Hitchcock: The Legend Begins

In a weak moment (on 5/9/11), I picked up the Alfred Hitchcock: The Legend Begins collection, which may have been a mistake.

The set includes 20 Hitch films, most of which are in the public domain, giving companies like Mill Creek Entertainment the ability to put 20 old movies together in a set for pennies on the dollar. They did the same thing with John Wayne.

Of course, most of these films are in shoddy condition, and the Amazon reviews are mixed, pointing to faulty DVDs that won't play properly. So far, I haven't noticed any playability problems, but as for print quality, these appear to be U-matic transfers — mediocre but watchable.

Four DVDs of Hitch for $5? Count me in. I'll look past flawed prints if I can get 20 films outright and watch them on my own entertainment system and at my own pace. Renting 20 films on Netflix would take me weeks — way more expensive and time consuming, and that assumes Netflix has all of these films available (not sure there and don't feel like checking).

Enter reality. This comes on the heels of picking up the Masterpiece Collection, another 14 Hitch films. Then I found the Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which adds another eight to the pile (two of those films are also in the above 20-film set). Then I took the plunge on the Alfred Hitchcock Signature Collection, adding nine more. I've suddenly added more than 50 movies to this project, a few of which are downright clunkers to which I have no personal or academic attachment, and most of which I've never even seen. Oops? What am I supposed to say about them all?

Hitchcock's film work largely has been a black hole for me over the years, so I don't have buyer's remorse, exactly. I've seen several of his greats — Psycho, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Shadow of a Doubt, The Lady Vanishes — but I don't count Hitchcock as a real influence, and I'm not satisfied with how much I've seen of his work.

I may have overcompensated.

Most of Hitch's films are lessons in character development, pacing, maintaining suspense, and structure. I still fancy myself a screenwriter with a lot to learn, and Hitch seems like a teacher whose classes I've always seemed to miss until now.

All that said, this set presents some logistical problems. I'll treat the 14 films in The Masterpiece Collection normally, watching each title as I get there alphabetically because those films are truly masterpieces and I have stuff to say. I'll do the same with the 9 films in the Signature Collection and the 6 films in the Premiere Collection.

As for The Legend Begins set, maybe two of these films are truly "masterpieces" (The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, if you're curious) so I don't need to write 20 individual entries for a mixed bag of mostly awful looking and sounding films I've never seen and may never watch again, and about which I feel nothing but curiosity and satisfaction for finding a bargain. So one entry is all you get for the entire collection, filed under "H," and this is it.

Highball

Highball is a Noah Baumbach film that nobody's ever heard of, and even Noah Baumbach doesn't put his name on it (he uses the pseudonym "Ernie Fusco" as director and "Jesse Carter" as writer).

I failed in my attempts to find adequate DVD artwork to pilfer for the benefit of this post. The above shitty image is the best my Google searches yielded.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement for this little '90s film. I could try to write such an endorsement, but this guy did that already. Read that and come back. I'll wait.

...

I mostly own this film because I have all of Noah Baumbach's films on DVD, and even his lesser films still have merit. Also, I'm a completist and I can't stop.

I have to look past the technical issues — the awful lighting, the jump cuts, the tinny soundtrack — and focus on the writing and acting. Do that, and this is a solid little independent made on a shoestring.

I've been to some parties like the ones depicted in this film. The formula is pretty easy: Create a mixed company situation, introduce a guest or guests who has/have some insane perspective perfectly rationalized (I'm suddenly remembering the woman I once met who confessed that she stops taking birth control when she meets a new man), and see what happens when they spout their bullshit madness in mixed company. "Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan makes a lot of sense!  What do you mean, you need a Constitutional Amendment to implement that? Sounds like a liberal conspiracy!"

Honestly, I think there's such a thing as a sociopathic party host, and they collect batshit crazy friends who don't get along. And then they invite everyone to the same party.

You know when a friend tells you, "I have to introduce you to my friend so-and-so, because you guys would really get along great."  This is the opposite — this is a party host not telling you anything, and instead ambushing you with an asshole. "I don't really like you, so I'm going to introduce you to this other asshole I don't really like, because you'll hate each other and that is funny to me."

[They don't really say that. But they think that.]

Having suspected this sort of thing for some time, I sometimes look for the batshit crazy person when I'm at a party. Maybe someone walks in with an ironic hat or eyewear or facial hair (dead giveaway), or keeps insisting we turn off the music and put on his or her band's new bullshit EP instead, or maybe he or she brings the single most disgusting dish of sweet smelling nastiness full of cat hair and shame. You know, for sharing.

