The Walk First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

In the 2010s, something strange happened to Robert Zemeckis: he almost became respectable again. After his trilogy of mo-cap extravaganzas, he suddenly returned to, if not prominence, then a certain level of respect for his next two films. Flight, in some ways, made sense: Denzel Washington being as much of a powerhouse as ever, an examination of addiction and guilt, a spectacular centerpiece. But it makes an odd pair with its successor, 2015’s The Walk; though both films involve extensive special effects and were New York Film Festival gala world premieres — spanning both Richard Peña’s and Kent Jones’s festival director tenures — the similarities, at least on a surface level, end there. I should note here that I’ve never seen either James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire (2008) or The Walk in its proper 3D form. Indeed, both of my viewings of the latter were significantly compromised: the first was literally on an airplane — approximately 38,000 feet higher than Philippe Petit was — and the second was on my laptop. But the universally adored part of this film, the high-wire walk itself, which takes up a full twenty minutes, still manages to captivate me. The sense that I got, both at the time and in the intervening years as Zemeckis’s reputation — first unfairly and now perhaps fairly — sunk once again, was that the preceding hour and twenty minutes were simply a means to an end, a necessary inconvenience in order to experience the simple thrill of being perched above the void. But to view The Walk as merely twenty minutes of great filmmaking doesn’t capture what makes it so odd and compelling. This is evident from the very first shot: a tight widescreen close-up on Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, with piercing blue eyes and a hyperactive French accent, monologuing at the viewer while the camera pulls back to reveal him perched atop the Statue of Liberty torch, with an impossibly sparkling New York City in the background. Zemeckis will return to this narration time and again, both with and without image, only reinforcing what was already evident: that Petit will survive his death-defying feat, that there will be numerous complications and intense planning to achieve this. But it also places the film into an almost mystical realm, most obviously invoked by the arrival of the mysterious visitor on the South Tower roof (which in turn reminded me of The Falling Man) and the clouds that swell as Petit makes his first step. This tone, which reaches its apex during the successive walk Petit makes, including the sublime crane down from him lying down on the wire to the adoring watchers below, makes for a great counterweight to the first hour, and especially the extended thirty-minute sequence of preparations on the day of August 6. The heist movie comparisons have already been made clearly, and the fairly tight construction makes the film relatively zip by, but the two approaches are allowed to meld together: the door that the construction worker leaves open is both a necessary step to progress the plan and an almost divine intervention, as are the serendipitous introductions of Barry Greenhouse and Jean-Pierre. Chance and skill have an equal place in The Walk, where little gambits and risks add up across both Petit and his collaborators. The Walk is certainly romantic, swooning and thrilling to the passion of Petit even as his more unhinged impulses get their day in the sun. The viewer of course connects to the applauding audiences because the experience is so exhilarating, the sight of seeing this man suspended so high in the air. But the final gesture of the film, a brief turn of expression after Petit mentions that his pass to the World Trade Center observation deck was meant to be forever, rings deeply. There is an air of melancholy that pervades the film, where the simulacrum of both the Twin Towers and Manhattan are necessary because these worlds are impossible to access now. But Zemeckis’s final touch, fading out on his constructed New York skyline to not erase the towers, but to encase them in gold, unites all of his most pleasing impulses. The Walk is not necessarily a great film — too airy, too manic, even too silly at times — but it offers great riches throughout.

