Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)

Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Phoebe Augustine, Eric DaRe, Grace Zabriskie, Moira Kelly, James Marshall, Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, Kyle MacLachlan, David Bowie, Pamela Gidley, Miguel Ferrer. Screenplay: David Lynch, Robert Engels, based on the television series by Lynch and Mark Frost. Cinematography: Ronald Victor García. Production design: Patricia Norris. Film editing: Mary Sweeney. Music: Angelo Badalamenti.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was widely panned when it was released, but it has since developed a stout corps of admirers, some of whom think it's Lynch's masterpiece. I think I would have been among the naysayers when it first appeared, partly because I was never a follower of the TV series for which it's a prequel, an account of the last days of Laura Palmer, the teenager whose murder precipitated so much confusion and intrigue in the town of Twin Peaks. The film begins with another murder, that of Teresa Banks, another teenager in another town, and the investigators are not the familiar Dale Cooper and Harry S. Truman of the TV series, but Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland), who are sent on their mission by FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch) in scenes that have an off-beat enigmatic style: They're hilariously weird and played in a dead-pan artificial manner. But Lynch switches tone and style when we reach Twin Peaks a year later, shifting to his usual plausible nightmare mode. For devotees of the series, there are cameo appearances by familiar characters as well as some allusions that went over my head. But at its essence, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a straightforward story of a lost girl, caught up in a web of sex and drugs and adolescent rebellion. It seems to me that Lynch does this much better in other films, like Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), that aren't encumbered with the mythos generated by a popular TV series.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)

John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Cast: John Cameron Mitchell, Miriam Shor, Michael Pitt, Andrea Martin, Maurice Dean Wint, Ben Mayer-Goodman, Alberta Watson, Stephen Trask, Theodore Liscinski, Rob Campbell, Michael Aronov, Gene Pyrz. Screenplay: John Cameron Mitchell, based on the musical by Mitchell and Stephen Trask. Cinematography: Frank G. DeMarco. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Marcus. Music: Stephen Trask.

If nothing else, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a landmark in queer culture, a rock musical about a non-binary performer that moved from Off-Broadway to movies to a Broadway production with big-name stars like Neil Patrick Harris and Darren Criss. But is it anything else? Does it deserve to be celebrated as something other than a colorful anomaly in the usually gender-stable milieu of theater and film? Does it speak to anything enduring about humanity? I think it probably does, largely because it extended my sympathies to a portion of humanity of which I'm not a part, but that's fortunately not for me to decide. I enjoyed it, which may just be enough.

Barking Dogs Never Bite (Bong Joon-ho, 2000)

Lee Sung-Jae and Doona Bae in Barking Dogs Never Bite

Cast: Lee Sung-Jae, Doona Bae, Kim Ho-jung, Byun Hee-Bong, Go Su-hee, Kim Roe-ha, Kim Gin-goo, Im Sang-soo, Seong Jeong-seon. Screenplay: Bong Joon-ho, Song Ji-ho, Derek Son Tae-woong. Cinematography: Cho Yong-kyou. Production design: Lee Hang. Film editing: Lee Eun Soo. Music: Jo Sung-woo.

After watching several films by Bong Joon-ho, I should know to expect the unexpected, but even his very first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, threw me for a loop. What to make of a film whose protagonist, an unemployed academic kept sleepless by the demands of his pregnant wife and a barking dog in his apartment building, captures what he thinks is the offending animal and, failing in his attempt to throw it off the roof or to hang it by its leash, shuts it into a cabinet, but after finding that it was the wrong dog, unable to bark because of a throat operation, returns to the basement to release it, only to find that it's being stewed and eaten by the janitor? Moreover, after this experience, he does find the barker and this time succeeds in throwing it off the roof. And eventually the janitor finds the carcass and eats it too. Would it be fair to say that a failure of tone if not taste has taken place? But tone is something, to judge by Bong's other films, the director thumbs his nose at. Suffice it to say that there's something to offend almost everyone in Barking Dogs Never Bite, which seems to delight in treating animal cruelty as a subject for comedy. The film actually begins with the proclamation that no animals were harmed in its production, which doesn't exactly get Bong off the hook for his depiction of animal abuse. But what it does is remind us that this is "only a movie," or that we should approach the film with the awareness that there's a reason it's going to shock or offend us. The reason, I think is that Bong wants us to question our reactions, to examine why our responses are the way they are. Does the death of the small animal flung from the roof offend us more or less than the death of its somewhat addled human owner? Barking Dogs Never Bite doesn't succeed in part because it meanders a bit into the lives of its ancillary characters, such as the young woman who accidentally witnesses the killing of the second dog and pursues the killer, filled with dreams of being celebrated as a hero on television when she captures him. And then there's the protagonist's attempt to raise enough money to bribe a dean into giving him a professorship. It often seems as if Bong had ideas for at least three movies that he tried to blend into one. Still, as an expression of an ironic vision by a gifted artist, the movie can't be dismissed simply as a failure. Rather, it's an astonishing feature film debut by a director who would find his footing soon enough. 

