Christopher East

Sam Peckinpah’s final film, The Osterman Weekend (1983), is exactly the kind of intriguing oddity I was hoping the Spy 100 project would suss out, a convoluted and interesting kludge of ideas, themes, and film-making techniques.  In light of Peckinpah’s reputation as a director of violent action movies, I wasn’t expecting much complexity from this one…but was I ever mistaken.  Hardly without flaws, the film is a deviously plotted one that goes unexpected places, and while it doesn’t entirely come together in my view, it does a lot of things well.

The early situation takes some parsing:  FBI agent Lawrence Fassett (John Hurt) comes to hardline CIA director Max Danforth (Burt Lancaster) with evidence of a Soviet network on American soil in southern California.  The Omega network, as it’s dubbed, is headed by three men, all connected to a popular muckraking TV journalist named John Tanner.  Since the three men (Dennis Hopper, Craig T. Nelson, and Chris Sarandon) are just the tip of the network’s iceberg, simply arresting them may not be enough to stop the attack they’re suspected of planning, so Fassett suggests an alternate plan, and Danforth agrees to help implement it.

Tanner traditionally hosts a regular weekend retreat for the Omega three and their significant others.  Convinced by overwhelming video evidence that his friends are Soviet spies, Tanner allows himself to be recruited for the risky operation.  The objective is to turn one or more of the three men into a double agent, thereby turning them back against the Soviets as well as countering the imminent biowarfare threat they represent.  Tanner’s upcoming retreat provides the perfect opportunity to spring the trap, and Fassett has Tanner’s house fully wired for sound and video in order to gather evidence and monitor Tanner’s progress.  But the operation gets off to a rocky start, and only gets worse, as events take turn after sinister turn.

The Osterman Weekend is quite satisfying for its intricate and twisty plot, which provides some truly surprising twists, especially in the late-going.  It’s a movie that requires closer attention than its cheesy 1980s surface would lead you to expect, and I enjoyed puzzling out its mysteries.  As for the violence, I’m generally not a huge fan of it for its own sake, and definitely not of the kind of stylized, slow-motion violence Peckinpah tends to employ.  But I have to say, the explosive penultimate scenes at the Tanner house are well handled, unsettling, and not unearned.

Unfortunately, the spy trappings don’t seem quite enough for Peckinpah.  He seems much more interested in the Big Brotherization of Tanner’s house, and in examining the perils of voyeurism and media manipulation.  While nominally tied into the plot, these themes seem crudely attached — and besides, it always strikes me as disingenuous when films that decry voyeurism employ elements that cater to voyeurs (cue gratuitous nudity and sex, largely inessential to the story).  Moreover, the wiring of the Tanner house is sadly dated, clunky, and worst of all insecure.  The way he has Fassett pop up on TV screens to speak with Tanner about the mission (risking all operational security, on multiple occasions) is highly unconvincing.  Evidently Peckinpah was fascinated by these subjects, but they seem shoehorned in, to the detriment of the plot.  The script’s closing dialogue seems like the coda to an entirely different film, perhaps the movie Peckinpah was seeing, in which the media — and Tanner’s role as a TV interviewer — was more important.  Forcing these media themes onto what is otherwise a fairly conventional spy thriller makes for an awkward, if interesting, marriage.

There are other, less blatant missteps.  The Lalo Schifrin score lapses into distracting cheesiness too often.  The casting is weird.  (John Hurt as an American agent?  Rutger Hauer as a patriotic American journalist?  Dennis Hopper as…a meek guy?  Okay, I actually kind of liked the change there…)   The TV show bits aren’t entirely convincing, and the endgame really lacks finesse.  But in the end I’m glad to have seen this one:  a complex mystery, a bizarre time capsule, and kind of an ambitious, grand mess.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming — which is to say, the steady parade of reviews of obscure movies, to resume shortly — for another music post.  Like last time, I’ve included a few tunes from the first album, plus a relatively new one from the second.  Yep, I’m still slugging away at GarageBand in my spare moments, writing theme songs for TV shows that don’t exist.  For example (as if it’s not obvious) “Junkyard Cats” is an imaginary animated 1970s comedy featuring the vocal stylings of Casey Kasem and Flip Wilson.  Can you synopsize the other series?

