Every month, Establishing Shot brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited.
Jesse Pasternack, contributor | Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is one of the most audacious movie spin-offs of a television show of all time. Instead of wrapping up the cliffhanger with which he ended season two of Twin Peaks (1990-1991), co-writer (with Robert Engel who wrote several episodes) and director David Lynch minimized the eccentric humor and beloved supporting characters from the show in favor of a brutal look at the darkest events of its backstory. He also gave free rein to two of his most beloved collaborators, composer Angelo Badalamenti and actor Sheryl Lee, to do some of their best work.
This film is a prequel to the events of Twin Peaks (1990-1991). It follows an FBI investigation into the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), whose case is strikingly similar to the murder of Laura Palmer (Lee), whose own killing was the central event behind the television series. The film eventually shifts focus to depict the last week in Laura’s life, as she learns the truth about an evil spirit named Bob (Frank Silva) and her father Leland (Ray Wise).
The music is the first clue that this film is going to be different from the television series. Instead of the famous “Theme from Twin Peaks,” (also composed by Badalamenti), with its reassuringly deep and triumphant synthesizer parts, “Theme from Twin Peaks – Fire Walk with Me” plays. Its most distinctive element is an achingly sad jazz trumpet part, which seems to foreshadow the sorrow that is at the heart of its story. The score that follows is full of jazz music in a melancholy minor key and often resists the urge to reprise Badalamenti’s more beloved pieces from the television series. Even “Theme from Twin Peaks” only appears once and its most triumphant section is used contrapuntally, when Laura does cocaine in a high school bathroom. The heavy use of jazz feels fitting because that art form often takes something that is already established, like a popular standard, and riffs off of it to create something new. Lynch does the same thing here, expertly aided by Badalamenti’s memorable score.
But the greatest thing about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is Lee’s lead performance. She had briefly played Laura in the series, as well as her lookalike cousin Madeleine Ferguson and did voicework for a bird named Waldo. But in this film, Lee gets to fully embody Laura as a person in a way that she never did before. She gets to show why she was so beloved in the town of Twin Peaks, as well as how she dealt with her demons. Lee’s performance is, quite simply, one of the most intense and best I have ever seen. There are things she does with her eyes when she confronts her deepest fears that I will never forget. It’s the type of brilliantly go-for-broke work that makes you want to see everything else she has ever done. While Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me did not do well at the box office when it first came out, it has since undergone a critical reevaluation. Filmmakers ranging from James Gray to Jane Schoenbrun admire it, with the latter saying that it is their favorite film. Beyond that, it will always remain a brilliant part of the Twin Peaks universe, and a testimony to the power of Badalamenti’s music and Lee’s legendary performance.
Ed. note: this October and November, you can catch the entire first season of Twin Peaks on IU Cinema’s big screen! Visit our website for full details.
Alex Brannan, contributor | Inherent Vice (2014)
With Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another newly released in theaters, I felt like returning to Anderson’s first Thomas Pynchon adaptation. Inherent Vice can be a laborious exercise if spectated under the wrong circumstances. That was my experience 11 years ago, when I both tackled the Pynchon novel of the same name and sat through the 149-minute-long movie. I found both undertakings to be mentally taxing.
Watching the film again, I better grasped the extent to which this deconstruction of the hardboiled detective genre was less about pastiche and more about window dressing. As with any good private dick story, it is cluttered from floor to ceiling in plot. Perhaps to some the plot is the selling point, but the circuitous route of private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is more enjoyable to me when its inner workings are simply a punchline. In this sense, Anderson’s Inherent Vice reminds me of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, a personal favorite that houses a similarly dense yet circular tale of crime with a well-meaning and mumbling detective helplessly caught in the middle. “Doc,” holding on with a deep sense of sadness to the drug-warped memory of his ex-lover Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston), eagerly accepts her job offer. This sends him spiraling into a cobweb conspiracy involving drug addicts, international heroin trade, corrupt real estate developers, corrupt cops, corrupt dentists (most everyone is corrupted by vice in one way or another in this film…as suggested by the title, it is kind of the default state of affairs).