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Joe Morton, Earl Boen, S. Epatha Merkerson, Castulo Guerra, Jenette Goldstein, Xander Berkeley, Danny Cooksey. Screenplay: James Cameron, William Wisher. Cinematography: Adam Greenberg. Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III. Film editing: Conrad Buff IV, Mark Goldblatt, Richard A. Harris. Music: Brad Fiedel.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a complex system that would use satellites to detect the launch of nuclear missiles and then destroy them in mid-flight with automatically launched anti-ballistic missiles. Critics of SDI called it unrealistic, fanciful, and ultimately destablizing for international peace. It became known by a nickname familiar from the movies: "star wars." The following year, James Cameron released a film called The Terminator in which a cyborg arrived from the future to make sure that a potential leader of a rebellion against his fellow cyborgs and other creatures of artificial intelligence never gets born. It wasn't immediately clear to most people at the time that Cameron's film contained a sly reference to what many people feared might be a consequence of Reagan's SDI: out-of-control automated weaponry. By 1991, when Cameron released the sequel to that film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, that reference had become explicit: The "Skynet" of the sequel is clearly a fantasized version of SDI, in which the AI creations began a war against humans with a nuclear strike that killed three billion people in 1997. Today, that historical subtext is probably lost on most viewers of the movie, as Reagan's "star wars" has faded from memory, except in some think tanks and Pentagon brainstorming sessions. But to those of us who lived through the Reagan years, the reference in the movie was more than just subtext. There are some actual digs at supporters of SDI in the film, as when Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the scientist behind Skynet, attempts to defend technological research and John Connor (Edward Furlong) retorts that the kind of research that proceeds without considering the consequences produced the hydrogen bomb. One of the most ardent proponents of SDI, who sold Reagan on the idea, was Edward Teller, the physicist who became known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," a title he never fully rejected. But even without the historical underpinnings, Terminator 2 is a kind of landmark in popular entertainment: an exciting concoction of violence and special effects, with old-fashioned touches of humanity and wit that lots of today's CGI blockbusters no longer find necessary. Cameron never seems content just to dazzle us but to make us think and feel. If there's too much feeling in his Titanic (1997) and not enough thought in Avatar (2009), there's the right amount of both in Terminator 2.  

Magnet of Doom (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Vanel in Magnet of Doom

Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Vanel, Michèle Mercier, Malvina Silberberg, Stefania Sandrelli, Todd Martin, E.F. Medard, Barbara Sommers, André Certes, Andrex, Jerry Mengo, Delia Kent, Ginger Hall. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville, based on a novel by Georges Simenon. Cinematography: Henri Decaë. Production design: Daniel Guéret. Film editing: Monique Bonnot, Claude Durand. Music: Georges Delerue.

