Quinoa1984

Bare-ly a movie!

I love how much Michael Donovan O'Donnell is just grinning ear to ear like an adolescent constantly spying behind not at all conspicuous large plants inside of every naked woman's room.

This was around the time when from all reports Ed Wood went deep into the world of smut movies and got deeper into alcoholic waste, but you frankly wouldn't know that it was made by a desperate man so much as my a gleeful if untalented showman.

It is never quite rises past being inept in the ways of, you know, how a film can or should be shot or framed or lit or edited (if Godard saw this he might have regretted starting off the Jump Cut style, and that amuses me), but the majority of the performers seem to be having vivacious (largely softcore) sexual situations and just having a generally fun time, as if Wood off screen was getting jubilant the more they were dancing and falling over one another.

Practically all of the scenes that should involve hardcore sex look hilariously like, at least when it is man on woman, when you were a kid and smashed your action figures together to simulate then having sex with each other. It also gets positively kinky and manic in the final ten minutes and that is much appreciated. Other times when it is lady on lady, it is a little more sensual and almost truly erotically charged - as opposed to over-long and kind of icky when it is the guys and their mangy hairy mugs - probably because Ed just let them do what they wanted (many a pool table is used well to put it that way).

The highlight of this largely slipshod Hippie-Free-Love-adjacent *Detective mystery* story, which only remembers its plot by around the one hour mark and makes Inherent Vice look like the most lucid piece of filmmaking ever, is Wood in his few minutes on screen. He knows what he wants from himself and can deliver his campy lines with commitment; I wonder if he had lived past the 1970s if John Waters might have picked him up for parts in his ensemble.

The refreshing aspect of this documentary about the innovative Clarinetist and band leader Artie Shaw is how the director doesn't try to steer him in any direction in particular or to make him look or sound like he has finesse. That isn't Artie Shaw, certainly at this later stage of his life, and director Brigitte Berman, armed with a cornucopia of archival images and footage from the period and throughout his career, shows him as craggy and opinionated as he was then.

In truth, a lot of what he says makes sense, even when he sounds to be a little insulting (ie the highlight or one of them at least is his episode circa 1939 where he called teens who did the Jitterbug "morons" - he had a pretty good reason in context, but it would have been hard to communicate that in a headline). There is some heady and impressive points of history as well to take in, like during the second World War when Shaw and his band played for one of the great warships, but that isn't the main draw: what hooks us in is that this is about the needs and desires of an artist versus commercial expectations, and how that can lead to constant anxiety.

I do wonder if there were points Berman did steer the conversation or answers and we didn't see it so much, but I doubt it. The presentation via the narration is a little dry, and it may cover some parts I personally wanted to know more about (ie his marriage to Lana Turner seems to be hand-waved away), but that is my only main knock against it (that and perhaps those bits where he just sits listening to his own music doesn't add as much as Berman thinks).

This is a fascinating capital-C Character of the world of music and the 20th century American imagination; despite all of his existential troubles, Shaw's candid admissions and how often his ornery opinions mesh with a plain spoken sense of his life and career and collaborators (and even his psychotherapist) is involving and you want to keep hearing him talk.

Kind of like Paul Verhoeven's ARMY OF SHADOWS (which is to say there is a lot of intrigue and espionage and dirty Nazi business and scenes of torture and murder and betrayal and so on... and there are boobs - and sexual attraction as a weapon - and an April Fool's day joke involving public sex as a gotcha on some soldiers, and it is all so very impressive and dynamic). Unlike Jean-Pierre Melville though (and this isn't to put him down), this is not an icy examination of the tragic dimensions of resistance fighters; the ins and outs of the struggles for men and women against the Nazis in Holland (and the UK) has a fresh immediacy to the form. Verhoeven and his camera team have that is electric, like the way it will move across the room and it feels like it is in a space between a regular Dolly and Hand-Held.

This is a film that has scenes and sequences of adventure and daring-do - that is up to and including Rutger Hauer having to slather some weird liquid over his body that makes him vomit in an act of subterfuge in an espionage mission - but Verhoeven takes the dominance of Nazism seriously and for all of his flourishes of the exaravagant or for brief shock value this is a Suspense film that manages to tell a riveting story with two pivotal characters, Eril amd Guus (Hauer and Krabbe).

As much as the whole group of guys we meet early on are important to the story, it is the fates and chances and choices of Erik and Guus to unexpected places. Hauer already made an impression on audiences with Turkish Delight, but this feels like the kind of role for him (and Krabbe as well) to make a star; he has that kind of look where when a Nazi shines a flashlight in his face he knows just how to get out of that situation right quick. They have solid writing and the turns and developments are exciting, but the acting takes it to the next level.