Best Movie Ever: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The Leatherface family sez: "Join us for dinner!"

Tobe Hooper's low-budget rural horror masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is my single favorite movie of all time. It appears on every iteration of my personal "Top Films" list and is my go-to answer to the question "What is your favorite movie?" 

I love low-budget films and I love horror films. My love for low-budget film aesthetics dates back to my 1990s independent film fandom, spurred by stuff like Slacker (1991), El Mariachi (1992), Clerks, Go Fish (both 1994), and Gummo (1997) but also via the influence of John Waters, whose films I started watching voraciously in the late '90s and 2000s.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the pivotal film that won me over to the horror genre. I had seen Halloween and a few other slashers (including Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and the incredibly weird Sleepaway Camp) before I first watched Tobe Hooper's masterpiece in 2002. I enjoyed those films, especially Halloween, but Texas Chain Saw really showed me what a powerful horror film can do.*

There is something special, something charged and electric and more about TCM. I don't like the phrase "this movie transcends its genre" because that is both technically impossible (if it is a genre film, it is a genre film and it ain't transcending anything) as well as insulting to whichever genre you happen to be talking about. Genre-film lovers should never use that phrase.

I will say instead that TCM is a superlative example of the rural slasher genre. Along with Peeping Tom, Psycho (both 1960), Black Christmas (1974), and Deep Red (1975), TCM helps set the template for the "classic" slasher which fully emerges by the time of Black Christmas or surely Halloween (1978).

As far as the specifically rural slasher goes, TCM is the best of the best -- its only close rivals are Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II (1987), and the intense, well-shot The Descent (2005). Other more distant (but still worthy) runners-up include Motel Hell (1980), Pumpkinhead (1988), Wrong Turn (2003), Wolf Creek (2005), the even better Wolf Creek 2 (2013), and Rob Zombie's underrated Halloween II (2009).**

Despite (or probably because of) its low budget, Texas Chain Saw's camera work is effective and inventive, its mise-en-scene artfully insane. Its performances are all-out. It is tautly edited and incredibly suspenseful. It is, in every aesthetic category, a triumph of scrappy, compelling, no-frills filmmaking.

One of Texas Chain Saw's great strengths is that it trusts its imagery to convey its ideas. The shot compositions and blocking tell the story without the need for dialogue. That said, the dialogue, particularly about the Leatherface family's history in the slaughtering industry ("My family's always been in meat" brags Hitchhiker), is believable as spoken by the characters and simultaneously freighted with deeper thematic implications.

Chain Saw uses many images as "free motifs," that is, as abstract imagery that suggests, rather than outright denotes, meaning. For example, there are several recurring images of circular objects: the sun, the moon, a windmill. To me these suggest cyclical time, prehistoric time, the centripetal energy of the Leatherface family devouring itself. The windmill in particular hints that the Leatherface family is "spinning its wheels" -- see also the generator that endlessly runs, powering nothing. All these circular images rhyme with each other, with certain circular camera movements as when the van pulls into the gas station, and with Leatherface's twirling dance that ends the film. When Sally flees Leatherface, her journey is also circular, from the house to the gas station then back to the house. Circularity abounds.***

Chain Saw's experimental soundtrack contributes much to the film's overall tone of terror. The minimalist score consists of weird pitch-bent tones resembling metal scraping against metal, plus occasional staccato percussion including cymbals and gongs. The diegetic music, especially the plinky little ditty "Fool for a Blonde" by Roger Bartlett is eerie and effective during Hitchhiker's bizarre ride in Jerry's van.

Along this same line, pay close attention to the sound design throughout Texas Chain Saw's opening vignette and opening credits -- it's creepy! -- and note how the radio announcer, whose lengthy report about local grave robbings is important, sound bridges us into the film's first scene in the van.

Hitchhiker sez: "I have this knife -- it's a good knife."

In addition to all its artistic and cinematic virtuosity, I love The Texas Chain Saw Massacre because it is an important cultural document, an ecstatically truthful reflection of early seventies American culture. Written and shot by college-aged youths in summer 1973, the original TCM captures U.S. malaise during the period of our national post-Watergate "nervous breakdown." According to historian Andreas Killen:

In 1973 America was jolted by three shocks, following on one another in rapid succession. First, the war in Vietnam ended in the first-ever military defeat for the United States. Second, the Watergate cover-up unraveled, and the presidency of Richard Nixon became engulfed in scandal and, by year's end, calls for impeachment. Last but not least, Americans were hit hard by a collapsing economy: 1973 was also the year of the Arab oil embargo and the beginning of the long slide into stagflation that lasted until the 1980s. Any one of these events alone would have challenged America's image of itself; together they shook the national psyche to its very core.†

In short, Chain Saw is a succinct, powerful snapshot of that shakedown of the national psyche. Screenwriter Kim Henkel and director Hooper confirm this interpretation on their DVD commentary, explicitly calling the movie a response to the Vietnam war and the Watergate crisis. While all films carry ideological meanings and can be analyzed as reflections of and responses to the cultural concerns of their time, the 1974 Texas Chain Saw is a particularly rich and multi-layered cultural looking-glass. Embracing the tropes of the just-burgeoning slasher genre, Hooper, Henkel and company commit to their project with abandon, infusing their despair and anger over the loss of life in Vietnam and the lies of Nixon into their depiction of the Leatherface family's impotent yet deadly rage against the privileged teenagers who invade their homeland.

Which is probably why I keep returning to the film in my writing. I advise my film studies students not to write about or critically analyze films they are too close to as fans, and I usually follow that advice myself. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an exception: I have published one article about the film and plan to include more Texas Chain Saw analysis in a chapter of my (slowly) forthcoming book.