Junkyard Cats

Pawn Shop

The Fixer

Quitting Time

Ang Lee is an interesting enough director that I’ll often check out his movies even when they’re about things I’m not terribly interested in…like, well, 1960s counterculture.  Taking Woodstock (2009) takes us to upstate New York in 1969, where Elliott (Demetri Martin) has retreated for the summer from his failing NYC design business to help his parents (Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman) with their struggling motel.  Things look bleak for the family until news of the Woodstock concert finds its way onto Elliott’s radar, and he sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get in on the ground floor and save his family’s financial neck.  The sleepy run-down motel quickly becomes a bustling nerve center for the event organization, putting all kinds of new stresses on Elliott, who also begins to find himself during the course of the legendary concert.

Unfortunately, aside from effectively recreating Woodstock (or at least its fringes), Taking Woodstock doesn’t really accomplish all that much.  If it’s a comedy, it’s not terribly funny; if it’s a drama, it’s not all that powerful.  Like Lee’s The Ice Storm, it seems to have a dual focus: to both nostalgically celebrate and cynically deconstruct a bygone era.  It manages to do both, but in a kind of humdrum, middling way that is rife with clichéd plot elements and familiar visual ingredients for this kind of period piece:  spacey philosophy, reactionary hicks, LSD hallucinations, wacky Bohemian performance artists, shellshocked Viet Nam vets, dope-smoking hijinks, affected hippie nudity.  It’s pretty much all been done before.  Martin has a kind of wooden likeability, but neither his acting nor his character are strong enough to help this coming-of-age tale rise above its surface as an attractive, low key, and predictable fusion of light comedy and mild drama.

For being so low on the list, The Quiller Memorandum (1966) turned out to be much better than I was expecting, a colorful, picturesque puzzler that may be, if there is such a thing, the quintessential anti-neo-Nazi spy film.

The set-up is fairly simple:  MI6 is attempting to sniff out a secret Nazi underground in West Berlin.  Their first two operations, however, have met with utter failure — and two dead agents.  Enter Quiller (George Segal), a daring, somewhat reckless American agent, who is recruited by arms-length controller Pol (the gloriously unctuous Alec Guiness) to follow in the footsteps of dead men.  Quiller accepts the case, and with little more than a handful of clues, sets out to locate the Nazis’ secret lair.  His risky strategy involves rattling around town asking loud questions– and it pays off, landing him in the clutches of the ruthless Nazi ringleader, Oktober (played, but of course, by Max von Sydow).  It turns out Oktober is just as anxious to locate his British opponents as they are to find him, though, and Quiller soon finds himself caught in the middle, a pawn in a Cold War chess match.  Quiller needs to pinpoint the Nazi headquarters without betraying his allies, all the while keeping himself and his on-the-fly German girlfriend, schoolteacher Inga (Senta Berger), from getting caught in the crossfire.

The opening situation isn’t all that complicated, but the ultimate plot is well structured, providing the requisite twists and turns, and the story is helped in no small part by effective dialogue from Harold Pinter; highlights include droll exchanges between Segal and Guiness, and a particularly good interrogation scene.  (And trust me, I’ve seen a lot of bad interrogation scenes, so this one — with von Sydow cleverly ribbing Segal, who is desperately resisting a mind-warping truth serum — jumped out at me.)  A simple but effective framing device ties it all together, and the cynical denouement provides a creepy, powerful final note.  The film has a distinct and striking look, kind of a mix of noir and Technicolor, much of it shot on location in West Berlin, which lends an air of authenticity to what could easily have come off as a comic book plot.  The pace is at times stately and thoughtful, with long passages of silence and minimal dialogue; I suspect it might bore some viewers, but I found it nicely suited to the material and generally engaging.

Clearly I don’t have much to complain about with this one, but it’s not without a few flaws.  There are a couple of odd, slightly amusing scenes involving British espiocrats in London, which seemed wedged in to emphasize the cold-hearted divide between the brass who pull the strings and the soldiers of the Cold War battleground — diverting and brief, but not entirely necessary.  And the romance-under-fire subplot between Segal and Berger, while generally well played and absolutely necessary to the plot, felt a bit pro forma in its details.  But overall this one really clicked with me, delivering some effective, old school cloak-and-dagger goods.

The only Paolo Bacigalupi story I’ve read — “The Gambler” (reviewed here) — was fantastic, and led me to expect that the critical buzz surrounding the author’s first novel The Windup Girl (2009) is fully warranted.  I can now happily report that it is, indeed; this is a remarkable book.

The post-petroleum future of The Windup Girl is a grimly transformed one:  food shortages caused by mutating, crop-killing diseases, lack of oil-based transportation, a worldwide “Contraction” that’s resulted from slow, difficult travel and reduced telecommunications, a planet unglobalized.  Thailand has survived by grimly guarding its borders, protecting its food science, and generally resisting outside influence.  The Environment Ministry and its “white shirts,” while cruel and corrupt, have kept the predators at bay, while their natural rival, Trade, seeks to gain power through a “New Expansion.”