The cobweb might look pretty (the film is gorgeously shot by Robert Elswit), but it isn’t the spider. Inherent Vice may be a crime mystery with a plot to be solved, and that is all well and good. But what makes Anderson’s version of Pynchon so enthralling is how it sinks us into a quagmire that is also populated by broken people whose regrets and desires are profoundly resonant. Doc, despite his flaws and occasional lack of self-awareness, exercises a meaningful (yet never cloying) empathy toward his interlocutors, both good and evil. The tagline on the poster for The Long Goodbye reads, “Nothing says goodbye like a bullet,” yet there’s no bullet worth remembering in the film. Inherent Vice is steeped in vices, but the memorable moments have little to do with the Golden Fang drug trade; they have to do with the quietly acknowledged bonds between characters who will almost as a rule refuse to state those bonds aloud (the moment when Doc tells Josh Brolin’s burly, flat-topped “Bigfoot” Bjornson that the cop “could use a keeper” is both one of the film’s most sentimental and most humorous moments). The film is a moody, melancholic piece that exquisitely captures the feeling of swimming upstream, constantly exerting energy just to measure the progress in inches. Luckily, an inch can contain a lifetime of emotions.
Chris Forrester, contributor | Career Girls (1997)
How do you follow up a towering pair of Very Serious character studies that contain just about the finest dramatic character work your career is ever likely to produce and comprises the Cannes Best Director and Actor-winning Naked (1993) and Palme d’Or winning Secrets and Lies (1996)? If you’re Mike Leigh, you do the unexpected and halve the scope while doubling the sweetness. The result is the impossible-to-dislike (unless you really hate a certain British band, I suppose…), easy-to-love Career Girls, which works Leigh’s ongoing kitchen-sink realist ensemble drama approach to stories of existence within the constraints of class and other social structures into a fleet little story of friendship outlasting the doldrums of your twenties.
Set in 1996 as a pair of former flatmates reunite in London for a weekend together after six years apart, Career Girls fleshes out this relationship and its contexts across a series of episodes in both past and present. The flashbacks, cleanly and moodily demarcated by a dreary blue color palette, jump a decade back to 1986 when the pair first met and the songs from The Cure’s 1983 singles compilation Japanese Whispers soundtrack their frantic domestic lives and blossoming friendship. Ever the filmmaker to beat as an actor’s collaborator, Leigh works with his former Naked actress Katrin Cartlidge and relative unknown Lynda Steadman to breathe wonderful life into these characters, whose dynamics quickly suggest the scope of their friendship and individual growth over this decade that’s left largely unchronicled. It’s another terrific achievement from a filmmaker who had a reliable knack for such things, but feels a special standout of his oeuvre for its particular tone of earnest realism; there’s neither a wasted note nor unearned tear.
Ben van Welzen, contributor | Andrei Rublev (1966)
Watching an Andrei Tarkovsky film in theaters has always been a dream of mine. In fact, it’s a dream I lived a couple years ago when I went to a late-night showing of Stalker, though the film’s sleepy disposition made that 11pm showing less of a dream I lived and more of one that I, well, dreamed. So, I was thrilled to catch Andrei Rublev — a film that always intensely resonates on a spiritual level — in a stuffy theater on a hot Brooklyn summer day for a Tarkovsky retrospective. Of course, as his films never fail to do for me, I was enraptured within minutes. The frames of Andrei Rublev are as painterly as the icons of its 14th-century artist protagonist, and when blown up to the size of a theater’s screen the film does indeed achieve the aesthetic serenity and awe of an art exhibit. Despite how emotionally, spiritually, and narratively sprawling the three-hour film is, Tarkovsky approaches every moment and every scene with a distinct grace and reverence for his history, his faith, and his medium.
Perhaps the most striking image of the film for me has always been Rublev’s encounter with a group of pagans wandering through the Russian countryside. It’s one of the most immediate challenges to Rublev’s faith, and clearly to Tarkovsky’s as well. Notably, neither Rublev nor Tarkovsky approach the pagans with curiosity and even excitement towards the sacrilegious behavior. This all culminates in perhaps my favorite image in the filmmaker’s entire catalogue: Rublev watches the torch-carrying pagans wade through a river to perform a ritual. The image is equally serene and harrowing, a moment of chaotic beauty that directly disrupts and attacks the organized Christian faith that drives the film forward, but does not appear grotesque. Altogether, this sequence embodies much of what makes Andrei Rublev so special; Tarkovsky presents everything with compassion and embraces the spirituality found in every person and every belief.