In that article of mine, "Sympathy for the Devil: The Cannibalistic Hillbilly in 1970s Rural Slasher Films," I point out that low-budget rural slashers like Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre

present their cannibalistic hillbilly "villains" in extremely sympathetic terms and, due to the emerging conventions of the slasher horror film genre to which they belong, may even present the rural killers as the ultimate "heroes" of their scenarios in a way that a critically acclaimed Hollywood studio film like Deliverance does not attempt.†† 

Indeed, in TCM, the teens who intrude upon the Leatherface family property, especially the males, are presented as insensitive, oblivious jerks who think nothing of entering the Leatherface house uninvited. Even wheelchair-bound Franklin, who has a strange affinity for Hitchhiker and an appropriate sense of foreboding about the threat the rural family represents, is so whiny that he drives his sister Sally -- TCM's protagonist and Final Girl -- to distraction. Franklin is easy for the viewer to pity but hard for most viewers to like. Of all TCM's teens only Sally and maybe Pam are relatable.

Meanwhile, despite his violent, psychotic tendencies, Leatherface in particular is shown to be emotionally vulnerable at certain key moments of the film. His two brothers bully and mistreat him when they're all at home together, and the viewer sees Leatherface's fear and worry after the third teen, Jerry, walks into his house unannounced. This provocative, finely nuanced ambiguity about who we're supposed to feel for and root for places The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the highest echelon of successful horror movies, alongside other masterpieces like Peeping Tom, Psycho, and King Kong.

Leatherface sez: "I'm frightened and upset and deserving of your sympathy."

Beyond singling out The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as my personal favorite film, I am also quite serious (if hyperbolic) when I call it the "Best Movie Ever" -- that is, I would definitely place it on any more "objective" Top 100 Films list I had a hand in creating. Like so many canon-generating lists, Entertainment Weekly's is, in my view, disappointingly light on horror movies, including only seven: Psycho (#5), King Kong (#11), Jaws (#18), Rosemary's Baby (#36), Frankenstein (#55), The Shining (#66), and Night of the Living Dead (#79) -- all of which I'd keep.

But where is Nosferatu (1922)? Vampyr (1932)? Halloween (1978)? Videodrome (1983)? Peeping Tom (1960)? Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960)? John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)? Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977)?

John Carpenter sez: "Not a single movie in your Top 100, EW? You're fucking kidding me!"

What about Alien (1979)? Gojira (1954)? Wait a minute, EW, you're really putting The Fucking Dark Knight and Return of the Stupid King on your Top 100 Films list and not Gojira? That's completely fucked up.

Furthermore, any "Top 100 Films" list that excludes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre -- one of the most terrifying, visceral, brilliantly crafted, culturally significant, and influential American horror films ever made -- needs serious revision.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Gunnar Hansen, the original and best Leatherface actor.

Bonus Afterthought: Why the 2003 remake is a worthless abomination. I hate to waste any space at all discussing the 2003 Marcus Nispel Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, a formulaic, boring, worthless piece of shit that completely misses the point of what made the original scary or compelling. Instead of creating truly horrific situations arising from the motivations of the characters, the 2003 version goes for cheap jump scares -- yes, a cat even jumps out at one point -- lots of gore, and improbable, ill-motivated plot twists.

Besides its bland aesthetics, abuse of cattle prod cinema techniques, and crappy plotting, the remake's worst offenses are its decision to give the Leatherface family a surname -- Hewitt, which I guess is supposed to be "funny" -- and to fully explain the hillbilly clan's (hackneyed, pedestrian) behavioral motivations.

You see, in the 2003 version, the Leatherface -- er, Hewitt -- clan kidnaps babies because they want to expand their brood and be parents. Sadly, this is a stupid and disastrous miscalculation on the filmmakers' part, for it makes the Hewitts comprehensible to us in a way that deflates their power to horrify. It completely negates the powerful structural social critique of the original. The 1974 Leatherface clan kills because, as professional meat slaughterers, it is all they have ever known. They have been displaced from their jobs by the advent of the air gun stunner. Their family pride in their profession has been stripped from them, so they just keep on butchering -- now humans instead of cattle.

Their insanity and cannibalism is therefore a logical extension of the core principles of capitalism -- they are simply small business-people doing what they need to to survive.††† The inappropriateness of their choice of raw materials serves as a savage critique of the capitalist system, showing the desperate, horrific lengths to which the economically disenfranchised must resort to survive.

The 2003 version offers no such critique or thematic nuance. It is simply about a family who wants more babies and who isn't horrifying or scary at all. Yawn!

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* Perhaps due to the early influence of Halloween and Texas Chain Saw, to this day I generally prefer slasher and serial killer-based horror films and thrillers. Along this line, let me recommend the raw and terrifying Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and the criminally under-seen Peeping Tom (1960). And, on the horror-comedy side, Man Bites Dog (1992). And of course Hitchcock's classic Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
** The elephant in the room here is Deliverance, which at least indirectly inspired the rural horror slasher cycle and the figure of the monstrous hillbilly. But that film itself is not precisely a horror film. It's more of a dark male melodrama with higher artistic pretensions than most slashers. Psycho also (again) sets an important precedent for TCM via the rural locale of the Bates Motel. Rural locales, from Dracula's castle to Night of the Living Dead's farmhouse to Them!'s California desert, pervade the horror film.
*** I noticed this circle motif due to reading Christopher Sharrett's "The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Sharrett says some really smart and insightful stuff in that indispensable article, found in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, Scarecrow Press 2004).
† Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (Bloomsbury, 2006) p. 2.
†† Carter Soles, "Sympathy for the Devil" in Ecocinema Theory and Practice (ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, Routledge 2013) p. 237.
††† This idea comes from Robin Wood, in his "An Introduction to the American Horror Film." also found in Planks of Reason (Scarecrow Press 2004). 

Book Review: Orson Welles by Simon Callow

Actor / director / producer / author Simon Callow.