The devilishly plotted story involves the interconnected fates of various figures at the forefront — by chance or by choice — of the dramatically shifting political situation of this vividly imagined future Thailand.   There’s Anderson Lake, an American corporate man nominally running a struggling energy tech factory but secretly pursuing disease-resistant seedstock for his company’s exploitation; Hock Seng, a Chinese refugee working for Lake, whose fallen position never stops him from angling for a return to power; Jaidee and Kanya, two prominent white shirts of the Environment Ministry; and Emiko, the eponymous “windup girl,” an artificial human programmed for subservience and tragically abandoned by her Japanese master to the clutches of a callous, pimping tavernkeeper.  These distinct, alternating viewpoint characters provide various perspectives on — even as they influence — the powderkeg political situation.  It all escalates gradually and brilliantly, and resolves with real power.

Bacigalupi’s writing is brisk and engaging, fiercely intelligent, and brings the detailed retro-futuristic world-building vividly to life.  It had the feel of a convincing historical novel — that sense of detail and depth and truth that such novels can offer, as well as the focus on nation-shaking events — but, of course, it’s a history of the future.  It’s a bleak one, to be sure, but also a powerful dramatic vision that asks important science fictional questions.  What will happen to the world when the oil runs out?  How will we feed the planet?  What are the ethical consequences of creating artificial life?  How do we balance environmental concerns with our flawed capitalistic system?  Bacigalupi wrestles with these tough, dare-I-say Mundane SF questions throughout, and the results are consistently thought-provoking.

Not for the faint-of-heart, The Windup Girl’s grim message may be tough to swallow for some, but I found it a moving, hard-hitting tale of gritty extrapolative SF, and I’m anxious to read more of the author’s work.

A subtle, dialogue-driven mystery, director Eric Rohmer’s Triple Agent (2004) is a somewhat ponderous, confusing slog.  Set in Paris in the mid-thirties, the story milks the complicated political landscape of its era for all it’s worth, in a tale of an exiled Russian officer named Fiodor (Serge Renko) and his Greek wife Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou).  Fiodor has a supposedly legitimate job at a Russian veterans’ union, but as the story progresses, Arsinoé begins to suspect that his travels and work are a cover for espionage dealings.  But who is he spying for?  The Russians?  The Germans?

Following the film requires a fairly comprehensive knowledge of twentieth century European history:  French government, the factions of the Spanish Civil War, and the white/red divide of the communist revolution in Russia are all discussed in great detail, among other things.  The film also requires patience, as Fiodor’s duplicity (or triplicity?) emerges over the course of numerous scenes of extended conversation, often among polyglots in multiple languages.  I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the history and a fair amount of patience, but evidently not enough of either to really appreciate this one.  Rohmer attempts to help things along with occasional interludes of newsreel footage, which at least helps to tie the mystery in to a significant historical event, and he adds an expository epilogue, but neither of these devices really succeed in rendering the proceedings any less murky.  Of course, in spy films, murkiness is often the point, but I found this one’s plot machinations too subdued and buried to enjoy.

From Thailand, Bangkok Dangerous (1999) is a stylistically innovative crime film that relies heavily on visual story-telling.  It centers on a deaf-mute man named Kong (Pawalit Mongkolpisit) who happens into a life of a crime when he befriends a couple with gang ties, Jo (Pisek Intrakanchit) and Aom (Patharawarin Timkul). Deep into his career as an assassin, Kong stumbles into a chance friendship with a beautiful young pharmacist named Fon (Premsinee Ratanasopha), which leads him to  question his life of violence.  But it may be too late to change his ways, as his allegiance to his criminal family is about to be challenged by escalating gang rivalry.

It’s a fairly simple story, but well told; I was particularly fond of the way it let the pictures tell the tale — partly out of necessity, in light of Kong’s inability to speak, but also out of stylistic choice not to clutter the story with unnecessary dialogue.  The cinematography has a gritty, grainy feel that serves the milieu nicely, and the action sequences are both engaging and realistic.  It’s easy to see how this film put the Pang Brothers (who directed) on the map, and why the movie was remade (although I can’t imagine the Nicholas Cage vehicle could be an improvement).  As in most of the Hollywood reboot situations, I say stick to the source.

By chapter three of Inglorious Basterds (2009), it occurred to me that I’d gone into the movie wanting to dislike it.  I really enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s early work, right up to Jackie Brown, but he started to lose me right after that — Kill Bill in particular really exhausted my patience.  Part of me was expecting this one to be another excessive, unrestrained, self congratulatory visual feast of empty calories.

