Gremlins (1984)

Gremlins imagined the archetypal American small town under siege from hostile creatures who wreak havoc and destruction over the course of a Christmas Eve. Mashing together elements from Frank Capra's Americana with Alfred Hitchcock's sardonic sense of humor best exemplified in The Birds, with a touch of 1950s monster movies like The Blob. Gremlins is also situated within Spielberg's playful and dark portraits of America during the Reagan era.

A box office hit over the summer of 1984, Gremlins was the fourth highest grossing movie of the year in a crowded summer that included Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, and Spielberg's highly anticipated follow up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Capitalizing on the popularity of horror-comedies during the decade, Gremlins also helped usher in the PG-13 rating by portraying violence considered too intense for a PG audience. 

Directed by Joe Dante and written by Chris Columbus, Spielberg admired Dante's work in Piranha and The Howling, two horror movies with a satiric edge. Dante had also directed "It's a Good Life" episode in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Dante brought a sense of comedy, satire, horror, and film history. to Gremlins.

Columbus was a fledgling screenwriter who wrote the first draft of Gremlins, a script that fell into the possession of Spielberg. A native of small town Ohio, Columbus had a sense of Midwest life and an eye for horror. The original script was much darker with the gremlins killing Billy's Mom and going on a cannibalistic rampage at a McDonald's. Those elements were removed to make the film more accessible. 

Dante put together a memorable cast of unknowns in the lead roles and excellent character actors for the supporting cast. Zach Galligan as Billy and Phoebe Cates as Kate were cast because of their onscreen chemistry. Hoyt Axton and Francis Lee McCain were cast as Billy's parents. Dick Miller remains a favorite as Mr. Futterman, a xenophobic resident of the town. Keye Luke as Mr. Wing had a long history of acting in Hollywood. Judge Reinhold as the yuppie Gerald rounded out the cast.

The story begins in Chinatown following Randall on the search for Christmas presents. He discovers the Mogwai and buys it despite the warnings of Mr. Wing. Billy works at the local bank and contends with arrogant co-worker Gerald and the snobbish Mrs. Deagle. When presented with the Mogwai Billy is given three rules: 

1) no bright lights
2) no water
3) no food after midnight

Predictably, the rules are broken, and chaos ensues. When water is accidentally spilled on Gizmo (voiced by Howie Mandel) he self-reproduces lesser tame versions of himself. Later the mogwai fool Billy into feeding them chicken after midnight and they cocoon into gremlins, green creatures who mimic the worst of human behavior: eating junk food, drinking, watching television. They also exact some poetic justice. 

Spielberg's pop culture utopia resides in the household space. Billy's room is piled with comic books and his walls are plastered with iconic movie posters. Spielberg kids are rebels of a sort, anti-conformists working from within the system. 

The politics of Gremlins is all over the map, not unlike a Capra film. Small town capitalism gets lampooned throughout. Mrs. Deagle owns the town and is closing factories and building golf courses for profit. Billy's mom can be seen watching It's a Wonderful Life makes the parallel even more literal. Mr. Futterman's distaste for anything foreign whether it be cars or movies symbolizes a failing middle class feeling lost in the 1980s, he's stuck in the 1950s.  

In recent years Gremlins has also spurred conversations on racial stereotypes, revealing a reactionary streak from the Spielberg machine. Mr. Wing is the mystical Asian stereotype who chastises the Americans unable to handle the mogwai. Some have also suggested the gremlins symbolize white fears about African Americans and urban spaces. 

The gremlins reinforce old racist stereotypes, specifically in the bar scene. Glynn Turman plays the only African American character, the kindly science teacher who gets dispatched in an unsavory way. Spielberg's own Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was also lambasted for its representation of India. All this points to a complex relationship with '80s pop culture which can serve as a dopamine of nostalgia, at the same time the insensitivity of the era is impossible to ignore.

The Christmas season atmosphere contributes to the sense of maniacal playfulness throughout Gremlins. Dante highlights the traditional imagery of the season - caroling, shopping, lights, making cookies and then subverts them. The dog gets wrapped in lights. While making cookies Lynn is attacked by the Gremlins (brutally killed in the original script), resulting in a gruesome microwave effect that earned the PG-13 rating. The consumer mania of Christmas adds extra fuel to American craziness. To top it off there's also Kate's story about her father dying inside a chimney on Christmas Eve.

Dante had to fight to keep the scene in the film, which elicited laughter and gasps from audiences. The random nature of Kate's revelation in Spielberg's dreamy America hints at the tragedies floating just below the surface. David Lynch would take the concept further in Blue Velvet, but Dante keeps the darkness ever present.

An iconic film during the height of Spielberg's command of pop culture, Gremlins is now sealed in wax as an '80s cultural artifact. The combination of Spielberg's milieu with Dante's subversive sensibility makes Gremlins a fascinating and entertaining gateway into American cinema during the Reagan era

Shadows (1959)

Shadows, the debut film by actor/director John Cassavetes, is considered a landmark in American independent cinema, Cassavetes was on the vanguard New York filmmakers during the 1960s fashioning an alternative to Hollywood movies. 