Though I have mentioned a few books in my movie review posts -- titles like Searching for John Ford, Joseph McBride's biography of the influential director, More Than Night, James Naremore's brilliant exploration of film noir, and Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers, Kathleen Karlyn's insightful feminist overview of contemporary cinema -- I haven't really written any bona fide film book reviews for this blog to date. That will now change since I am most excited to tell you about Simon Callow's wonderful multi-part biography of Orson Welles.

I obtained a lovely hardcover edition of The Road to Xanadu (Viking, 1995), the first volume of Callow's projected four-volume biography of Welles, for free. The book was sitting on the "free book" table outside the English Department office where I work, so I snatched it up. Once I started reading it -- this was in 2012 sometime I think -- I simply could not put it down. It is a totally gripping page-turner.

Part of what compelled me to race through that first lengthy (650-page) volume is Welles himself -- influential film artist, larger-than-life personality, iconic entertainment figure, and, most interestingly, a multi-faceted, internally contradictory, delightfully puckish trickster and raconteur of the first order. Welles is simply fascinating and so too is that book about his early years in the theater, his exploits on the radio including War of the Worlds, and the events leading up to the release of Citizen Kane in 1941.

Yet Callow's remarkable prose also accounts for the "page-turner" quality of Xanadu and the subsequent volumes of his Welles biography, which include Hello Americans (Penguin Books, 2007), One Man Band (Jonathan Cape, 2015), and a forthcoming, as yet untitled fourth volume. No doubt about it: Callow is a flat-out excellent writer.

Here, for example, is an excerpt describing Welles from the preface to the latest volume, One Man Band:

His energy is astonishing and unceasing. But it would not be correct to describe him as a driven man, a Dickens or a Laurence Olivier -- men whose goals were clearly defined, and whose very lives seemed to depend on achieving them. [. . .] With Welles there was simply a constant supply of energy which could be squandered on anything; he seemed to give himself with equal fervour to all of his projects, whether vaudeville, radio comedy or filming the classics. (p. xvii)

Succinct, clear, yet so evocative. Great stuff.

I am only a quarter of the way through One Man Band (which I received for Xmas this year) as I post this. The volume covers an especially tumultuous time in Welles' life and career, his European "exile" period when he truly became an independent filmmaker working (at least in a directorial capacity) completely outside the Hollywood system (with the exception of 1958's Touch of Evil). Callow's heady, montage-like approach, interweaving and juxtaposing fragments of information and analysis to expressionistically suggest a larger whole, suits this period's rootless and feverish tenor.

One of the best Xmas gifts I got this year: the hardcover edition of One Man Band.

The central thesis of Callow's biography is that Welles was a relentless experimenter -- for Welles, process was everything. This is one reason why so many of Welles' films never got finished, or got changed by studios without Welles' consent: because he just didn't care all that much about the finished product, especially if it was being contractually demanded or creatively influenced by some outside entity like a producer or a studio. As Callow writes in the closing paragraph of Hello Americans:

Any form of limitation, obligation, responsibility or enforced duty was intolerable to him, rendering him claustrophobic and destructive. He could only function as a free agent, untrammelled by partners, children, wives, administrators, accountants, producers, studios, political mentors. [. . .] In terms of his work as a director, that meant that he had, inevitably, to become an independent film-maker. Confinement, whether personal or professional, was unbearable to Orson Welles. His exploratory urges were central to his nature; he indulged them unceasingly for the rest of his life. Occasionally, something close to a masterpiece would result. But that was not the purpose of his journey through life. The doing was all. (p. 444)

If this sounds a bit grandiose, perhaps it is. Welles possessed a grandiose persona and Callow, with his theatrical background and flair for the rhythm of words, tends to convey information dramatically. As a lover of melodrama and appreciator of hyperbole, I enjoy Callow's somewhat purple style -- it works beautifully for me.

Callow's theater background lends a dramatic quality to his prose but also qualifies him to speak most insightfully about Welles' approaches to acting and directing. 

But lest you think these tomes are simply full of adulating macro-observations about Welles, check out Callow's discussion of the director's incessant need to introduce an atmosphere of chaos and instability into his film sets:

[Welles] would call the entire crew and actors for nine in the morning, and then show up at six in the evening surrounded by pretty women and a chap playing the accordion. 'What can you do with a man like that?' asked [Othello cinematographer Alvaro] Mancori plaintively. It takes a nearly superhuman level of chutzpah to behave in this fashion on a film set, which at the best of times is a seething mass of resentments and mutinies waiting to happen. It is a gauntlet thrown down, an explicit assertion of personal status, which says: 'Defy me if you dare.' It is behaviour designed to provoke. And provocation was one of Welles's central strategies -- a technique, in fact. 'If everything's going well,' said [art director Alexandre] Trauner, 'you can rely on him to come up with something that throws everything into doubt. It's subconscious.' It is a tactic that breeds adrenalin and counteracts complacency; it was deeply embedded in Welles's temperament. (One Man Band pp. 46-7) 

Notice how Callow moves from the particular -- Welles' outlandishly rude and childish behavior on the set of Othello circa 1950, and Mancori's exasperated yet resigned response to it -- to a broader analysis of how Welles' eccentric, childlike behavior is somehow fused to his artistry, hardwired into the core of this despotic yet brilliant man who created so much great cinema, radio, and theater. While Callow rarely gives exact dates and provides no clear over-arching timeline for Welles' activities, he does zero in on key incidents like this that give a taste of what it was like to work alongside Orson Welles. Nearly every paragraph begins with observation then plunges into deeper analysis.