I don't know what the title Magnet of Doom means -- the original French title is L'aîné des Ferchaux, which means "The elder Ferchaux" -- but its elusive quality seems about right for Jean-Pierre Melville's shaggy dog of a movie. Ostensibly a thriller, a genre of which Melville was a master, Magnet of Doom meanders as much as the road trip which its central characters, Michel Maudet (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Dieudonné Ferchaux (Charles Vanel), set out upon. Especially in its peregrinations through the United States, it reminds me a bit of Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities (1974) and even more of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), two films that I suspect owe a bit to Melville's movie, and even more to Henri Decaë's cinematography for it. The story, such as it is, details the flight from prosecution in France of crooked banker Ferchaux, accompanied by Michel, a young man he hires as a secretary. Since Michel is a lean, lithe ex-boxer played by lean, lithe ex-boxer Belmondo, there's a touch of homoeroticism in Ferchaux's choice of secretary, especially since the interview is perfunctory and it becomes clear that Michel doesn't really know how to type -- he does it with two fingers. Mostly Michel's job is to drive Ferchaux on his trip through the States to New Orleans. At the outset, Michel is taciturn and submissive, doing Ferchaux's bidding without question. But after they make a stop at a bank in New York City where Ferchaux has a safe-deposit box full of cash that he loads into a suitcase, Michel begins to assert himself a little: One of his first stops on their trip is in Hoboken, N.J., so he can see the birthplace of Frank Sinatra, whom he idolizes. And after they pick up an improbably pretty hitchhiker named Angie, played by Stefania Sandrelli, he begins to turn the tables on Ferchaux, ordering the older man into the back seat and stopping to go for a swim in a river with Angie. Ferchaux regains control, however, by flinging the cash from the suitcase off a cliff, holding on to a wad of money that he can use to maintain dominance. Michel and Angie clamber down the hill to retrieve what they can of the money. But when they stop at a service station and Michel goes to the restroom while Ferchaux dozes, Angie absconds with the suitcase containing the recovered cash and hitches a ride with a trucker. Michel gives chase and outruns the truck, gets the money back, and orders the trucker to leave and Angie to resume hitchhiking. The rest of the film is a series of power plays between Ferchaux and Michel as they wait in a cabin near New Orleans for the arrival of the money Ferchaux has arranged to be sent to him upon the closing of his main account in New York, after which they plan to avoid extradition by taking up residence in Venezuela. But the older man begins to suffer health problems and Michel starts to collaborate with the authorities who are pursuing Ferchaux. This summary makes the film sound more cut-and-dried than it is, however. The pacing is, if not off, at least off-beat, sometimes engaging, sometimes lethargic, and sometimes frustrating. Melville's take on America makes it worth watching, and the performances of Belmondo and Vanel are as good as one might anticipate. It's the kind of film you watch just to try to anticipate what's going to happen next, and you usually can't.

The Children's Hour (William Wyler, 1961)

Audrey Hepburn, James Garner, and Shirley MacLaine in The Children's Hour

Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner, Miriam Hopkins, Fay Bainter, Karen Balkin, Veronica Cartwright, Mimi Gibson, Debbie Moldow, Diane Mountford, William Mims, Sally Brophy, Hope Summers. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, Lillian Hellman, based on a play by Hellman. Cinematography: Franz Planer. Art direction: Fernando Carrere. Film editing: Robert Swink. Music: Alex North.

Time has not been kind to Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, either the play or the second film adaptation. It had been filmed once before, also under the direction of William Wyler, as These Three, in 1936, only two years after it had become a Broadway sensation. At that time, the central accusation that the two schoolmistresses, Karen and Martha, were lesbians had to be changed to a heterosexual moral transgression -- that both were lovers of the same man, Dr. Joe Cardin. Despite this bowdlerization, there are many who think that the earlier movie is the better one, largely because it puts the emphasis on what Hellman said was the play's theme: "the power of a lie." In our contemporary climate, the idea that Karen and Martha might be lovers has much less power to shock, so that to our eyes, the furor that arises from a child's confused and devious accusation seems excessive. But perhaps more to the point is an artistic one: In today's LGBT community the idea that a work of fiction dealing with non-heterosexual relationships has to end in the death of one or more of its supposed transgressors has been labeled a "kill the queers syndrome." Even more recent films such as Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999) and Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), though praised for dealing candidly with transgender characters and gay relationships, have been faulted for too easily resolving their plots by having their central characters murdered by bigots. The Children's Hour falls more blatantly into this trap with Martha's suicide, which seems not to come out of anything integral to the character but instead out of the need for a dramatic conclusion to the play and film. It's a film with good performances, though its actors sometimes have to struggle against their star personae. James Garner was so familiar as a smart aleck on the TV series Maverick that he feels a little miscast as Dr. Cardin, Karen's fiancé, who is unable to convince her that he may indeed have believed in the rumor about her relationship with Martha. Audrey Hepburn, too, carries the aura of winsome romantic comedy heroine into her performance as Karen, but is more successful at overcoming the image. Of the three leads, Shirley MacLaine is the most successful, since she doesn't have to deal with a too-precisely established screen persona, and she brings real depth to Martha's conflicts, including her simmering resentment of Karen's supposed abandonment of their plans in order to marry Joe, and her anguished recognition of her possibly repressed lesbianism. But the real standouts in the cast are the supporting players, Miriam Hopkins (who had played Martha in These Three) as the flibbertigibbet Aunt Lily and Fay Bainter, Oscar-nominated for her role as Amelia Tilford, whose credulity when her niece tells her the lie about Karen and Martha brings about the crisis. Wyler's direction is, as always, precise and professional, and the art direction of Fernando Carrere and the cinematography of Franz Planer make the primary setting, the girls school, follow the film's changes in mood, from innocent to grim.