If I can't find him or her, I just assume it's me.

If you've been to enough parties, you've seen the usual stuff:

• Someone inevitably drinks too much and makes a total asshole of him or herself. With any luck, there is crying involved, and I get video of it.
• Somebody says something political or homophobic or racist or sexist or just generally ignorant, and other people get pissed off and clam up or leave the room. Even better, someone gets pissed off and stays in the room to speak up. "Hey man, that's not cool — my sister is a leper."
• Someone else tells a story about some local yuppie bullshit for which they currently have a chub. "I brew all my own beer, make all my own clothes, and of course, all of the food you're eating was created from the molecular level using only the finest locally grown organic molecules that I picked up at the molecular farmer's market at 5 o'clock this morning while walking the labradoodle. Did I mention I'm an asshole?"

Or, you know, "All of the products you're eating and drinking are Amway...as well as that couch!  Here, let's watch this quick DVD and I'll show you all how you can make a fuck-ton of dollars!"

All that well-deserved ranting and ridicule aside, I've also met some great friends this way, had some great food, and made some great memories. We've even thrown a couple of our own parties here at Chez John, and no one even got food poisoning!

So dinner parties aren't all bad. Far from it. Go to enough dinner parties, and you run the risk of having a good time, and maybe even making new friends that are the kind of people you want to invite to your own home, because they're on the level, and they can cook, and they're smart, and funny, and they're not class warriors or elitists or helicopter parents or furverts.

[Side note: What's up with furverts?]

A great party doesn't have to be an all-out happy fest wherein everyone walks away fast friends. People go to parties to relax, have fun, and meet people. Of course, there are your awkward moments even at the great parties, because that's what happens in mixed company. It's not a big deal, though.

This isn't the best place for personal shout-outs, but suffice to say, if I've been to a party at your house in the last couple of years, I definitely want to come back, and I don't think that you're a sociopath or a bad cook or host, and I don't mind your pet(s) or your friend(s) as long as they don't mind me.

Also, that cajun bread you made was fantastic, Matt Lasher.

High Plains Drifter

In the first 16 minutes of High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood's character visits a town called Lago, where he kills three men and rapes a woman. By the 20-minute mark, if we're still watching, we get an idea of why.

Through a flashback/dream sequence as Eastwood's character sleeps, we see several outlaws brandishing horsewhips, beating an unarmed man to death in the street.

As the townspeople look on, the man begs for someone to help him, but all the townspeople — their faces wrapped in shadow — just stand there and let him die. Among the townsfolk, we see familiar silhouettes of characters the stranger has met so far, including the woman he's already raped.

Finally, we see Duncan's face — a slightly younger, clean-shaven Clint Eastwood. Somehow, this unnamed stranger in town and Jim Duncan are connected. 

But Jim Duncan is dead. 

When the stranger wakes from his dream, he goes out again. The town sheriff approaches him with an offer. Seeing as the stranger shot and killed the town's hired guns, the sheriff wants to hire the stranger to help with a little problem. The town needs protection from three gunfighters who are getting out of prison and heading straight for Lago. They're the same three gunfighters that killed Jim Duncan.

The sheriff insists that the stranger pay nothing for any goods or services in Lago. The stranger accepts the offer, and immediately goes on a town-wide shopping spree. He gets free boots, free drinks (he "buys" a round for the house before the barkeep knows the stranger isn't paying), and recruits a town militia, which he offers to train. He tears down a rich man's barn for the building materials. He evicts everyone in the town hotel so he can have the whole place to himself. He even names the town dwarf as acting mayor and sheriff — at the same time.

In short, the stranger pretty much does what anyone would do if you got an all-expenses paid shopping spree in a town full of assholes. He paints the town red — no, literally, with the townspeople's help — and re-names the town "Hell." Here's another good examination of the film.

Hello, revenge fantasy! Pretty much every character who was either complicit or directly involved in the killing of Jim Duncan gets his/her just desserts.

Wait...so rape is justified? That's not what I'm saying. But maybe the film is saying that.

One could argue at great length about the rape scene. While neither sexually explicit nor as intense as the rape scene in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (which came out two years previously), there is a disturbing connection between the two films that gets at the worst of misogyny. Of course, neither Straw Dogs nor High Plains Drifter pre-date another classic film that depicts rape as something a woman eventually enjoys. Dr. Zhivago (1965) did the same thing. 