This seems an appropriate way to relate the life of such a frantically energetic, unpredictable, and prolific artist as Welles. It also provides evocative, poetic description of a kind that keeps these biographies light on their feet and extremely enjoyable to read. As Callow explains in One Man Band, "The technique I have applied in trying to organise all this material may perhaps be compared to the way in which Welles edited his films: I have juxtaposed and woven together images, incidents, phrases, seeking (sometimes by means of echoes, sometimes sharp contradictions) to give an impression of how Welles moved through life" (p. xvi). I approve of this approach, especially when writing about Welles. Callow claims that this montage-y approach to his notoriously contradictory subject has led him to be able "to sense the existence of a continuous Welles, not one that simply staggers from one anecdote to another" (p. xvi). In other words, his Welles biography is going to prioritize flowing and getting into a "truthy" groove rather than meticulously recording every anecdote, every incident, every factoid.

My love of Callow's books may reflect my preference for this artsy, Werner Herzog-ian search for "ecstatic truth" over a strict recounting of facts. Don't get me wrong, I have read several extremely factual (some would say dry) film business books in my day -- Memo from David O. Selznick (ed. Rudy Behlmer, Modern Library, 2000) leaps to mind, as does Tino Balio's amazing political-economic history United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1987). These are incredible, eye-opening books but they are very thorough, detail-laden works about the business side of the film business, not (primarily) breezy dishes on scandal, stardom, or film artistry.*

In his Welles biographies, Callow foregoes certain details (day to day accounts of life on the set, much of anything about Welles' personal/home life) and foregrounds others (Welles' approach to directing and acting, his professional and artistic relationships and rivalries) in order to capture, as he says, "an impression of how Welles moved through life" as a mercurial, vital artist and an erratic, negligent businessman. This feature makes Callow's books stand out and, as I've said, makes them enormously readable.

I recommend starting from the beginning with The Road to Xanadu and reading all of these suckers in order, but if you don't think you can commit to that, I recommend beginning with Volume Two, Hello Americans, which documents Welles' activities from just after the release of Citizen Kane in 1941 until he departs for Europe in 1947. It discusses a concise seven-year segment of Welles' life, after he started making movies, and it is (mainly) set in the U.S.A. -- though some of the most compelling stuff in the book centers on his stint as a quasi-documentarian in Brazil. Start there and then if you're convinced, go back and read Xanadu, which is mostly about Welles' early love of and extraordinary early work in the theater.

Or maybe just jump right into the third volume, One Man Band. Why not? Callow's writerly voice remains potent and his grasp of what makes Welles tick only seems to have deepened and taken on new layers since he wrote Xanadu twenty years ago. Hell, with a newly restored print of Chimes at Midnight now circulating in the U.S., now's the time to read up on the story of that film's creation, recounted in the last third of One Man Band.

Then again, one's understanding of Welles's European period, which One Man Band recounts, would be greatly enhanced by knowing which factors in his meteoric American rise eventually sent him there. So maybe it's best to read at least one of the first two volumes first -- The Road to Xanadu might be especially crucial since it covers Welles' creatively fertile radio years and the production of the debut film which would (for better or worse) forever define him, Citizen Kane.

In any case, the final word: you cannot go wrong reading Callow's biographies of Welles.**

Orson the cat loves reading books about the inner workings of the film business.

Bonus Afterthought: Beyond Callow's first three volumes, I have only read three other books about Orson Welles.

James Naremore's oddly titled The Magic World of Orson Welles (U. of Illinois Press, revised edition 2015) centers its analysis on the films only, and is highly recommended for those seeking insightful film interpretation without much biographical material. Naremore is simply one of the best scholarly film writers around.

However, the (as far as I can tell) undisputed master of understanding Welles and his work from the point of view of a professional film critic is Jonathan Rosenbaum. I strongly recommend Discovering Orson Welles (U. of California Press, 2007), Rosenbaum's collection of superb Welles-related essays.  The whole book is top-notch, though I would single out chapter 15, "The Seven Arkadins" (available in revised and updated form here) as a particularly essential piece of Welles criticism.

See also Rosenbaum's thoroughgoing and informative reviews of various books on Welles, available piecemeal as this online review*** plus chapters 9, 12, and 13 of Discovering Orson Welles.

Josh Karp's recent Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind (St. Martin's Press, 2015) is one of the most fun Welles books you could hope to read, and serves as a crucial stop-gap covering the last phase of Welles' career until Callow's fourth biographical volume arrives. It tells the tale of the as-yet unfinished and undistributed "last" Orson Welles film, The Other Side of the Wind. Unlike Callow's works, this one goes day-by-day and blow-by-blow through the making of an Orson Welles movie. It is written with keen attention to detail and appreciation for the humor and absurdity of Welles' methods. A behind-the-scenes thrill ride!

Lastly, I want to mention a book I have not yet read, but that almost surely will be the next Welles-related work I pick up: Alberto Anile's Orson Welles in Italy (trans. Marcus Perryman, Indiana University Press, 2013) Callow himself repeatedly draws from and acknowledges this book in One Man Band, and there seems to be some critical buzz around this essential tome that "gives us a more detailed impression of a great artist in the midst of a gruesome spell, and entertains in the process." 

"It is characteristic of many of Welles's commentators that they select one or other of the many Welleses as quintessential, but the mystery of the man is that all the Welleses coexist; all are true."

--Simon Callow, One Man Band p. 108

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* Anyone familiar with Golden Age uber-producer David O. Selznick knows that he was deeply involved in the day to day creative doings of every film he worked on. Therefore Memo from David O. Selznick, an edited collection of Selznick's famous, enormously detailed memos spanning his entire career, reveals the intersections between commerce and artistry in unique and fascinating ways.
** Unless you really need to know facts and dates and production schedules in order to be satisfied. In which case I assume Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened To Orson Welles? (U. Press of Kentucky, 2006) is an excellent choice. You can read Callow with a grain of salt then compare what he says and thinks about Welles to McBride's or Rosenbaum's take. Also see Wellesnet for all the latest Orson Welles-related news.
*** Also available as Chapter 20 of Discovering Orson Welles.