Back to the Future First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Cinephilia is necessarily littered with the detritus of half-remembered viewing experiences, films only glimpsed from childhood in a perspective almost wholly incompatible with the viewer’s current state of mind. Those two ideas overlap, a double (or triple, or quadruple, etc.) image which stirs up all sorts of memories. Sure, a viewer may have a better of how the camera moves in one instant, how a particular editing pattern might seem rote where it once was thrilling, but those primordial sensations still remain; the thrill is never truly gone unless someone’s willing to make a total break. I didn’t truly become obsessed with film until the latter half of high school, but from an early age (probably until my teens) my favorite film was Back to the Future. I only had the vaguest idea of who Robert Zemeckis was; I saw Forrest Gump around this time, but the technological prowess of that film by design totally passed me by, and its qualities seemed totally divorced from the adoration I felt for the adventures of Marty McFly and Doc Brown. I was a science obsessive, a child captivated by action and popcorn filmmaking, a boy fascinated by the loop-the-loops of gags and time travel quandaries — it certainly didn’t hurt that it was one of the first films I ever saw with substantial swearing. I even had a pen with the Japanese hoverboard on it and a miniature model of the Texaco station, both from Back to the Future Part II. Even at that young age, perhaps out of that standard anti-sequel bias, I recognized that II and III weren’t quite as good as the original — one of my first memories of Rotten Tomatoes was the substantially lower approval ratings for the sequels — but I didn’t care. I became obsessed with the idea of a potential sequel almost two decades on, tracking any possible developments on the official website, and was virtually counting down the days until October 21, 2015, when flying cars and hydrated pizzas and Jaws 19 would finally come true. In something of an effort to remain more closely tied to these rose-tinted memories, I only watched parts of the films in the trilogy, letting my mind piece together the connective tissue that links the myriad set-pieces, but even from this limited viewing the dichotomy between the first film and its predecessors only became clearer. The first still remains one of the great works of Americana from the past forty years, a lightning bolt of summation that nevertheless manages to be an oddly small-scale film: there really are only five characters that truly matter here (Marty, Doc, Lorraine, George, and Biff), and the film takes great pleasure in constantly shuffling the tables, throwing in little bits of nonsensical gambits — the Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan scene, featuring the music of Eddie Van Halen, is a particular favorite. It’s by no means perfect: the aging makeup in 1985 is distracting, Zemeckis and screenwriter Bob Gale often get a little too cute — Marty getting to invent the skateboard chief among them — certain aspects like the random guy who tries to dance with Lorraine get to be a little too grating, and the metaphysical implications of people’s lives constantly changing based on one little interaction is too frightening to contemplate; I also have to point out that Chuck Berry released “Maybellene,” arguably even more important than “Johnny B. Goode,” well before the school dance. But it’s also just as thrilling to revisit and see the blatantly adult things (aside from the language) hiding in plain sight to a child: the blues band smoking weed, the proliferation of porno theaters in the Hill Valley town square, the relentless incestual horniness of Lorraine (more on that in a bit). By contrast, the two sequels, while both well-constructed and engaging in their own right, shunt themselves into a bit of a corner, in doing so presaging much of modern franchise filmmaking. There’s the eerie remake of the final scene of the original in II, a sort of throwaway gag of a finale reshot with a new actress and an oh-so-subtle pause in Doc’s reaction to Marty’s worries about his future; the uncanny recasting of Crispin Glover; the back-to-back production of the sequels. Whereas the first film felt free to both swiftly create and then refer back to Hill Valley 1985, the sequels end up acting as more of a reference to the original rather than any wider idea about what it meant to live in the future, or in the Wild West. Indeed, III especially acts as a grab bag of cinematic references — none of which I knew at the time, I learned about e.g. A Fistful of Dollars through this film — irrespective of whether they belong to the Western genre or not: the playing of “My Darling Clementine” exists side-by-side with a Taxi Driver riff, though I’m pretty sure no one in Ford films (or Monument Valley generally) wore blue and pink shirts with nebulas on them. Instead of Marty’s displacement, referring to then-Senator John F. Kennedy and Tab, not knowing how to open a bottle and getting the mocking suggestion that Jerry Lewis (one of the names that I of course didn’t know at the time) would be Vice President, there’s such scenes as the Café 80s scene, recreating the skateboard/truck chase from the original yet unceremoniously crammed into the opening; I always forget that the 2015 aspect of II only takes up a third of the film. That film has the special awkwardness of having to set up entirely new signifiers and plotlines that will be directly paid off in III: the introduction of Mad Dog Tannen, the hilarious Clint Eastwood motif (considering his and Michael J. Fox’s substantial difference in stature), the random introduction of Needles, and above all the misguided attempt to have him grow via the “chicken” device. It’s not that these films don’t understand the genius of the first film: the recreation of 1955 is astonishing in its deft restaging/reshooting, helped by the quick sequel production time stalling any aging; the reintroduction of Strickland again and again is a total riot; and Christopher Lloyd and Thomas F. Wilson especially have so much fun playing their various temporal incarnations across time, though the disturbing nature of Fox playing his daughter in II and being the incredibly Irish husband to his mother’s actress in III cannot be discounted. But these crucially lack the sense of tech fetish awe afforded to even the plutonium, or the magnificent, prolonged introductions to Marty and Doc, the discovery of love echoing across time where a novel cover speaks to all the strange things that have occurred. By the end, the sentimental idea that the future ultimately isn’t written comes as a bit of a cop out after the train barrels through the DeLorean. Of course, the fact that Back to the Future has its anchors in the two great decades of American conservatism in the 20th century is a key part of its ultimately safe mainstream appeal, though the most charitable reading would suggest that the time travel acts as a sly parody/disruptor of this normalcy; the Trumpian overtones of the alternate 1985 collide oddly with a crime-ridden ‘70s vibe, though the suggestion that a second term of Reagan is so much better than a fifth term of Nixon is laughable. In pure political terms, a number of representational elements really become troubling: the cartoonish Libyan terrorists, the Black family in alternate 1985 almost shot like a horror film, the Native Americans who disappear after their magnificent entrance into the drive-thru. And of course, there is the routine usage of damsels in distress, often of a sexually violating nature. What balances them out are perhaps the two best performances in the entire series: Lea Thompson in the first and Mary Steenburgen in the third, two absolutely radiant and steadfast performances that contain so much longing appropriate to their eras: barely repressed erotic desire and timidly passionate meeting of the minds. They are the glue just as much as the beautiful friendship between Marty and Doc; just as these improbable friends maintain their compassion across centuries, so do these women carve out a slice in this timey-wimey hijinks for real emotion, which Zemeckis graciously and deftly affords them. Back to the Future Part IV never did come to pass, perhaps for the best, but another fictional misbegotten sequel perhaps provides even more insight: Jaws 19. On the marquee, it is clearly stated that it is directed by “Max Spielberg.” Whether this was out of some fear on producer Steven’s part that he wouldn’t live to see 2015, or out of his hope that his child would become a successful director (even a hack), it was yet another prediction that didn’t come true. Spielberg has improbably become a bastion of classicism — demonstrated by his actual 2015 film Bridge of Spies — but Zemeckis’s own subsequent history is left unsaid. Though he might have wanted to believe that it was as open to his own writing as it is for Marty and Jennifer at the end of III, his future was already made: the relative modesty of his first three films would be forever gone; with this quantum leap visited twice more, he barreled past the point of no return, and his reputation, for better and worse, as a technical inventor was sealed.

