Miguel Angel Vivas’ SECUESTRADOS (2010), which is available on DVD in this country as KIDNAPPED (IFC Films), is a nasty piece of work inspired by the vogue in Spain for “express robberies” … home invasions in which criminals force homeowners to participate in their own fleecing, often with tragic if not horrific results. Conceived as a slick genre programmer from a young filmmaker with talent to burn, SECUESTRADOS exceeds that modest goal. It is brutal business aimed at the heart of anyone with a family, anyone considered by their loved ones to be a protector, to be a shield against an often frightening world. On the continuum of home invasion movies, the feature is closer to the example of Michael Haneke’s debilitating FUNNY GAMES (1997, remade in English in 2007) than the more audience-friendly likes of Florent-Emilio Siri’s HOSTAGE (2005) or, going back farther, William Wyler’s THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955, remade for TV in 1967 and for the cinema by Michael Cimino in 1990). For this reason, SECUESTRADOS has taken its licks from critics and extreme film fans but I don’t think its thematic dependencies invalidate it as a cautionary tale meant to disturb, unnerve, and think. The cast will be largely unfamiliar to Americans, apart from Fernando Cayo, who played another family man in Juan Antonio  Bayona’s EL ORFANATO (THE ORPHANAGE, 2007), and that works in the film’s favor to divorce the events that transpire in its real time-like duration from cinema, from make-believe. Key to the film’s ability to haunt is the performance of Manuella Vellés, as the only child of an affluent suburban family beset by home invaders. Playing a teenager whose biggest concern at the top of the film is getting out of having to spend the night with her boring middle aged parents, Vellés takes an incredible (incredibly bad) journey through SECUESTRADOS that leaves her, by the film’s incredibly cruel coup de grace (seriously, this is not a date movie), little more than the shell of a human being. I was incredibly moved by the performance, which at times, in its total abdication of lucidity, borders on Diamonda Galas-like hysteria, but at all times couched within the context of a child having her body ravaged, her soul slashed, and her heart broken. When was the last time, while watching a horror film, you were aware of a character’s heart breaking right in front of you? READ MORE

She was brash, she was bold and she was damn funny. Phyllis Diller took a road less traveled and in the process she helped pave the way for many female comedians who followed in her footsteps including Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr and Tina Fey. Comedy is still considered somewhat of a “boy’s club” but Phyllis Diller’s self-deprecating sense of humor helped her crack that glass ceiling and today she’s often credited for making the world a better place for female comedians to practice their craft.

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Last week I wrote a piece on how I came to love the classic actors (roughly, those whose careers started in the forties or before) over the modern actors (roughly, those who came into prominence in the wake of Marlon Brando in the fifties).  Of course, there’s an amazing amount of overlap in any such attempt at a demarcation point.  Brando was on Broadway in the forties and in the same decade, Montgomery Clift was already in the movies.  Then, of course, some actors who started in the twenties and thirties had careers that spanned far longer into the modern era than either those of Clift or James Dean.  Nevertheless, it’s a fairly well-accepted dividing point between the old school and new school for Hollywood actors.   One of the modern era actors I didn’t mention last week was Jack Lemmon, for many reasons.   One, it’s not entirely clear into which school he fits.  We don’t think of him as a new school method or naturalistic actor but he also didn’t have the formal stoicism of an earlier era.   Two, it’s his day today on TCM’s Summer Under the Stars so I wanted to save up any discussion of him for this week.  And three, a lot of people don’t like him while others adore him.  Let’s talk about that last one for a bit.

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The once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction. -W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

The setting of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s extraordinary debut feature Neighboring Sounds (opening on 8/24 in NYC) is not a resort, but the aging apartment blocks and flimsy, sprouting condominium towers of Recife, Brazil that bear similar scars of overdevelopment. The seemingly haphazard urban planning has the upwardly mobile middle class living on top of and among the blue collars who serve them. Filha’s film presents the neighborhood of Setubal as a series of constant intrusions, from the minor annoyances of a yapping guard dog and a stolen car stereo to the unsettling history of the area’s industrialist/colonialist past leaking into the present. The social contract in Setubal is built on as uneasy a ground as the swiftly built condos. As in Sebald’s description of a depopulated Deauville in The Emigrants, the whole town seems on the verge of collapse, haunted by the ghosts of its lost wealth. Yet all of this is subtext, woven into the comic-melancholic fabric of the neighborhood’s everyday routines.

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Today, the films of Anthony Quinn are spotlighted as part of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars. Lust for Life, one of my favorite movies featuring the earthy, expressive actor, airs this evening. However, this biopic of artist Vincent Van Gogh is not really Quinn’s movie. Nor is it star Kirk Douglas’s film, despite his intense, show-stopping performance. Instead, Lust for Life belongs to director Vincente Minnelli, who not only identified strongly with Van Gogh’s tortured life but also translated the artist’s techniques, palette, and compositions into cinematic equivalents.  Minnelli was inspired and influenced by painters throughout his entire life career, from his days as a set dresser on Broadway to his years as one of MGM’s most talented directors. He filled notebooks with photos and illustrations of paintings, ornamentation, architectural details, and other imagery, which he used as references for set and costume design. He approached his work in Hollywood like an artist, and he strove to collapse the distance between fine and popular art. Alongside the 17-minute ballet at the end of An American in Paris, Lust for Life is his finest achievement in that regard.

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Tuesday, August 21^st marks Kay Francis day on TCM’s Summer Under the Stars and the lineup of films should not only please her avid fans but also introduce newbies to this elegant underrated actress of the early sound era who is not that well known today. While there are plenty of high points to recommend here from the giddy sophisticated comedy-romance Jewel Robbery (1932), a Pre-Code Ernst Lubitsch wannabe, to the eclectic political espionage thriller British Agent (1934) to the exotic and risque melodrama Mandalay (1934), I cast my vote for THE HOUSE ON 56^TH STREET (1933) as the quintessential Kay Francis vehicle and an excellent introduction to the actress.        READ MORE

Last week I began a cycle of talking through how the transition to talkies affected the development of American screen comedy, and to continue in this vein we need to take a moment to talk through what that transition was all about.  The Jazz Singer has persisted in posterity and popular memory far in excess of the merits of its actual content–it is however remembered as a revolutionary picture, one that precipitated a sudden reorientation of the industry.  But the real story behind the switch to talkies is messier–and doesn’t have much of anything to do with The Jazz Singer.  It is instead a story about the dynamics of format wars.

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I was having lunch in Manhattan last week with my friend Kevin Maher, a writer-director-producer, comedian, and B-movie horror fan, who never misses a Blobfest and was in the envious position this year to be paid to go to Jawsfest. One of a thousand topics shoehorned into a fifty-minute man-date (same length as a therapy session and equally healing!) was the lost art of movie-telling… of one person patiently and thoughtfully relating the entire plot of a movie to another. If you’re over the age of 40, if you have had real life experience with rotary phones and VHS, there’s a good chance you remember a time in your life — maybe on a long car trip or riding bikes in the summer or while doing menial work on the job with a coworker– when somebody told you a movie. All the way through. From fade in to fade out. READ MORE

Some women like men who drive fast cars; others prefer men with an athletic build while some find a uniform irresistible. Me? I appreciate a good pair of spectacles.
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