However, unlike some of his other films that I still love even more, Andrei Rublev remains consistently engaging and entertaining for the entire three hours. As a historical film, it doesn’t do much to inform (at least not for a viewer like me who couldn’t know less about the context), but instead it completely immerses the audience in the mind of a creative, and how that mind interacts with hostile and delicate surroundings. Even on a plot level, Tarkovsky delivers some thrilling and impressively choreographed battle scenes, as well as a gripping final act following a boy building a bell that could serve as its own short film. It doesn’t seem to get much less accessible than a black-and-white three-hour Russian historical epic about a painter from the 1300s, but Tarkovsky’s unstoppable humanism and approachable spirituality make Andrei Rublev a timeless work that reaches far beyond its constraints.
Michaela Owens, Editor | Blindfold (1966) and A Fine Pair (1969)
Given the recent news that we sadly lost the effervescent Claudia Cardinale at the age of 87, I’m going to cheat a little here and recommend two films I’ve already written about for the round-up before: Blindfold and A Fine Pair, both starring Cardinale and the incomparable Rock Hudson (whose centennial is this November if you want to get a head start on your celebration!).
In Blindfold, a valuable government scientist/former patient of psychiatrist Hudson suffers a mental breakdown, leading CIA man Jack Warden to coerce Hudson into treating the scientist at a secret location that requires him to be blindfolded every time he is taken there. Things only get more complicated when Hudson meets his patient’s sister, Cardinale, who will stop at nothing to figure out what has happened to her missing brother. As if that wasn’t enough, Hudson begins to question if Warden is the real deal, or if he has been inadvertently helping the enemy all along.
Blindfold is a little quirkier than your typical spy yarn. It has a great sense of humor, which works in tandem with the thriller aspects quite well. The movie’s first big fight scene, when Hudson is grabbed by the bad guys and taken to a nearby storage shed to be interrogated, is a good example. He is able to break free, though, and briefly fights them off by swinging around a canoe that he accidentally gets his head stuck in. He then finds himself keeping them at bay by spraying them with a fire extinguisher… while sitting on a carousel horse. The whole situation becomes a little ridiculous, which is reflected in Hudson’s giddy reaction.
While Blindfold — a lush piece of entertainment with daffy charm — definitely emerged from late-’60s Hollywood, A Fine Pair is an Italian production brimming with the stylistic experimentation and overt eroticism that were emblematic of European films and were just starting to flourish in the American mainstream market. The plot follows a stuffy New York police captain (Hudson) who reunites with an old family friend (Cardinale) only to learn that she wants his help in returning a stash of jewels she stole before the owners notice they’re missing. As the twosome plan their reverse heist, Hudson is slowly seduced by the husky-voiced Cardinale and her carefree, jet-setting lifestyle — but how long will it last?
I adore Rock Hudson so, so much and A Fine Pair is a wonderful example why. His character’s journey from a bespectacled stick-in-the-mud to a romantic thief is somewhat predictable, but he makes it a pure joy to witness. Some critics have pointed out that while Cardinale, a European star, was obviously right at home in this kind of movie, it’s strange to see Hudson, a textbook example of the glossy Hollywood studio system, in a film as “hip” as A Fine Pair. Although this remark is meant to be a snide one, it really is fascinating to consider. What helps Hudson fit in here, though, aside from his talent, is his delicious (and often steamy) chemistry with the superb Cardinale, who commands the screen with an assurance and sensuality that are magnetic.
The actress didn’t make as many films in Hollywood as she did in Europe — she refused to be bound to a studio contract, which was undoubtedly the right call — so it can be hard to track down a good chunk of her filmography, but I promise you that whatever bits you are able to find, Cardinale will make it worth your time. She possessed a quietly electric presence, tinged with both an adorable playfulness and a soulful melancholy, and her death is such a loss.
I couldn’t find any original trailers for either film, but here’s a fan-made one for Blindfold and a very brief TV spot for A Fine Pair.