Virgin Blue First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

It’s perhaps become a moot point to invoke the shadow of Apichatpong Weerasethakul on an emerging festival filmmaker’s work in the 21st century. Few directors have been as quietly but markedly influential as the Thai master, as his interweaving of the mundane and the ethereal is able to be harnessed in a vast array of styles and narratives. But it feels especially apropos when considering Niu Xiaoyu’s lovely feature debut Virgin Blue, which builds a whole solar system out of its simple premise: Yezi, a recent college graduate, goes home for the summer to visit her grandmother who raised her. During the course of this stay, uneventful in “realistic” terms, the apartment that much of Virgin Blue takes place in seems to mutate and expand. As befits the semi-constant state of napping or sleep that Yezi and her grandmother occupy, this is a somnambulant film, filled with interludes explained partially by the onset of the grandmother’s dementia, partially by the memories that both women have together, and even moreso by the supernatural figures that flit in and out, most notably Yezi’s grandfather, whose spirit is said to be visiting for a few days. Early on, in a series of mistakes regarding the year, the grandmother balefully notes that she “always thinks it’s 2020,” and while the film appears to actually take place in that year — albeit without masks or apparent signs of the pandemic — that painfully apt sentiment says a great deal about the dislocation that the film revels in. Indeed, this floating quality is Apichatpong’s territory: fantastical musical interludes, nocturnal conversations with spirits; the film even ends with a similar gesture as Syndromes and a Century, though it lacks that film’s narrative precision. But what truly distinguishes the film are its extravagant play with light and its moderate metafictional elements. There are moments inside the apartment where space and time seem transfixed, as the film’s subtly dynamic sound design comes to the fore and rays of light dance across the room, alighting on objects and clocks that seem to suddenly gain a new vitality as the camera patiently moves along with it. As much as the explicit occurrences of surreal intervention, these moments enhance the already serene quality of Niu’s largely locked-down frames, often playing out in long takes. The ruptures alongside these scenes lead to one of Virgin Blue’s most fascinating qualities. At one point in the film, Yezi moves a sliding glass door that reveals a film crew; she turns around, only for the people to have vanished. Later on, the grandmother’s actress seems to have a conversation with an offscreen Niu, complaining about the confusion of filming as crew members and cameras are seen in the far background. These, along with other puncturing scenes, seem to get to the heart of Virgin Blue’s mystery and beauty: it is a film open to possibilities, never straying too far away from these women’s figures and memories, and instead opening them up to new life and contemplation.

Lolita First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online's Kicking the Canon section.

