Who tried to lure Nehemiah into a trap to discredit him?

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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: April 10, 2010 at 9:42 pm by Eve Tushnet

2010-04-10T21:42:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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CINEMA PURGATORIO: Lots of quick film notes. I wish I had something more substantive to say about all of these, and welcome your thoughts.

The Comedians: An all-star cast does Graham Greene’s Haiti novel. Masks are what we have instead of command; masks are what we have instead of peace. Haiti is shocking and it isn’t much prettified. (I don’t know where this was filmed.) The Catholicism starts to feel strenuous–even in Haiti, I’m pretty sure you can invoke the Virgin without showing us part of a Hail Mary scratched into a prison cell wall and then talking about it–but the underlying conviction that this life is a dead-baby joke, and yet somehow, somewhere, things must be put right… that basic Catholic sense of the horror of justice comes through. One of the points I wanted to make about Brown Girl in the Ring, but forgot, is that justice is horrifying to watch no matter how much you want it and know it needs to happen (to someone else, but also to you, when it happens to you).

Anyway, I think the cruelty and absurdity of this movie, and its bone-deep conviction that this world is not enough, mark it as Greeneland. Recommended.

Brighton Rock: One of the first (the first?) Greene adaptations for the silver screen. What’s weird is that the novel is in some ways more cinematic than the movie. The novel’s first and final thirds are both incredibly tense, suspenseful, freighted with obvious but still powerful theological weight.

The movie is way too quick at the beginning–I went with someone who hadn’t read the book, and basically just missed the essential ten-second shot and dialogue which explained the entire setup–and the movie is badly hurt by the cardboard placidity of its Final Girl. If her love for the Catholic-diabolist gangster Pinky doesn’t make sense, then the whole movie suffers, because she serves as the audience identification character, I think.

The good news (so to speak!) is that Richard Attenborough, I am not making that up, is an amazing Pinky. He is young and cruel and charismatic, and he’s able to convey exactly as much depth as the story needs–you can see him dipping his rosary into the Styx.

I think the gay couple who exited the movie ahead of me and my friend pretty much summed up the weaknesses–and the weird, indefensible strengths–of this otherwise studio-standard working-class noir: “I really wasn’t expecting all the Catholic stuff. That came out of nowhere–it was really bizarre. I mean is that normal?“

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I don’t know if there are points to be made (scored?) from reviewing this movie. Richard Burton was amazing in The Comedians, and he surpasses himself here. Liz Taylor was acceptable in TC, and gouges a handhold in my heart with this performance. I like Albee anyway, but this is also good filmmaking: The long shots and the space this movie takes up should let you know that dir Mike Nichols is making choices for a reason.

This is one of the movies I started playing, thinking, “Hey, it’s basically dialogue. If it gets boring I can read something cheap while it plays.” And I watched and gasped and whimpered all the way through.

Butterfield 8: Taylor as doomed girl with damage. Soapy and gross and fatalist and really no fun (except for the bitchy neighbor lady). Suds gone wrong.

The VIPS: Suds gone right! Absolute soap opera of various characters dealing with shifting power relations in their business and marital and extramarital relations, as they wait in the Heathrow VIP lounge in the sexy Sixties. Yet more Taylor/Burton, and I loved both of them. (She was also great in Butterfield 8. The fact that I hated that movie isn’t about her performance, which was committed, and mannered in the good way.) This is unnecessary fluff, but utterly painless. And really, we all need soaping once in a while.

The Conformist: Fable of Italian fascism. Astonishingly beautiful to look at. (There’s probably a paper still to be written about the differences between aesthetic fascism and aesthetic anti-fascism.) The understanding of sex is Freud plus slut-shaming all sprinkled with holy water, so if you cringe when you see the name “Maria Goretti,” this movie will hurt. Similar issues w/r/t gay life. Still, it is stunning to watch.

Elevator to the Gallows: I’m pretty sure I Netflix’d this because of a horrifying article you can find among the awful links here, about a man who was actually trapped for an entire weekend in a corporate elevator. I honestly don’t know why this article still shakes me so badly. But the man had what sounds like a serious nervous breakdown, so he needs your prayers.

ANYWAY, this is a cute French caper film in which a man does in fact get stuck in an elevator. I loved it! It’s fast and fun and sexy. The gamine is ridiculously cute–like, I lost IQ points just looking at her pixie face–and Jeanne Moreau is amazing. She’s alternately, shot to shot, the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in your entire life, and a potato-faced castoff. Apparently the movie was controversial for shooting her in this no-Vaseline style, but really she makes the film. She exemplifies my dictum that most men are average, but most women are beautiful. A lady who can look lumpy-faced and bag-eyed under one kind of lighting is the absolute avatar of Venus under another.

She, uh, also acts well. But she doesn’t have to, is my point: The camera acts for her. I was five kinds of blown away.

The Lost Boys: This may be the first R-rated movie I ever saw (at a friend’s sleepover). I’m deeply irrational on this subject. But I loved this.

I mean come on: Knockoff Madonna from Like a Prayer needs your help to keep from becoming a vampire! Your only allies are your adorable little brother (their relationship really rang true to me, with a special kick because they clearly are bonding after their mother’s divorce) and the inherent awesomeness of your late ’80s Venice Beach carnival setting. The logic works (what appear to be plot holes really aren’t if you watch carefully, which admittedly I don’t know why you would), the carousel horses are creepy, the Echo and the Bunnymen is awesome, and the taxidermy is hilarious. ’80s horror-comedy at its second-best (after Gremlins).

Kiefer Sutherland is in this, and yet his scenes are all stolen by Bill from Bill and Ted. I… I have no idea if this movie works for people who were still teething when the Cold War ended. But if you’re wondering whether The Lost Boys is really awesome, or if you were just eating maggots all along, I can tell you: IT’S BLOOD, MICHAEL.

What Have You Done to Solange? So the thing about gialli, and movies in that tradition (Italian gruesome horror), is that some of the movies are astonishing artistic achievements in which the grue and the sex are used to transfix the viewer while the real horror happens in the warping of our sense of reality. Suspiria, you know, or even Phenomena which I didn’t much like. Or even Demons, which was hilarious and silly and gross.

And then there are the movies which are rape festivals interspersed with shower scenes.

And amazingly, you can’t tell which from the descriptions at mainstream movie sites. So just an FYI: Despite the beautiful, transfixing credits sequence, with lovely camerawork and music by Ennio Morricone, Solange is the latter.

I know I defended Deadgirl for being about misogyny, and said it wasn’t itself misogynistic. I think I should probably expand on that here. Deadgirl provides exactly no escape from a horrific conception of what it means to be a man. There are no alternatives. No women really have agency in the movie. And yet it still seemed to me to be a movie I could understand, enter into, relate to as a woman, because it never once (IMO) presented the dead girl’s violation as anything other than a horrific encroachment by human monsters. When she was simply touched, the camerawork and color control and acting made it clearly a desecration–if you’re Catholic, a desecration of the temple of the Holy Spirit, this creature’s body. In the end I didn’t think Deadgirl–despite its advertising–presented rape as titillating or deserved or natural.

Solange is… in some ways the opposite. Watch the first five minutes or so of this–and then write your own movie, better.

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