The moody black and white atmosphere of the film follows a collage of characters shifting between aimlessness and ennui in the city. Propelled by Jazz music and the Beat Movement, they shuffle along the fringes of intellectual and artistic life. 

A sad love story shapes the narrative of Shadows. Complexities of race and identity are also woven into the film. Lelia (Lelia Goldini) lives with her two brothers Hugh (Hugh Hurd) a jazz singer and Ben (Ben Carruthers) an aspiring writer. Leila is uncertain about what she wants in life and worries about falling behind and aspires to attend college. At a literary party she meets aspiring intellectual Tony (Anthony Ray) who seduces her, but then bails on the relationship for racist reasons.

Cassavetes famously worked out the framework of Shadows through improvisation exercises with the cast. Technical and logistical setbacks extended the shooting of the film, additional scenes were also shot after the premiere was poorly received. 

While the improvisational approach feels awkward at first, as the film unfolds the line between fiction and non-fiction blur. By the end, the documentary effect is vivid.

Shadows would cast a wide legacy in the coming decades, especially on New Hollywood filmmakers. Scorsese and Altman immediately come to mind. The realist and film noir style can also find in the French New Wave, especially in Godard's 1960 film Breathless. Cassavetes and Godard set their films in urban environments and relied on character instead of narrative to shape the style.  

Wild Strawberries (1957)

In some ways the inverse of Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful life (although both sort of end up at the same place), Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries follows Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) as he journeys to accept a lifetime achievement award. Aging and near the end of his days, he reflects on the regrets of his life during the trip while interacting with fellow travelers along the way. Kurosawa's Ikiru deals with similar subject matter, but takes a more sociological approach to mortality, avoiding the troubled theology of Bergman, yet both films never fail to put one in a reflective state of mind, regardless of age.

Western culture romanticizes youth as the time to do everything and have lots of fun. Possibilities look endless at age 21, yet for anyone who's 21, that can be both exciting and daunting. We never know the consequences of our decisions until we have the benefit of looking back with hindsight. In the film, septuagenarian Professor Borg is asking questions like: What kind of person was I? What were my mistakes? Why did I not learn from them? Why am I full of regret?

In dream sequences, Isak relives moments of unrequited love and scenes from his unhappy marriage. His wife came to despise him and carried on affairs. The present and past are merging in some ways. Accompanying him on the trip is his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) who grows to have a grudging respect for Isak and even confides in him about her own issues with his melancholy son Evaid (Gunnar Bjornstrand), also a doctor.

Mortality, a recurring theme in many Bergman films, is looked at from a variety of perspectives here. Evaid is chronically depressed and despairs of his own existence, even walking out on Marianne after she reveals she's pregnant because he has no wish to bring a child into the world. A touch of despair is infecting all the characters. 

Along the way they pick up three young hitchhikers. The two men in the group debate the existence of God and even come to blows and compete for the affection of their female companion. Later, they encounter a bickering middle aged couple, a shadow of Isak's own marriage. 

Bergman is expressing a harsh truth: Regrets are inevitable as we age. Despite Isak's successful career as a doctor and scientist, his personal life has been a disaster resulting in grief and loneliness in his old age. Questions of whether he would've been happier with this person or had devoted more time to his family no longer matter. Approaching 40 when he wrote the film, Berman was musing on whether the "What ifs?" will consume us as the end nears. I suppose so, and there's really no way around it except by how one chooses to deal with it.

"Arid" is word that keeps popping up lately. Those with a religious perspective often use the term to describe the secular worldview, but it goes both ways. One of the hitchhikers wants to be a clergyman, an ambition his companions find quaint. Preaching a theology in a world of rapid social and technological change, informed by a catastrophic century simply offers a solution among many, at worst a pitiful nostalgia for a past that never existed. Turning to conventional religion ultimately involves not leaps of faith, but flights of fancy. 

Wild Strawberries resolves itself by, to quote Lincoln, turning to the "mystic chords of memory." The professor thinks back to moments of his childhood to assuage his regrets and fears. Many poets have offered a similar prescription to despair, but few films have expressed the notion in such a brave and unvarnished way. 

The Fabelmans (2022)

 

My audio review of Steven Spielberg's latest films The Fabelmans. 

A link:

https://coldwarfilmandculture.wordpress.com/2022/11/24/the-fabelmans-2022/

H22 #29: The Birds (1963)

The creeping sense of dread in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds combined with its surreal siege narrative remains an uncanny cinematic experience. Hitchcock's apocalyptic adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier short story still gets under the skin. Anytime I catch site of a murder of crows flying overhead I feel some trepidation.