Experiment in Terror (Blake Edwards, 1962

Lee Remick and Ross Martin in Experiment in Terror

Cast: Lee Remick, Glenn Ford, Ross Martin, Stefanie Powers, Roy Poole, Ned Glass, Anita Loo, Patricia Huston, Gilbert Green, Clifton James, Al Avalon, William Bryant, Dick Crockett, James Lanphier. Screenplay: Gordon Gordon, Mildred Gordon, based on their novel. Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop. Art direction: Robert Peterson. Film editing: Patrick McCormack. Music: Henry Mancini.

Experiment in Terror is a moody but slackly paced thriller that was the first film directed by Blake Edwards after his smash hit Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). He would follow it up with another dark but more successful movie, Days of Wine and Roses (1962), also starring Lee Remick, but he became best known for his lighter work, especially the series of Peter Sellers comedies that began with The Pink Panther in 1963. Experiment in Terror begins well, with Kelly Sherwood (Remick) arriving home from her job in a San Francisco bank only to be trapped in her garage by a man who threatens to kill her or her sister if she doesn't help him steal $100,000 from the bank. It's an intense, well-played scene, filmed with some harrowing long-take closeups of Remick and the shadowy figure of the man, who speaks with a kind of raspy wheeze. This is all she can really tell the FBI when she defies the man's order not to contact the police. The agent who takes her call, John Ripley (Glenn Ford), immediately sets in motion an attempt to identify and trap the man, whose identity becomes clearer to us only as it becomes clearer to the G-men. He's "Red" Lynch, played very creepily by Ross Martin, a character actor familiar from TV, on which he had a recurring role in a series created by Edwards, Mr. Lucky, in 1959 and 1960, and would later gain more fame as Artemus Gordon on the late '60s series The Wild Wild West. In the course of the film, Red terrorizes and murders another woman before finally getting shot down on the pitcher's mound after a Giants-Dodgers game at the late, unlamented Candlestick Park in San Francisco, one of several locations used to good effect in the film. Unfortunately, a lot of the burden of the film falls on Ford, who gives a bland, colorless performance as Ripley, and Edwards doesn't build suspense effectively. Some of the fault of the film may lie in its screenplay by the married writing couple known as The Gordons, adapting their own novel. What life the film has comes from Remick and Martin, from Philip H. Lathrop's views of San Francisco, and from a score by Edwards's frequent collaborator, Henry Mancini.

Sons and Lovers (Jack Cardiff, 1960)

Dean Stockwell and Wendy Hiller in Sons and Lovers

Cast: Dean Stockwell, Wendy Hiller, Trevor Howard, Mary Ure, Heather Sears, William Lucas, Conrad Phillips, Ernest Thesiger, Donald Pleasance, Rosalie Crutchley, Sean Barrett. Screenplay: Gavin Lambert, T.E.B. Clarke, based on a novel by D.H. Lawrence. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Thomas N. Morahan. Film editing: Gordon Pilkington. Music: Mario Nascimbene.

Dean Stockwell has had an interesting career, or rather three careers. He started as a child actor in movies like Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945) and The Boy With Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948), then matured into a handsome actor of considerable resources, holding his own in the company of Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards in Sidney Lumet's 1962 filming of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. He never quite made it as a movie star, however, and did most of his work in television before re-emerging in the 1980s as an off-beat character actor, most memorably in Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), and Married to the Mob (Jonathan Demme, 1988), earning an Oscar nomination for the last film. Sons and Lovers is probably Stockwell's most impressive work as a young leading man. He maintains a credible British accent and stands up well to such legendary actors as Wendy Hiller and Trevor Howard. The film itself is more solid than impressive. It was originally envisioned by producer Jerry Wald with Montgomery Clift as Paul Morel, but fell afoul of the Production Code enforcers' strictures on extramarital sex: For the story to make any sense, or at least to cohere to something like D.H. Lawrence's vision of the characters, Paul has to deflower the repressed Miriam (Heather Sears) and have a passionate affair with Clara (Mary Ure), who is married but separated from her husband. So the film was shelved and Clift grew too old for the role. When the Code was on its last legs, Wald revived the project and commissioned a fresh screenplay. The film version tosses out a lot of the novel, but tries to evoke Lawrence's vision of the somewhat Oedipal relationship of Paul and his mother (Hiller) and her still-simmering sexual attraction to Paul's father (Howard), as well as the frigidity instilled in Miriam by her pious mother (Rosalie Crutchley). The relationship with Clara is a bit more sketchy, suggesting that social pressure rather than psychosexual incompatibility leads to its breakup. All of these relationships encumber the film with a lot of talk, though Freddie Francis's cinematography gives it a good deal of visual interest. Francis won a well-deserved Oscar for his deft use of the often unwieldy CinemaScope aspect ratio, coming up with some impressive compositions, sometimes placing the actors off to the side in long-shots and often posing one figure in the foreground and another recessed into the frame. It may also be noted that the director, Jack Cardiff, was himself an Oscar-winning cinematographer.