Four More Directors to Watch Out For

This is a sequel to a 2013 post I wrote about five of my favorite directors. This time I talk about Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow, Harmony Korine, and Noah Baumbach.

Michael Mann
I glancingly mentioned Mann at the end of that earlier post as one of my favorite action directors. It's true. I have reported before that I love film noir and moody urban (or rural) crime films, and in the contemporary era, Mann is one of the undisputed masters of the genre.

I have written elsewhere about my deep love for Manhunter (1986), so let me focus here on a couple other of Mann's best films as a means of explaining his appeal. (Remember, however, that as Nathan Ditum has written, Mann's career is quite varied and rife with "medium-hopping" variety.)

Neil (Robert de Niro) and Eady (Amy Brenneman) in Heat, Michael Mann's dramatic crime thriller masterpiece.

Heat (1995). My God, Heat. Heat is so goddamned good that I hardly know where to begin. This accurate appreciation does a good job of summing up the film's (and Mann's) many strengths, stating that Mann

traffics in established loner-pro genre archetypes, walking a fine line between character psychology and pulp myth. Mann’s underworld thrillers — Thief, Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and the recent, unfairly maligned Blackhat — blend fantasies and realities of crime. His screenplays are notoriously wordy, but play as minimalist on screen, with paragraph blocks of novelistic detail used to inform single gestures. He collects psychologies and reams of off-beat technical information and transmutes them into archetypal stories. 

[In] the two decades since its release, Heat — a film that was very well received, critically and commercially — has only grown in stature, and come to be regarded as a modern classic and a point of reference for genre filmmaking. Newness depreciates in value over time, but craft and expression remain. Most of Mann’s movies — quite a few of them flops — have become more highly regarded over time. Mann’s perennial problem, it seems, is that his plots are too old and that his movies look too new.

I couldn't say this any better. If you like smartly scripted, visually eye-popping urban crime films, then you simply must check out the films of Michael Mann, especially Heat. All 170 minutes of Heat's pleasurably grandiose running time are absorbing and tension-packed; the movie never drags. Its two leads, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, give career-high performances, backed by a supporting cast par excellence: Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Ashley Judd, Diane Venora, and Ted Levine. Filled with exciting, well-choreographed action set pieces interspersed with deliciously atmospheric L.A. film noir moments, I simply cannot recommend Heat strongly enough.

The post-heist shootout in the streets of L.A., one of the most exciting and expertly constructed scenes in Heat and in Mann's filmography writ large.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992) sits outside Mann's "usual" mode of the tough, urban crime film and yet in many ways it fits right in: it is about tough, manly, resourceful men caught in extremely precarious circumstances. I re-watched this movie a few months back and was blown away by how well-made, exciting, and compelling it is. All this plus Daniel Day-Lewis in the starring role equals, as Ditum calls it, "a period winner."

I also emphatically recommend Mann's Thief (1981), Collateral (2004), The Insider (1999), and the aforementioned serial-killer classic Manhunter. Furthermore, despite its decidedly mixed reviews (some positive, some middling, some negative) I plan to see the recent cyber-thriller Blackhat on the strength of Mann's good name alone.

UPDATE 11/27/2016: See also Darren Franich's detailed appreciation of Mann's Collateral.

Action thriller director Kathryn Bigelow in 2009. 

Kathryn Bigelow
As this sharp writeup of Hurt Locker-era Kathryn Bigelow argues,

She is, simply, a great filmmaker. Because while it is marginally interesting that she calls “action” and “cut” while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.

Yeah! I agree. Bigelow's films are consistently good -- I have been thrilled and entertained by every single Bigelow film I've seen, and a few, like Blue Steel (1989), Point Break (1991), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), are truly great. Probably the best way to approach her work, like that of Nicholas Winding Refn, is to see her films as a series of revisions of and experiments with different genres. MoMA's Jenny He accurately writes that Bigelow

boasts an accomplished oeuvre of engrossing and exhilarating films that are unified in their defiance of genre expectations, their sensual and visceral imagery, and their examination of societal mores and individual psyches.

Indeed. Let me further explain Bigelow's greatness via some specific comments about a few of her key movies:

The Loveless (1982). As the writeup from this 2011 retrospective explains, The Loveless "is a study in Americana that evokes influences as varied as Walker Evans, Kenneth Anger, Edward Hopper, and Douglas Sirk." Willem Dafoe is simply great as the lead, Vance, in this film (when is Dafoe not great?). Yet Vance's oscillating attitude -- between bemused detachment and mildly angry ennui -- is indicative of the overall tone of The Loveless. It is a fascinating genre study and entertaining in a downbeat, existential way, but it is also just a warm-up to the bolder and more innovative genre experiments to come.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan in Blue Steel. 

Blue Steel (1989) is one of my all-time favorite Bigelow films -- it's the one I've seen the most times. It is both an exciting and suitably hyperbolic 1980s crime thriller in its own right and a subtle deconstruction of the gendered assumptions that usually accompany that genre.

Film scholar Christina Lane notes that the "first five sequences of [Blue Steel] represent a series of reversals in which Bigelow toys with gender expectations that are embedded in the genre." My favorite of these reversals is the second one Lane analyzes, about the close-up tracking shot over the gun in the opening credits sequence:

Rather than impart the point of view of the bullets going into the chamber from the outside in, she presents the insertion "from within," perhaps suggesting a point of view that is gendered female. Exaggerating the fetishism of this phallic symbol, a fetishism common to the cop genre, the film defamiliarizes conventional connotations of the gun, asking us to examine the relation between the whole and the parts (i.e., the theory of phallic power and the practice). Also, during this caress of the gun, Bigelow frames the spinning of the chamber as though it were a movie reel, linking the phallic discourses of weapons to those of the cinema.*

In other words, Bigelow points out the masculine, phallic nature of the image of the gun while simultaneously reversing that gendering -- feminizing the gun -- visually. Clever! Lane continues:

In Blue Steel, Bigelow may stay within the terms of the cop/psychothriller genre, in which the gun is fetishized and women present a sexual threat; however, she reverses its terms, exploring what happens when the governing symbolic imagery changes due to a female presence which oscillates between femininity, masculinity, and androgyny (that is, to say that Megan takes up various positions throughout the film). Bigelow refuses to suggest that a mere substitution of a woman in a man's role - and one who is masculinized at that - ultimately reverses male power structures. Rather, she privileges the slippage between gender codes and modes of power, entertaining the possibility of disrupting those structures.**

Very well argued, I completely agree. Blue Steel doesn't just plop a female heroine into a masculine film-world and plot structure, as do Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Kill Bill (2003 and 2004), but rather it disrupts and renders ambiguous the gender codes of the typically male-centered action genre.***

Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) and Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) in the downbeat final scene of Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 action masterpiece. 