What's more, during the rape scenes in all three films, the female fights at first, then submits, then appears to enjoy herself. In High Plains Drifter, when the rapist goes back to her for more, she welcomes him — and sleeps with him again! 

But in High Plains Drifter, this is a protagonist committing the rape. Only despicable characters do that, right? Protagonists maintain that moral high ground, so they're always better than the villains. High Plains Drifter takes on that old saw.

High Plains Drifter appears to take a rather blithe view of violence against women, with only the flimsy justification that this woman somehow "deserves" this sort of thing because of her complicity in the murder of Jim Duncan. Here's an interesting thread on the topic.

The film's thesis appears to be that any punishment up to and including rape or death, regardless of the damage emotionally, financially, or otherwise — is justifiable when the original crime is murder. Say what you will about that. I'm not certain I agree with that thesis, but I'm trying to understand how the filmmakers got there.

Eastwood's stranger is an avenging angel with no morals who has returned to Lago to enact justice. In High Plains Drifter, in order to deal with the amoral, one must abandon all morality. In order to enact revenge, morality disappears almost altogether here. Some characters in the town get a free pass — the meek, for example. The stranger treats all of the town's minorities — Mexicans, Native Americans, and even the town dwarf — very well. The stranger is not entirely without morals. He doesn't rape every woman in sight — he rapes the one woman who watched Jim Duncan's death and did nothing. Agree with his method or not, he does have a motive to commit the crime.

But does the stranger really get revenge? That's the part I find most interesting. In "The Cask of Amontillado," Edgar Allan Poe's short story, Poe clearly lays out what the narrator believes to be the tenets of revenge:

"I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong."

Using that as a guide, does the stranger get revenge?

1) Yes, he gets away with punishing the town and townsfolk, leaving destruction in his wake. 

2) No, the retribution does not overtake him. He leaves town unscathed and disappears into the ether. 

3) He does not fail to make the town aware of his identity and motivations...sort of. Several characters allude to Marshal Jim Duncan and appear to recognize him, but the stranger doesn't confess, and no one outright identifies him. 

But when he kills the outlaws in the film's climactic sequence, one of the gunmen repeatedly screams, "WHO ARE YOU?" but the stranger remains silent. Only when he leaves town and passes Mordecai, the town dwarf, who is carving the name "Jim Duncan" into a headstone, does the stranger even remotely identify himself. Mordecai says that he still doesn't know the stranger's name. The stranger simply responds, "Yes you do," before riding off. That's all.

Is that true to how Poe defined revenge? Did the outlaws who murdered Jim Duncan in the street realize who had come to kill them? Even if the complicit townsfolk eventually realized who the stranger was, at best, they simply learned a valuable and violent lesson. The killers themselves were the ultimate target of the stranger's revenge. 

Did the killers know? The stranger hangs one, whips another to death (okay, maybe that one understood what was happening), and the third is shot to death in the street. Do they know what hit them, as they die? That's unclear. Poe might argue that the revenge is incomplete.

However, the stranger rode off into the ether anyway, satisfied with his work.

High and Low

At 143 minutes, finding time for High and Low has been difficult, and after watching The Bad Sleep Well a while ago and finding myself bored to tears and perpetually confused, I was reluctant to watch High and Low.

Today I decided to devote my afternoon to High and Low. The film is set in 1960s Japan, and longtime Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune plays Kingo Gondo, a footwear magnate on the cusp of taking over his company, National Shoes. When he gets a call that his son has been kidnapped and the abductor demands 30 million yen, Gondo's plan to assume control of the company is scuttled. 

Ah, but his son is fine — the kidnapper took the boy's friend by mistake. So now Gondo has a choice, sort of: pay the ransom and save the child, even if the child isn't his own, or ignore the kidnapper's demands and let the boy die (and face the PR fallout when such a story goes public).

I'm watering down the plot a bit here, but suffice to say the film pits rich against poor, those who live high on a hill vs. those who live in a squalid valley below, or those who maintain moral high ground vs.   the purely immoral. In ways both literal and symbolic, Mifune's character struggles to maintain that high ground throughout the film, and the film examines the cost of doing the right thing.

Part mystery, part police procedural, and part family drama, High and Low is a deeply satisfying film worth spending an afternoon to enjoy. While watching, I noted several moments in the police procedure that Hollywood films have since appropriated.  For example, recording phone calls and analyzing background noise is a device most famously used in The Fugitive, but Hollywood has beaten to death many times.