Well, Inglorious Basterds is still occasionally excessive, unrestrained, and self congratulatory, it’s definitely a visual feast, but it’s not remotely empty, and I loved it.  The movie has nothing to do with the old Italian action pic from which it liberated its title, except for the WWII setting.

There’s no real high-concept summary here.  There’s a group of brutal Jewish-American resistance fighters working behind the lines in  occupied Europe, headed by hilariously drawly Brad Pitt, spreading terror throughout the Reich with their Nazi-killing atrocities.  There’s a gloriously awful German colonel, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), and a young Jewish woman, Shoshana Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who escaped his clutches.  There’s a British secret agent on a mission (Michael Fassbender) and a beautiful German film star (Diane Kruger) working against Hitler’s regime.  And there’s a German propaganda film, a small theater in Paris, and cameos galore by the German high command.  Like Tarantino’s best work, the film plays out in a series of a shorter stories, all interconnected.  And as it all builds up, you just hope it’s going to pay off.

It does, in ever unexpected and occasionally shocking ways.  While it’s a war film and a spy film and a historical film, what struck me most about it is the sheer suspense — scenes that start quietly are always rife with tension and escalate in unsettling ways.  It also manages to be, by turns, dead serious and hilariously funny, without ever feeling like a distracting tonal clash — the elements just work together.

My admiration for the film isn’t entirely unconditional.  Sometimes implying violence is just as effective as graphically depicting it, but you’ll never convince Tarantino of that.  There are moments of distractingly anachronistic music; one sequence in particular struck me as a “look at this cool song I like!” decision.  And at times the film, which is generally incredibly immersive, becomes less so by drawing conspicuous attention to its technique.

But I guess it wouldn’t be a Tarantino movie if there weren’t lots of unusual filmic choices to quibble over.  In the end, Inglorious Basterds is a pretty amazing film that nobody else could have made.  And really that’s kind of the best reason to watch his movies.  Somtimes it’s much more fun and rewarding to occasionally argue with a perverse filmmaker than always agree with a more conventional one.

Tarantino’s won me back…for now, ayway!

La Femme Nikita (1990) is more style than substance, a dark, slick French adventure starring Anne Parillaud as Nikita, a drug-addled street punk who, in the wake of a violent felony conviction, is “rescued” by an intelligence agency.  There, the cold and steely Bob (Tcheky Karyo) undertakes to transform this violent, irredeemable kid into a trained operative.  With life imprisonment her only other option, Nikita agrees and undergoes a rigorous, years-long training program, before finally being released to perform missions for the government.  Once back in the world, she quickly lands a charming civilian boyfriend (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and starts a new life, only to find it constantly interrupted by stressful, terrifying missions forced upon her by her spy masters.

It’s easy to see why this was such an influential film:  it’s nicely shot and produced, with gritty, intense action sequences, and — perhaps most importantly — a gripping central premise, which the film only really partially exploits.  (Indeed, the concept is tailor-made for an episodic TV show, which it eventually spawned — La Femme Nikita the TV version ran for five seasons on USA; this movie also seems to be a pretty direct ancestor of Alias, a show that got a lot of mileage out of Sydney Bristow’s struggle to balance personal issues with spy duties.)  Although the build-up is somewhat laborious, the pace eventually picks up, and the action is generally compelling.

That said, I didn’t really love this one.  For one thing, the slightly crazy, unpredictable Nikita seems an unconvincing choice for a cold-blooded, highly disciplined assassin, a logic issue never really surpassed by events.  Parillaud is generally engaging, but occasionally distractingly hysterical, and her character never entirely earns the sympathy the film demands of the viewer.  (She may have started out a bit too awful.)  Also — and I know this is kind of a stupid criticism –  the horribly dated, late-1980s synth-rock soundtrack is painfully bad.

I think my main issue, though, is that the inherent intrigue of Nikita’s situation ultimately seems a bit hollow; interesting questions are asked, but never answered.  The film seems much more concerned with its surface action than with what lies beneath it, which for me is always the more interesting angle of a spy film.   La Femme Nikita certainly does enough, I think,  to warrant mention on the list, but at the end of the day it may have influenced the genre more than it actually accomplishes within it.

I spent some time over the last couple days building a simple Review Archive for the site.  Since the main focus of my reviewing has been on books and movies — and because my TV and music reviews have been somewhat more disorganized — those are the categories I featured.  There’s also a page for the Spy 100 Project, which I will update as the viewing proceeds.  At some point I might add more sub-pages, but this seems like plenty for now!