I re-watched Point Break (1991) quite recently. Prior to that, I hadn't seen Bigelow's high-octane cops-and-robbers actioner since the late 1990s. In my hazy memories, I remembered it as being too over-the-top for my tastes -- a strange perception, damn hard to account for given that I was still heavily into mid-career Schwartzenegger movies like The Running Man (1987) and Total Recall (1990) at the time Point Break came out.

Point Break constitutes a remarkable achievement in action cinema. Its bank-robbery, sky-diving, and chase sequences are tautly directed, with effective, visceral touches like the use of steadicam in the amazing mid-film foot chase between Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) and a Reagan-masked Bohdi (Patrick Swayze). And while the breathtaking, ever-escalating action set pieces are the main reason to take this ride, Point Break's surfing sequences and character development scenes are shot really beautifully, often in depth, with copious slow motion used for dramatic effect. Bigelow is great at directing action yet is unafraid to include some long takes and just soak in the mise-en-scene of things from time to time. The film's attention to detail makes the southern California setting, and the whole milieu in which the story takes place, feel lived-in and real. Much as I dislike the term for its recent overuse in film criticism, "gritty" is the perfect word to use here. Despite its fairly breakneck overall pace, Point Break is far more thematically resonant and visually gritty than I remember it being.

Point Break's Bodhi, in Reagan mask, torches a getaway car. I love this image. 

Seeing it again now, I am inclined to place Point Break in the upper echelon of great '80s and 90s L.A. crime films, a group that includes William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and Mann's masterpiece Heat (1995). Is some of the dialogue and its delivery (especially by Reeves) a bit cringe-worthy? Yes. Yet does it work as a piece of brilliantly crafted action fare? Yes, absolutely. Highly recommended!

Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero in Kathryn Bigelow's terrific neo-noir Strange Days.

Strange Days (1995) is a well-made neo-noir with slight science fictional trappings, that is, a noir set in a dystopic near future much like Bladerunner. Ralph Fiennes gives a terrific central performance as harried low-level street operator Lenny Nero, and the supporting cast, including Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott, and Richard Edson, is remarkable. As usual, Bigelow takes a familiar genre -- in this case the film noir or crime thriller -- and then slightly turns it on its head, especially along gender lines. I do not wish to give away spoilers, but suffice to say that Nero, our ostensible "detective," gets proven wrong on one key matter that gives the lie to his need to protect his ex-girlfriend Faith (Lewis). Plus the "real" badass of the film is not the somewhat effeminate Nero but rather Bassett's Mace, a limo driver with finely honed fighting skills and an unswerving loyalty to Lenny. In sum, Strange Days is a terrific psychosexual thriller that presents near-future L.A. in a very different yet nearly as haunting a way as does its most obvious influence -- Ridley Scott's Bladerunner. Well worth seeing.

K-19 The Widowmaker (2002): First, a caveat: Das Boot is to submarine movies what Jaws is to shark movies. It's the absolute peak of the genre, with no other film even remotely in its league. In the case of shark attack films, even other solidly enjoyable ones like the Jaws sequels, Deep Blue Sea (1999), the Sharknado films, and The Reef and Open Water form a distant second tier behind Jaws, that one superior specimen of the genre. Likewise, all other submarine warfare films fall distantly behind Wolfgang Petersen's incredible masterpiece Das Boot. 

So in order to place Bigelow's clunkily titled K-19: The Widowmaker in its proper context, we must compare it to other second-tier military submarine adventure movies, alongside stuff like Destination Tokyo, The Hunt for Red October, and U-571. And compared to films like these, K-19 is pretty good. The movie takes a lot of rightful heat for Harrison Ford's abysmal "Russian" accent, though if you can look (listen?) past that flaw, his performance on the whole is pretty damn good given how late in his career we are talking about. Also, the supporting cast, including the always-great Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard, is uniformly excellent, though mostly consisting of lesser-known performers.

K-19's greatest strength, however, comes from its relative seriousness of tone and its grounding in a historically true series of events. I know this is a Hollywood film and I am not saying I believe the film is historically accurate, of course not. But the whole tone of the film, especially its tragic, tear-inducing final scene, gains power from the story's link to reality, however tenuous that link my be (I have never extensively researched the real history of Soviet nuclear submarine K-19). Set in 1961, K-19 is an historical period piece and therefore not as contemporary feeling or as "ripped from the headlines" as The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Nevertheless in many ways K-19 is a warm up to Bigelow's subsequent Iraq war dramas. As a meditation on the personal cost of serving the state and maintaining state secrets, K-19 specifically foreshadows the themes of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

Jessica Chastain gives a harrowing performance as beleaguered CIA operative Maya in Kathryn Bigelow's espionage masterpiece Zero Dark Thirty.

While I like The Hurt Locker and am very happy in general that Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director at the 2009 Oscars for it, I nevertheless maintain that Zero Dark Thirty is a superior film and may even mark the highest point in Bigelow's directorial career so far. I won't spend time elucidating its many strengths -- taut action and suspense, full-tilt performances from all players but especially Jessica Chastain, pitch-perfect cinematography -- but simply urge you to see it and take in all its espionage-movie excitement, investigative breadth, and grim beauty.