The comparisons and contrasts with The Fugitive don't end there. You've got the kidnapper working in a hospital (rather than the protagonist).  The kidnapper has both arms, sure, but he has a prominent scar on his left hand denoting some limb injury that is never explained. The police investigation is headed by a relentless detective (rather than a relentless federal marshal) whose experience and tenacity comes in handy many times as they track down the kidnapper and bring him to justice. The kidnapper is involved with drugs; the villains in The Fugitive are involved with a pharmaceutical scam.

Rather than convicted murderers riding a train to prison, it is Gondo and the detectives who ride a train to a predetermined point where they must throw out the ransom — thereby assuring Gondo of a "life sentence of debt" as the relentless detective puts it.

The connections to The Fugitive are pretty consistent throughout.  Whether Kurosawa directly influenced David Twohy and Jeb Stuart when they were developing the script for The Fugitive is unclear.  Still, the mere fact that these two films can exist 30 years apart and have so many connections speaks to the enduring power and influence of Kurosawa's work.  Or maybe I just watch too many movies.

Much has been written about Kurosawa's influence on George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, especially when considering Kurosawa's large body of films set in feudal Japan.  Relatively speaking, not much has been written about how his more modern-set films continue to influence Hollywood today. That's worth exploration. Having said that, this is worth reading.

High Fidelity

I've been stuck on High Fidelity for months.  Too much to say.

Perhaps more than any other film, I distinctly feel how much I've changed since the first time I saw this one, way back in that little movie theater in Nelsonville, Ohio more than a decade ago.  

Back then, I sat there with the girl I was seeing, and over and over, I saw myself on the screen.  At 24 years old, I needed a film to tell me that what I was feeling and thinking about women and music was normal.  Other people were out there, and they were like me.  (For the record, I screwed that relationship up pretty badly.  So it goes.)

Now I realize that yes, other people like Rob are out there — and mostly they are all self-involved dicks who don't deserve much more than superficiality, and probably wouldn't recognize much more if they got it.  They are doomed.

I like to think that I've made progress.  I see Rob as a sad protagonist that I can't stand.  Watching him is like looking at a home movie of myself from years ago and wishing I could reach through and strangle the sullen little kid on the screen (or at least give him a decent haircut).  

He's a calculating misogynist — the kind of man who can't stand the idea of someone else sleeping with his ex, so he goes out and sleeps with someone, as if he's in a race to move on, or enact some sort of revenge...by striking first?

Once he sleeps with someone else, he immediately goes back to obsessing about his ex sleeping with someone else!  Then he flips out when he learns she's slept with the new guy!  But...look at what you just did, asshole!  AAARGGH.  

And because John Cusack is so damned likable, what his character pulls on screen is...okay?  Funny?  His redemption is...earned?  What did he do to earn this, other than going to his ex-girlfriend's father's funeral?  He's an asshole!

That's the first time I've gone off like that about this film and this character.  Ten years ago, I understood him — I felt his pain, even.  Bitches, man!  Women — especially ones who had the audacity to dump me (when I probably deserved it) — were the enemy, and I had so much stored up anger that I should've stayed away from women altogether, but I didn't.  I kept going back out there, and taking that darkness with me.  Baaaad.

These days, I'm still obsessed with collecting music, sure, and I spend a shitload of time and money in record shops and on eBay looking for stuff, and yes, I'm still self-involved (hello...blogging?), but...would I pull this shit?  No.  

I'm not perfect.  I still make plenty of mistakes with other people, but somehow I found a girl who stayed, and accepted all the faults and obsessions and stupidity and mistakes.  She stayed.  But more on that in a minute.

If not for the demise of physical media and my own canny move to stay in grad school through pretty much the entirety of George W. Bush's first term in office, I likely would be running my own record shop into the ground these days, hoping beyond hope that digital downloads and the death of physical media wouldn't be my undoing.  Of course, owning my own record shop also depends on if health care were affordable and if I could afford to pay myself a living salary and if the bullshit of owning and running a small business weren't so soul-crushing.  That's a lot of "if," but whatever.  

Mostly, record stores seem like a good life, but they're not.  "It's retail hell," my friend Stevie Ray used to say.  He went out of business a few years later.  But record stores are still cool, you know?  I idealize them.  They're fucking great.  They're my church.  Not like in Empire Records, which was nothing like any decent record shop I ever knew (more like a Sam Goody or the like).  No — record shops have an allure, a palpable attitude about them, and that hazy, nicotine and vinyl and incense smell.

