Category: Hollywood Cinema

THE TWO JAKES (Dir. Jack Nicholson, 1990, US)

Auteur, Genre, Hollywood Cinema, Noir, Uncategorized

The Two Jakes is less a sequel and more of a flamboyant continuation and expansion of the sun kissed noir universe of Los Angeles that Polanski brought to life in Chinatown. Everyone knows a project of this type had no chance of working without the creative involvement of Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson and Robert Evans, all of whom were reunited. Whereas Chinatown was a subversion of film genre, expressly the traditions of film noir, a resolutely anti-genre piece shot like a European art film, very much like Altman’s The Long Goodbye, The Two Jakes is unashamedly and resolutely a homage to the great riches of Hollywood film noir. It is well documented that Towne’s script for Chinatown went through numerous brutal changes, many of which Towne fought but ultimately could not prevent given Polanski’s authorial control. In many ways, The Two Jakes, is closer to Towne’s original vision of Los Angeles as a sprawling festering wound alluded to in interviews, mapping a broader nexus between oil, land and money, in which an underbelly of corruption and violence continually rises to the surface as a familiar subtext.

What makes The Two Jakes such a worthy successor to Chinatown is arguably the iconographic amplifications of noir and the endlessly pleasurable ways in which pastiche becomes a celebratory enterprise; a pulpy cinematic novel played out in classical film noir encounters. Towne draws the inevitable links back to Mulwray and Cross, framing Gittes as a broken, guilt ridden figure haunted by a murky past of incest and ownership, and who retains his self-righteous contempt for the police and big business. The startling LA art decor production design, dazzling costumes and widescreen cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond are the real stars along with a rich supporting cast made up of Harvey Kietel, Ruben Blades, Eli Wallach. Fatalism remains at the core as does the theme of flawed masculinity, although eclipsed by a perpetual sense of post war trauma. I wonder what Polanski would have made of it all?

JOSHUA (Dir. George Ratliff, 2007)

American Independent Cinema, Hollywood Cinema, Horror

The Yuppies are back (did they really ever go away?) in this expertly crafted psychological thriller that fuses the ornately technical sensibilities of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby with the bombast of The Omen. The result is one very claustrophobic work, visualising the descent of a family into ruin who become increasingly imprisoned in their high-class New York apartment. Director George Ratliff succeeds at creating a deeply impressionistic horror, favouring a mounting tone of dread than going for the jugular. This is equally a film about motherhood, a terrifying take on post-natal depression, much of it channelled through the exhausting performance by Vera Farmiga as a mother who begins to lose her mind, much of it orchestrated by her son – a piano prodigy psycho child of Satan. The link to the world of finance is made concrete in the obnoxious Yuppie aspirations of the father played by Sam Rockwell, the suggestion that horror and capitalism exist in a twisted parallel actuality. The ending is superbly underplayed, consolidating Jacob Kogan’s exquisite performance as the disturbed Joshua.

PATTY HEARST (Dir. PAUL SCHRADER, 1988)

Auteur, Counter Cinema, Hollywood Cinema, Political Cinema

The much publicised kidnapping and coercion of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army is the focus of Schrader’s 1988 film, a critical look back at the protracted complex political choices that underpinned the counter culture of the 1970s. It is an unusual film to have emerged from 1980s Hollywood cinema and is also one of Schrader’s most political works. Reconnecting with the proletarianism of Blue Collar, Schrader examines how the will to adopt and maintain a political posture is riddled with a gamut of intersectional insincerities that are class and race related. Schrader treats the first part like an exercise in Brechtian tableau, imbuing the SLA with an ideological sincerity while sympathetically framing militancy as wholly reasonable given the wider inequalities.

At the core is Natasha Richardson’s gruelling performance as Hearst who conveys the right degrees of ambivalence to make one uncertain of her motivations and ideological beliefs. Much of the film deals with the assimilation of Hearst, brainwashed to join the group, suggesting the decorative nature of counter culture was simply a momentary allure to middle class white people wanting to interminably escape the system while indulging in faux acts of sexual and political liberation. However, the government’s brutal annihilation of the SLA, carried out with impunity by the police, critiques the gradual erasure of counter culture militancy as something unambiguously ideological; a benign cultural struggle for political discourse, mainstream lifestyles and conformity.

THE MEAN SEASON (Dir. Phillip Borsos, 1985)

Genre, Hollywood Cinema, Neo noir, Thriller, Uncategorized

Long before Tom Cruise decided to patent the running on screen just to look cool thing, Kurt Russell was busting similar sprint speed marathons in many of his films. In The Mean Season, Russell really goes for it, bombing it through the streets of Miami so he can try and save his girlfriend from the clutches of a marauding copycat serial killer played by Richard Jordan. Russell was never really a major film star but he often put in some notable, overlooked performances.

The Mean Season, a pulpy Miami noir is perhaps one of his meatiest roles as an opportunistic, narcissistic journalist, who is contacted by a serial killer working his way through a spate of grisly murders. Concocting a sleazy ambience, makes for an exceedingly atmospheric work which is sadly somewhat at the expense of the mechanics of constructing an effective thriller.

The Mean Season begins with some promise, framing the media as a parasitic force but it lacks subtext, gradually taking a conventional route whereby the unmasking of the killer is not only anti-climactic but lacks the bite to make this genre piece altogether brilliant. Andy Garcia shows up as a disgruntled cop but is so much better in a similar role in later films like Internal Affairs and Jennifer Eight. Also, this film may have been a key influence on Fincher’s Zodiac (2007).