Tippi Hedren stars as socialite Melanie Daniels. The film begins with Melanie meeting Mitch (Rod Taylor) at a pet store. They banter about birds and their exchange is mildly flirtatious, leading Melanie to track him down at Bodega Bay. The first half the movie plays as a high brow melodrama with the various romantic intrigues at the idyllic seashore community. A sense of malaise and frustration serves as a foreshadowing of the terror to come. Interspersed throughout are signs our feathered friends are acting strangely.

Hitchcock's mastery is on full display during the attack scenes, done without music and only the high- pitched bird squawks. They find ways into houses, swoop down in large numbers on children playing in a schoolyard, each attack is an escalation. In my favorite scene at the diner, locals express their fears about what's going on, when a bird expert points out humans live at the mercy birds who outnumber them by the billions. In other words, nothing can stop them.

Many saw Cold War parallels, the birds a stand in for the threat of nuclear war. The helplessness of everyone in such an attack is captured with brilliantly by Hitchcock. Nature is a big theme as well, mocking all human pretensions with sheer power. An otherworldly grimness certainly takes over in the last 20 minutes. Other films have trod similar ground such as Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel or Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. The Birds in representing a rebellion by nature, forces the audience to grasp an arcane possibility. 

An overblown melodrama for the first hour transforming into an outright horror spectacle is Hitchcock once again playing the audience with one grim joke after another.  

H22 #28: Near Dark (1987)

Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark showcases her kinetic style and preference for characters who live on the extremes - in this case vampires. 

When Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) has a brief romance with Mae (Jenny Wright), she not only converts him to vampirism but also introduces him to her hellraising band of the undead. The Aliens reunion is a treat for movie fans including Bill Paxton, Lance Henricksen, and Jenette Goldstein. Paxton is at his most unhinged. These vampires are unlike any other to appear on the screen, a band of outlaws taking no prisoners. 

Shot throughout Arizona and Oklahoma, Bigelow paints a visceral portrait with the landscapes. A perfect synthesis of the horror-Western with shootouts worthy of Peckinpah.

H22 #27: Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher's Zodiac is a tour de force procedural told through the haze of 1970s discontent and bureaucratic inertia serving as a subterfuge for paranoia. A film bleeding with film history from Fritz Lang's M to the paranoid thrillers of Alan Pakula, Zodiac simmers in true crime obsession and harrowing encounters with the pursuit of the truth.

Zodiac is about the murders afflicting the Bay Area through the 1970s. Fincher is uninterested in criminal pathologies, and way more into how modern cities deal with a crisis. We follow detectives with the San Francisco Police department, principally Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and journalists for the San Francisco Chronicle, cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyellenhaal and crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr). 

The narrative drive of Zodiac is among the best of 21st Century cinema. Fincher drew upon All the President's Men as a primary influence: The brightly lit newspaper offices are contrasted with the darkness of the street where the killer lurks, striking at random. David Shire who composed the score for many '70s movies including ATPM was brought in for Zodiac. While many previous novels and films have dealt with killers terrorizing a city, Zodiac explores how mass media adds to the sense of paranoia. Television news feeds off the tension and makes it worse, the killer knows how to manipulate the media to stoke mass panic. 

Fincher relents from going too far into exploitative territory. Three of the killings are recreated, the scenes focus on the randomness of the killings, which is frightening enough, but not on the gory details. Neither does the film obsess over the psychology of the killer, James Vanderbilt's script is more of a puzzle. Gyllenhaal plays Graysmith as an amateur sleuth, spending most of the film trying to decode the clues in the countless letters the killer sent, in what would form the basis of his 1986 book Zodiac.

Meanwhile, the detectives on the case continually run into jurisdiction issues, which led to clumsy evidence collecting and a poor pooling of resources. Ruffalo as Inspector Toschi persists with the case despite all the setbacks - to his own detriment. When the authorities finally finger a likely suspect played by John Carroll Lynch in an icy performance, they fail to attain enough evidence. RDJ as Avery was targeted with letters by the killers and his own idealism is slowly shattered as his own investigation hits brick walls.

Graysmith becomes the main protagonist of the story, Gyllenhaal plays him with the right amount of virtue and intelligence. In perhaps the creepiest scene he follows a lead and ends up in a scary basement with a shady man offering information. Chloe Sevigny plays Robert's long-suffering wife in a thankless role who eventually leaves him over his obsession with the case.

In interviews Fincher spoke about growing up in the Bay Area being terrified of the Zodiac killer as a kid, almost in the way one speaks of fictional characters like Michael Myers or Freddy Kreuger, so there's a personal touch running through the film. The film was smart enough to create a vivid sense of '70s verisimilitude without trying to make grand statements about the era which has all been said before. It's all there on the screen. 

In the end I find Zodiac to be an oddly optimistic film in its thesis that the truth is attainable, thus eschewing the sense of ineffectual doom of so many paranoid thrillers.

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