Record stores are a fantasy that doesn't really deliver — at least not for me, anyway.  I know plenty of people who work in shops and have great lives and are happy.  I just couldn't get there, for whatever reason.  Loved the free music and the conversations.  Hated the retail drudgery.  But no job is perfect.  If record shops paid $60k a year, we'd all work in one.  Maybe.

Still, as a customer, I can't stay away from them.  Tangent: I once heard my dad telling someone about when he was maybe my age, and he'd work all week, and wake up on Saturday morning with this itch, like he had to go out, because there was a bargain out there.  He went out some weekends and would come back with all this stuff — a lawnmower, a car, a piece of furniture — never records.  Dad doesn't give a crap about music.  But I feel the same pull a few times a week — like if I don't check the shops regularly, I'll miss some amazing bargain, like when I found The Jimi Hendrix Concerts for one damned dollar, or both Traveling Wilburys CDs for $2, or when I found this for $90.  You miss stuff by staying home.  I don't club.  I don't karaoke.  I don't camp or climb rocks or ride a bike or take some martial arts class.  I dig around in record shops.  I might love that more than I love writing.

I'm Rob's age now.  But aside from the obsessive record collecting and the occasional (mostly harmless) navel-gazing, I like to think I'm a different guy now.  What changed?  I watched as my friends married off, had kids, bought houses, etc., and I didn't understand.  I kept collecting records.  I kept blowing money.  I kept having these aborted relationships with women.  Two dates, maybe even three, and then nothing.  Flameout.

Eventual solution?  Self-imposed exile.  Done going through the motions, telling the same stories, doing the same things.  I kept going with my gut: "Maybe this new girl is the one."

Finally, I had the same epiphany that Rob has around the 1:40 mark in High Fidelity: "I've come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."  The film helped me get there.  I sort of traversed the same arc he goes through.  On New Year's Eve, 2005, I hung out with some friends, had a great time, and felt hopeful about 2006.  My friends would later say that something about me had changed.  They'd never seen me that way.  What way?  I'm still not sure.  Maybe I was just at peace for once.

And then, along came my wife, our life together, our home, and Rufus, our little house rabbit, who is a total asshole, but we love him anyway.  Boom, almost all at once.

The thing about High Fidelity is in the epiphany.  Music and the messages therein shape how Rob views the world and the people around him, and it's all just fantasy.  And after a while, it's easy to get tired of the fantasy, because the fantasy doesn't deliver.  The bitch about fantasies is that they're perfect, and you can't have that.  

Record stores sound great, until you have to actually do some work or listen to shitty music or stock something you know is awful.  Takes a real adult to work in a record shop and not be an asshole to everyone who buys something you don't like.  That stuff never shows up in the fantasy of sitting around listening to music all day and talking to people about Bowie or whatever.  How cool is it that Nick Hornby sets this book in one of the most fantasized, romanticized places?

High Fidelity isn't really about music.  High fidelity is just another phrase for commitment, and the peace that comes from letting go of the rest of what doesn't matter.  I'm sure there's some Buddhism in here somewhere.  

When you commit to somebody — really, really commit to something real and steady, you get something that transcends the fantasy (even if you get worn out women's underwear occasionally hanging in weird places in the house, or endless piles of shoes placed near virtually every door, or half-full glasses of water left on virtually every flat surface).  

What at first seems like less than the fantasy actually ends up being more than the fantasy, and by miles.  You get to come home to something.  (I say this with the utmost respect for people who come home to an empty home for whatever reason, and do not intend to brag or whatever.  I've done the living alone thing, and by choice, even, and although I like my current situation better, if my marriage doesn't work out, I'm living alone in a shabby apartment for the rest of my life.  Living alone was great, too.)

Yeah, you might still slowly piece together all the deleted Bowie albums on Rykodisc (the ones with the bonus tracks you can't get anywhere else), or maybe you suddenly start putting together the Stones' discography on SACD, or maybe you go through a phase wherein you spend so much money on music at the Borders going-out-of-business sales that you actually wonder whether you'll single-handedly resuscitate the company and/or the entire record industry.  Or maybe that's all just me.

But that doesn't mean I want any of that superficial, material stuff more than the person, the rabbit, the house, the kids (someday), and so on.  All that collecting, that obsessing, that itch on Saturday mornings to go out and find a bargain even as physical media sits on life support...it's all just providing a great soundtrack for a pretty good life.