The main issue that comes up for most people around Zero Dark Thirty is its relationship to its real-life subject matter. We know all biopics and historical pics and films "based on a true story" are filled with inaccuracies and fabrications, but some films seem to draw more heat for exemplifying this ubiquitous truth than others do. Zero Dark has taken a lot of criticism from viewers who think its depiction of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e., torture) by U.S. military intelligence personnel is inaccurate and inappropriate. For myself, I fully agree with Roger Cohen:

Watching torture is profoundly unsettling. But Bigelow and Boal have done an important service in setting before a wide U.S. and global audience images of a traumatized America’s dark side. This happened: the waterboarding, the sleep deprivation, the sexual humiliation, the cruelty. Not exactly as depicted, but yes it did.

By graphically depicting actual U.S. torture methods, Zero Dark exposes a truth many Americans would not like to face: that the U.S. does not occupy moral high ground in the global conflicts in which it is embroiled. The reality that the U.S. tortures captives in violation of the Geneva Convention is, in the context of this film, more important than the specifics of real-life torture's efficacy or inefficacy. That torture is ineffective in reality does not erase the truth that it happens.

Thus Zero Dark Thirty is justified in integrating graphic torture scenes into its narrative, in part because it is a work of fiction and a work of art. As Cohen further explains, "while reality is the raw material journalism attempts to render with accuracy and fairness, it is the raw material that art must transform." This resonates with film director Werner Herzog's notion of cinema's "ecstatic truth":

Cinema, like poetry, is inherently able to present a number of dimensions much deeper than the level of so-called truth that we find in cinema verite and even reality itself, and it is these dimensions that are the most fertile areas for filmmakers. I know that by making a clear distinction between 'fact' and 'truth' in my films, I am able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth most films do not even notice. The deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically and mathematically correct.†

Starting with its opening audio of the real 9/11 attacks over a black screen, Zero Dark Thirty means serious business in terms of conveying the full emotional impact and consequences of the events it depicts. It artistically deploys the facts in the service of reaching a deeper, ecstatic truth. Cohen rightly concludes that "the charge of inaccuracy is a poor thing measured against the potency of truth. Zero Dark Thirty is a truthful artistic creation, one reason it has provoked debate." Very well said.††

The sublime last shot of Zero Dark Thirty, which conveys the personal cost of serving the state and implicitly questions whether or not the hunt for bin Laden was worth it.

Harmony Korine
Harmony Korine, like his German idol Werner Herzog and his Danish counterpart Lars von Trier, is an enfant terrible, a talented provocateur who crafts his films and public appearances in such a way as to tease, provoke, and mystify his audiences. Take, for instance, this bizarre 1997 Letterman interview segment:

Is Korine really this crazy? Or is this whole appearance some kind of performance-art type of stunt? We'll never know, and part of the fun with Korine is that the line between who he might be as a person and what he wants to accomplish with his art is pretty heavily blurred.

As Korine himself says in this interview, responding to a question about the capacity for some of the images found in his films to shock viewers:

It's nice to know that people haven't become so completely desensitised to things that there's still a way to get some type of extreme reaction. But that's why you make films; to provoke some kind of discourse.

I think that quotation is key to understanding Korine's over-arching project, and it says a lot about him that when asked directly in the same interview about that controversial appearance on David Letterman, he replies:

Well, you know, it's interesting, because this has become such a thing now, when it's something that happened 15 years ago! I know what happened. But… I don't want to really say, because I like the way it exists in the way it does now.

That is, Korine would rather preserve the mystery, leaving things open to interpretation, than to spoil it by explaining himself. In this way he reminds me very much of David Lynch, who also steadfastly refuses to explain or interpret his films or creative motivations to interviewers. Frustrating though this may be for some of us, this refusal tells me that Korine, like Lynch, trusts and respects his audience. He wants us to decide for ourselves.

None of this impishly maddening public behavior would matter if Korine's films weren't some of the best crafted and most ideologically insightful works being made in the early 21st century.

To start with, Gummo (1997). Gummo is my personal favorite Harmony Korine film -- I assume it will always loom large on my list of all-time favorite movies. Gummo tells a loose "day in the life" type story, albeit in a multi-strand, non-linear way. The film features a true ensemble cast, with no single protagonist unless it is Tummler (Nick Sutton), the younger of two boys who kill neighborhood cats, selling the meat to a Chinese restaurant to earn money. The movie episodically follows several neighborhood characters, gradually creating a penetrating if carnivalesque portrait of mid-1990s white American poverty.

Is Gummo thinly fictionalized "poverty porn?" It's a legitimate question. Korine surely immerses himself in the low-income worlds he depicts in Kids (1995), Gummo, and julien donkey-boy (1999). And his films do both critique and exploit the genres in which he works.

Like Herzog, Korine likes to look unflinchingly at bizarre, unusual, even grotesque things, somehow making the viewer see their abject beauty. Alternately painterly and grunge-documentarian, Gummo's visual style is something very unique and special, consisting of beautiful images of unbeautiful subjects.

Gummo is an absolute must-see if you are interested in American independent cinema, or even if you just want to see one Korine film only -- make it this or Spring Breakers (2012).

Then there's julien donkey-boy (1999), Korine's Dogme '95 film. This is for serious Korine enthusiasts and may not be an ideal first Korine film if you are new to his work. More narratively coherent than Gummo -- it has a clear protagonist, Julien (Ewen Bremner), and features fewer central characters, focusing only on Julien's immediate family -- julien donkey-boy is nevertheless more thematically extreme than its predecessor. Both Julien and his father (played by Werner Herzog) seem to be mentally ill, and the film's plot centers on the anticipated birth of Julien's sister Pearl's (Chloe Sevigny's) baby, whose father's identity I cannot spoilerishly reveal. There's some intense shit in this movie. It's very good and I recommend it highly if you like Korine's stuff but you've been warned.

