More gaps to fill

My viewing remains more random than usual. While generally diverse, now it’s hard to find any thread at all. Let’s see if we can tease one out. I really need to weed through and reorganize my Netflix queue, get it down from 200 to 100, and probably should economize by cutting back from five to three discs at a time. When I first subscribed to Netflix eight years ago, they only had one shipping point, in LaJolla CA, but now a two day turnaround in the mail is typical, so even if I watched one every day, the three-disc deal would be sufficient. And that was before I had TiVo, where I probably have twenty more films “Now Playing.” So these were the latest disks to show up in my mailbox:

There’s a strong presumption than any new Criterion Collection release is likely to be worth watching, and Barbara Stanwyck is an actress I look for, so that’s how The Furies (1950) got to the top of my queue. I’m not really up to speed with Anthony Mann’s Freudian Westerns, aside from one or two of the Jimmy Stewarts, but this transposition of King Lear to the New Mexico desert reeks of incestuous passion. Walter Huston, in his last film, is a cantakerous cattle baron, with Stanwyck as his spirited daughter, a mare who will not be broken. In noirish black and white, with more night scenes and interiors than wide open spaces, the film is a little much, but not enough, if you know what I mean. The leads are magnetic but much that surrounds them is laughable. Only for aficionados of one sort or another.

I was looking for another Therese adapted from a French novel, recommended by an emeritus professor who frequently comes to my screenings at the Clark, but wound up with Therese Raquin (1953), a Marcel Carne film from after his classic period (which was capped by all-time great Children of Paradise). Despite a tendency to turn Zola into potboiler, this story of a fatal triangle is carried by a luminous young Simone Signoret and a rugged Raf Vallone. Nearly unknown, it is not something you need to seek out, but not without interest

It must have been sheer randomness that brought Death and the Maiden (1994) to the top of my queue. I may have put in on after I had a chance to meet Sigourney Weaver briefly at a Williamstown Film Festival event, or maybe I was filling in my Roman Polanski life list. At any rate, it was years ago and the reason has been forgotten. My viewing was slightly discombulated by a dirty disk, but even allowing for the disruption, I don’t think this adaptation of an Ariel Dorfman play about torture, guilt, revenge, and forgiveness, set in an unnamed country reminiscent of Chile after Pinochet, would have worked for me, starting with the artificiality of the English-speaking cast. Sigourney is strong but not quite right as the torture victim who gets an unlikely chance to get back at one of her tormentors, played with requisite ambiguity but not much resonance by Ben Kingsley. Stagey as the set-up may be, Polanski brings a personal intensity to the volatile proceedings, which makes the film hard to dismiss despite evident flaws.

At some point when I was on a noir kick, it occurred to me that I had never seen the Jack Nicholson-Jessica Lange remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Now I have, and while it offers more than the 1946 version with John Garfield and Lana Turner, it also offers less. More of the book, but less sense. More sex, but less heat. More real, but less feel. It’s fascinating to watch Jack and Jessica in their prime, as they go down and dirty, if rather tastefully so. This is pulp gone classic, with script by David Mamet, direction by Bob Rafelson, and cinematography by Sven Nykvist (!). It’s a rare case in which a single reviewer -- Vincent Canby -- says everything I would say and more. Yeah, what he said.

Not as bad as one may have heard but not as good as one might have hoped, Art School Confidential (2006) is the follow-up by director Terry Zwigoff and writer/artist Daniel Clowes to their zingy, zesty Ghost World. As an art museum film programmer, I felt obliged to watch a film with “Art” in the title (plus, Zwigoff’s Crumb is a doc I’ve shown twice at the Clark already). So I kept my eyes and mind open, despite the critical pummeling this film took upon release. I found it half-good, with an effective skewering of art school pretension (like Claire’s experiences in Six Feet Under), but then some undernourished mystery about a serial killer develops and the satire goes from stinging to distasteful and disproportionate. Some familiar faces, some not so, appear in the film, but no acting worthy of a name. So now it’s on my list, but I wouldn’t recommend it for yours. (MC-54.)