum. Fun angles and shadowplay, and perfectly balanced tone of terror and action – no wonder a couple movies later Kaufman’s The Right Stuff got eight oscar nominations. Sutherland was later in the quite bad Puppet Masters, in which Earth is invaded by mind-controlling alien parasites, and McCarthy would reprise his role yet again in Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Film Quarterly:

Visually, the movies couldn’t differ more. Siegel’s unadorned black-and-white has yielded to Kaufman’s lyrical color, tilts, handheld shots, and high key lighting. Michael Chapman’s photography is both lustrous and penumbral, with deep shadows and crowded, mobile frames. Annexing the genre’s salient mood of engulfing dread, he has made the new Body Snatchers a film noir in color.