I already discussed Spring Breakers at length when I named it my favorite film of 2013, and I have not yet seen Trash Humpers (2009). Beyond that, Korine's feature filmography consists of Mister Lonely (2007) and the film he wrote but did not direct, Kids (1995). Mister Lonely is a gentler, more upbeat film than any other in Korine's filmography (even though one major character does commit suicide by the end). Depicting the exploits of several celebrity impersonators, including Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) and Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton), this slice-of life piece aesthetically foreshadows Spring Breakers, being much glossier and a bit less arty and abstract than his earlier works. I enjoy Mister Lonely but it is the Korine film I have returned to least. I recommend neophyte Korine viewers skip it in favor of seeing the more visually accomplished and thematically incisive Spring Breakers.

Harmony Korine's cameo appearance alongside star Chloe Sevigny in Kids.

Kids is must-see viewing, for multiple reasons. First, it is an early harbinger of Korine's style and themes, focusing on the lives of several (mostly delinquent) youths over the course of a single day and night. It is shot low-budget style with street photographer Larry Clark directing.

Second, Kids is a key work of the 1990s American independent cinema boom. As this retrospective interview and this oral history make clear, Kids is the kind of film that could be made during the mid-1990s indie film heyday, but simply could not be made today, now that the indie sphere has been more or less completely taken over by the multinationals that run the major film studios.

Lastly, Kids, sensationalized though it may be, deals frankly and truthfully with underage sexuality and drug use, shining a light on the interconnected dangers of AIDS and urban poverty. In this sense I see it as another precursor to Spring Breakers, which also investigates white youth culture's obsessions with drug use, crime, and imagined blackness.

UPDATE 11/14/2015: A friend recommends that those interested in hearing a Harmony Korine interview with less "performance art" weirdness should check out this podcast with Marc Maron.

Noah Baumbach 
I have been a fan of Noah Baumbach's work ever since I saw The Squid and the Whale (2005) on home video circa 2008. That is a remarkable film, still my favorite of the director's. It is an intense coming of age drama centering on the travails of Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) as he deals with the divorce of his parents.

The Squid and the Whale is one of Baumbach's most psychologically incisive films, though Margot at the Wedding (2007) is also pretty intense and I've heard Greenberg (2010) is totally warts-and-all too. In any case, Whale displays all the key hallmarks of Baumbach's style. It is well-shot, well-paced, and its focus is on the nuances of its hard-to-love characters and their interactions. Whale and Margot are the two most emotionally harrowing Baumbach films I've seen, bleak tales of interpersonal fragmentation and raw family relationships. The lightness and comedy that infuse Baumbach's later works is present only sparingly in these two superbly crafted dramas.

Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) in the final moments of The Squid and the Whale.

Baumbach is an excellent director of actors and he always brings forth real, lived-in performances from his cast members. Take, for example, Jack Black in Margot at the Wedding or Ben Stiller in While We're Young. These two guys both have clearly identifiable schticks -- JB's is rooted in his theatrically hyperreal Tenacious D persona, Stiller's is that of a tightly wound, geeky underachiever -- yet Baumbach brings roundness of character out of these two, mellowing, deepening, and therefore defamiliarizing their usual personas.†††

Ben Stiller as frustrated Generation-X filmmaker Josh in While We're Young.

One of the most accurate general assessments of Baumbach's work is this one, provided by AV Club's Mike D'Angelo:

Baumbach isn’t a great stylist, but he does think visually, especially considering how talky his films tend to be.

Very well said. Baumbach is no show-off, not even in his fairly clever dialogue. No, he places the characters (and by extension the actors) first. I think this is a fine principle by which to direct films. It seems to drive Nicole Holofcener's work, too. And surely Robert Altman's. This is good company to keep.

Amanda Seyfried, Noah Baumbach, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival premiere of While We're Young. 

Baumbach's strength as a director of actors is on display in Frances Ha, his upbeat female buddy comedy I discuss briefly here. While Frances Ha isn't my personal favorite Baumbach film -- I prefer his darker, edgier stuff -- I highly recommend that delightful gem if you haven't seen it already.

To conclude, I urge my readers to check out this delightful interview with Baumbach conducted by Jonathan Lethem around the time of Squid and the Whale. In it, Lethem says something of that movie that applies to Baumbach's film work as a whole:

it had that homely humanity to it. There was breath and impulse and life.

Yes indeed.

Nicole Kidman as the emotionally turbulent title character in Margot at the Wedding.

--
* Christina Lane, "From The Loveless to Point Break: Kathryn Bigelow's Trajectory in Action." Cinema Journal 37.4 (Summer 1998) pp. 70-1.
** Lane p. 73.
*** According to Kevin L. Ferguson, Blue Steel also reworks the "yuppie villain" trope in its bizarre depiction of obsessed serial killer Eugene (Ron Silver). Ferguson argues that the film "simultaneously sustains and critiques the new trope of the yuppie devil" in his fascinating analysis in Jump Cut.
† Paul Cronin (ed.), Herzog on Herzog (Faber and Faber, 2002) pp. 239-40.
†† Those interested in both sides of the debate over Zero Dark Thirty should check out Cieply and Barnes for the pro and Steve Coll and Peter Maass for the con. You may also want to read this Time Magazine interview with Bigelow, in which she addresses the Zero Dark controversy.
††† I think Black's part in Margo at the Wedding constitutes his second-best "offbeat" career performance after his starring role in Bernie, which is his career-best performance bar none. I like him in Orange County but I consider that to be one of his "core persona" performances. All that said, I basically like Jack Black's core persona, especially in School of Rock and the HBO Tenacious D shows.