Stanley Kubrick seems like an odd filmmaker to claim as having underrated films. I’m not as great a fan as most cinephiles, but given the extraordinarily high levels of continued interest and waves of reappraisal and renewed appreciation for such disparate films throughout his career as Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut, not to mention the omnipresent adoration for Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and 2001, it would be easily understandable if one assumed every film aside from his first two and perhaps Spartacus were considered major by this point in his critical reception. But even so, Lolita (1962), which has always been among my favorites of his, has remained underrated in my eyes, despite its quietly pivotal place in his oeuvre. It was his first of two films with Peter Sellars, whose casting in multiple “roles” led directly to his trio of performances in Dr. Strangelove. Most importantly, it was the first film the American Kubrick made in Britain, where he decamped after conflicts with Hollywood studios. He would make his remaining films, often resorting to simulacra of American environs that would contribute to the productive, nigh-perfectionist claustrophobia of his film set there. The first adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita is perhaps almost more well-known for its immortal tagline — “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” — than any other aspect. Indeed, the film was heavily censored during (albeit not after) production, and much of the explicitness of the original novel’s frank and graphic dealings with child sexual abuse was toned down, if not totally eliminated. I must confess here that I haven’t read the original novel, but while the basic arc of the film matches Nabokov’s — notably, though he is credited for the adapted screenplay, it was mostly rewritten by Kubrick and producer James B. Harris — the streamlined backstories and heavy reliance on innuendo and ellipsis seem to almost transform the narrative. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is never explicitly depicted as or even mentioned as having sexual relations with his stepdaughter; insinuations are made as their home situation, and Lolita (Sue Lyon) claims that she hasn’t told anyone about the two of them, but it never goes any further than that. The two closest moments are of close physical contact: a series of hand-clutches while watching The Curse of Frankenstein at a drive-in, with Humbert rejecting her mother Charlottte’s (Shelley Winters) while continuing to grasp Lolita’s; and a morning in a hotel room, where Lolita whispers details into Humbert’s ear about a “game” she played with a boy at a summer camp, before leaning in as if to kiss him. While Humbert’s lust for Lolita is immediately apparent, his ways of expressing it immediately towards her are kept off-screen, and thus Lolita finds more room amid its leisurely 152 minutes to examine neuroses that might not be considered central to a story so forthrightly concerned with pedophilia. For most of the first half of the film, Kubrick is far more interested in the relationship between Humbert and Charlotte, whose exaggerated flirtatiousness and misguided attempts to match the professor of French literature’s intellect upon their first meeting escalates into mania. During the first flushes of Humbert’s growing attraction, as much emphasis is put on Charlotte’s oblivious attempts to compete for his attention. It’s perhaps an obvious connection to draw between Lolita and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, where Winters also plays a sexually frustrated widow taken advantage of by a predatory intellectual man, but her patheticness is equally matched and played off by Mason’s casual, debonair cruelty. Numerous other undercurrents run through the first half’s setting of Ramsdale, New Hampshire, specified as a resort town that fits the perfect ideal of a mid-century American suburb. A couple close to Charlotte, John and Jean Farlow, are extraordinarily friendly, and the latter says to Humbert that they are “extremely broad-minded,” which seems to insinuate that they are propositioning him for spouse-swapping or something even more shocking to the British Humbert. The United States is first situated as a land of opportunity for Humbert, who puts himself in the lineage of so many other European expatriates. But as he gets further immersed in the New World, eventually embarking on a road trip across the country with Lolita, first to Beardsley, Ohio and then a failed run for the Mexican border, this vestige of the Old World is left adrift and unable to find his footing among these people with strange practices: the father of the man who accidentally runs over Charlotte seems to be taken aback by Humbert not holding a grudge against him. Nowhere is this strangeness more visible than, of course, the enigmatic figure of Clare Quilty (Sellars), whose role is far larger in the film. Expanded from a cipher lurking in the shadows to a seeming embodiment of everything that stands in Humbert’s way once his pesky wife is dead, he pops up at unexpected intervals, putting on various disguises and silly voices that Humbert never quite puts together. The constant is the even greater role of comedy that flows through these scenes, little off-hand remarks that the dynamic Sellars bounces off the magnificently befuddled Mason: remarking that he’s a bad loser at ping-pong after Humbert produces a gun; saying in his German accent that he was sitting in the dark to conserve electricity; his flurry of adjectives in describing Lolita. Even more than providing a dark mirror image of Humbert’s sexual desire, he comes to almost embody the fatalism that drives Lolita. Quilty’s death at the beginning of the film almost plays a similar role to the inclusion of murder in Mildred Pierce’s film adaptation: it transforms Lolita from psychological character study to film noir, one where the black-and-white shadows pierce the faux-Americana of the film and little gestures resound with a violence. Kubrick’s characters become trapped by not only their desires — for a kiss, for stardom, for a fried egg proffered by a potential lover — but by the invisible machinations of American society; that the grand overseer over it all did so after he parted ways with this society is the cherry on top of Lolita’s delicious irony.