Okja (Bong Joon-ho, 2017)

Ahn Seo-hyn in Okja

Cast: Ahn Seo-hyun, Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, Jake Gyllenhaal, Byun Hee-bong, Giancarlo Esposito, Steven Yeun, Lily Collins, Yun Jee-moon, Shirley Henderson, Daniel Henshall, Devon Bostick, Choi Woo-shik, Choi Hee-seo. Screenplay: Bong Joon-ho, Jon Ronson. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Lee Ha-jun, Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Yang Jin-mo. Music: Jung Jae-il.

In comparison with the other films by Bong Joon-ho I've seen, Parasite (2019) and Snowpiercer (2013), Okja seems to me a bit of a misfire, like a kids' movie gone dark, Charlotte's Web crossed with The Shape of Water. It often feels over-frantic, when what I want it to do is score its points against corporate hype and hypocrisy cleanly and without shouting them at us. The film centers on the Mirando Corporation's attempt to develop and market a "superpig," which involves creating animals in a lab and then farming the superpiglets out around the world, seeing which environment is most successful. The winner is judged to be the superpig -- which looks like a cross between a pig, a dog, and a hippopotamus -- raised by Mija (Ahn Seo-yeun) and her grandfather (Byun Hee-bong) on their small farm in the mountains of South Korea. The kids' movie part of the film is the affection of the girl for her pig, but of course things go awry when the corporation, headed by the air-headed Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton), decides to declare Okja the best of all superpigs -- followed, of course, by introducing all manner of superpig food products, something that Mija never suspects. Lucy's henchmen include Johnny Wilcox, a star of TV animal programs, played a little too frantically against type by Jake Gyllenhaal, and the  suave corporado Frank Dawson, in a more understatedly sinister performance by Giancarlo Esposito. Things go awry when an animal-rights organization, a caricature of PETA (which often seems to caricature itself), staffed by enthusiasts who give themselves pseudonyms like Jay (Paul Dano) and K. (Steven Yeun), take Okja's side and plot to expose the mistreatment of the superpigs in Mirando's terrifying abattoir. There's also a subplot about Lucy and her supposedly more evil sister, Nancy, also played by Swinton, but it feels unnecessary. There is some fun to be had in the film, with its elaborate chase scenes, but I found myself a little exhausted by its end.

Raffles (George Fitzmaurice, 1930)

Kay Francis and Ronald Colman in Raffles

Cast: Ronald Colman, Kay Francis, David Torrence, Frederick Kerr, Bramwell Fletcher, Alison Skipworth, John Rogers, Wilson Benge, Frances Dade. Screenplay: Sidney Howard, based on a novel by E.W. Hornung and a play by Eugene Wiley Presbrey. Cinematography: George Barnes, Gregg Toland. Art direction: Park French, William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Stuart Heisler.

Samuel Goldwyn's 1930 version of the old chestnut Raffles, about a gentleman jewel thief known as "the amateur cracksman," was reportedly made as both as a silent film and a talkie simultaneously. It's easy to spot scenes that would work in both versions, such as the one in which Raffles (Ronald Colman) woos Gwen (Kay Francis) in an automobile: We see them through the windshield, but we don't hear what they're saying -- just the sound of the engine running. Colman was one of the silent stars who made the transition to talkies easily, possessing not only good looks but also a speaking voice to match, and his performance in Raffles looks and sounds natural and easy-going. The film, unfortunately, still suffers from some of the sluggishness of early talkies, with dialogue that doesn't flow but chugs along, with pauses between lines that feel as if they're waiting for a title card to be inserted. It's a pre-Production Code film, so Raffles doesn't have to be punished for his crimes at the end -- he simply escapes, with the Scotland Yard inspector who has almost nabbed him admitting in the film's curtain line, "One can't help liking him." The movie was nominated for an Oscar for sound recording, and the nominee, Oscar Lagerstrom, was attentive to background noises like footsteps and car engines, though the version of the film available today is notable for the rumbles and whispers of the soundtrack, unsweetened by a music score.