Val Lewton (Producer)

1. The Seventh Victim (1943, Mark Robson)
2. I Walked With a Zombie (1943, Jacques Tourneur)
3. Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur)
4. The Leopard Man (1943, Jacques Tourneur)

1. The Seventh Victim (1943)
2. I Walked With a Zombie (1943)
3. Cat People (1942)
4. The Leopard Man (1943)

David Cronenberg

1. The Shrouds (2024)
2. Videodrome (1983)
3. Crimes of the Future (2022)
4. eXistenZ (1999)
5. Cosmopolis (2012)
6. Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection (2023)

1. The Shrouds (2024)
2. Videodrome (1983)
3. Crimes of the Future (2022)
4. eXistenZ (1999)
5. Cosmopolis (2012)

Will-o'-the-Wisp First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, João Pedro Rodrigues’s long-awaited follow-up feature to The Ornithologist (2016), almost seems to take the form of a sketch. Running a slender sixty-seven minutes and seeming to concentrate its action into a matter of days, the film’s structure bears a closer resemblance to “Un chien andalou” than anything else: it begins in the year 2069, before hopping back to 2011, then forward to “some years later,” then “one year later,” where the bulk of the film takes place. This purposefully ambiguous timescale feels right for a film that indulges so freely in alternate realities and surreal settings, an overflowing of incidents packed into a small container. Will-o’-the-Wisp appears to take place in a version of Portugal where the royal family still reigns to at least nominal effect: the main character is Prince Alfredo, seen on his deathbed in 2069 and as a youth in the rest of the film, and the first fourth of the film — delineated by a title card calling this a “musical fantasy” — moves through three consecutive parodies of the royal family in private; in one moment, the film even acknowledges the proscenium stuffiness by having the queen acknowledge that people are watching, with a knowing look towards the camera. Fittingly for such a short film, the first of just two musical sequences takes place before this intertitle. The two — one a cherubic children’s choir, one a highly choreographed group dance to non-diegetic music — couldn’t be more different, a neat summary of Will-o’-the-Wisp’s divergent but simpatico aims. It is both an oddly hopeful evocation of the changing tides of politics in the face of global warming and, in the style of Rodrigues’s previous work, a homoerotic exploration of a particular milieu. Here, that milieu is the volunteer fire brigade, which Prince Alfredo is prompted to join by a spate of forest fires, including one amid the “royal pines” that his father so fervently admires; in response, his mother claims that he is confusing “the royal family and documentary cinema,” an out of nowhere connection typical of the family scenes that operates in direct contrast to the fire brigade’s pleasurable bluntness. A predominately male unit, its members are exclusively hunks, who quiz the supposed art historian Alfredo on his (poor) knowledge by posing nude or in jockstraps in the manner of various paintings. These moments, a contrast from the rest of the film, are in striking chiaroscuro, a loving attention to the rippling muscles of these men’s bodies and the sensual absurdity of watching these men reenact these paintings. Sensual absurdity is a good word for a film whose primary sex scene, between the White Alfredo and his mentor Black firefighter Afonso, features exceptionally fake-looking penises; it’s not as if Rodrigues is afraid of showing nudity, even displaying a slideshow of penises that each correspond to a forest in Portugal. But the limits of showing reality are openly challenged by Will-o’-the-Wisp, a film where firefighters are never actually seen in front of a blaze, where a supposedly disastrous simulation is a lighthearted form of hazing, where futuristic clothing is beautifully tacky, and firefighters seem to have amassed considerable power in the intervening decades. Will-o’-the-Wisp even finds the place to invoke the pandemic, a sudden cleaving force that brings the film briefly back to “reality.” But Rodrigues’s concentration of his plot, his ability to elide the parts that would prevent this from taking full flight as a musical fantasy, preserves the strange and uncanny spell. The final image, of the acceptance of Alfredo into the fold despite his all-too-short time in the brigade, points to a certain optimism, one where the fantasy ends happily ever after.