Brazil (1985)

QFS No. 158 - The invitation for November 27, 2024
Brazil is directed by Terry Gilliam, the mad-genius behind (and part of) Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the still-quotable Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Time Bandits (1981), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), The Fisher King (1991) in which Mercedes Ruehl* won an Oscar, the terrific 12 Monkeys (1995) and other films that are all a little ... askew. What a fascinating career Gilliam has had as a comedian, animator, actor and filmmaker. This is our first of his movies we’ve selected for Quarantine Film Society.

And this one is a favorite of mine – darkly funny, unpredictable and visually captivating, stunningly so at times. I first saw Brazil after someone recommended it to me while a student (…fellow…) at the American Film Institute and the movie stuck with me immediately. The story of how Brazil was made and released has become something of a dark tale itself. There are three versions of the movie that exist in the world – the original European release that’s 142-minutes long, the American version that’s 132-minutes long (probably the one you’ll find out there on streaming), and the so-called Sheinberg edit also known as the “Love Conquers All” version that’s only 90-minutes long. I’ve seen some aspects of each of these, and whatever you do, do not watch the Love Conquers All version because it’s an abomination.

Is now the right time to watch a film about trying to live under the gaze of a dystopic government with a crippling and heartless bureaucracy on the eve of what could be the downfall of representative democracy in this country? Sure why not. Good to know what’s in store for us! Eh.

Anyway, join watch and and discuss below!

*Not only was she later to be directed by yours truly in an episode of television, she also has the distinction of her first and last name sounding like a complete declarative sentence.

Brazil (1985) Directed by Terry Gilliam

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a sequence in Brazil (1985) that captures so much of what the film attempts to say about society, progress, perception versus reality and also captures director Terry Gilliam’s unique vision, all in one 20-second (or less) moment and series of shots.

Sam driving in his miniscule car in his futuristic city.

Sam (Jonathan Pryce) is driving in his ludicrously tiny car, dwarfed by the wheels of a huge construction vehicle driving next to it. Then, the shot cuts from Sam’s face to what we presume is a POV shot of him driving through the city which we haven’t yet seen. This sort of cut is a conventional type of edit where we as the audience sees what he’s seeing.

Oh what a nice looking city they’ve got in Brazil.

It’s a driving point-of-view through a sleek, futuristic world with what appear to be cooling towers above uniform, efficient-looking buildings. But then, as the shot keeps moving (again, as though we are in the car looking out the domed windows as Sam is doing), suddenly a giant head of a disheveled-looking man holding a beer bottle appears above the buildings.

Wait, what’s going on?

The moment is long enough to give us a sense of what is going on? Is this some sort of giant? But then it cuts to a wide shot of the actual city – this was just a model in a glass case of what the city was proposed to look like, with this drunken fellow now peering into it and Sam’s car driving past the model in the background through what the city actually turned out to be.

It was just a model!

This sequence is illustrative of Gilliam’s work generally and themes of Brazil specifically in the following ways. First, it toys with filmic convention – we have an expectation of what we should be seeing (a POV) but the gag is a misdirect, played for laughs. But it’s also a commentary. People (government or businesses) promising one thing but the reality ends up being something totally different – both the shot and the subject in the shot (the cityscape). The wide shot shows the same towers as the model, but run down, graffiti covered. It’s no mistake that these buildings are named “Shangri-La Towers,” an elevated name for a dilapidated place.

Hidden in this is a third aspect: who is to blame for these promises not being kept? And are we simply powerless to hold anyone accountable?

We are victims of indifference to our circumstances in an uncaring world, Brazil tells us. Bureaucracy (paperwork!) is dehumanizing – no one takes responsibility because in a world where authority is both decentralized and opaque, there’s no one person to blame. Everyone is at fault therefore no one is. As perfectly described in this exchange:

Sam Lowry: I only know you got the wrong man.

Jack Lint: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?

Mr. Buttle - whose fault is it that this is the wrong man? The paperwork said it was Buttle.

That wrong man was poor Archibald Buttle (Brian Miller) who later died after being taken away in a case of mistaken identity – in that, they have the wrong name entirely and are looking for Archibald “Harry” Tuttle (Robert DeNiro). Jill Leighton (Kim Greist) attempts to find out what happened to her neighbor Mr. Buttle but since he’s considered a criminal, she’s only met with institutional indifference, given the ol’ run-around.

Sam, however, is in the system. So surely he can fight it – that’s where we think the film is going. Someone who is of the system but doesn’t really care for it will use his knowledge of the system against it to take it down and make the world a better place.

Will Sam take down the system? If this was a simple film subject to studio tinkering, then yes. If it’s a complex film about our real contemporary world, then no.

Gilliam, however, isn’t one for the Hollywood convention of a happy ending (as is thoroughly documented in his fight with Universal Studios and Sid Sheinberg to get Brazil released back in 1985). Instead, Sam, who has apparent privilege as a worker drone in the Ministry of Information and as the son of a prominent member of the government, in the end can’t defeat the system nor can he prevent himself from being a victim of it either.

One of our QFS group members brought up this phrase that I’ll try to remember when talking about Brazil in the future – it’s Kafka meets Capra. Comparisons to George Orwell and his 1984 are of course impossible to miss, but it’s not entirely accurate. The seminal book paints a bleak and ultimately joyless world living under a totalitarian state. Brazil’s world isn’t quite as bleak – in fact, the rich among them are very happy. They can endure routine terrorist attacks as “poor sportsmanship” and can continue to eat brunch so long as a barrier blocks them off from the horrors unfolding behind them. Or they can completely change their appearance with the right cosmetic surgeon. And Sam’s inner mind is full of fantasy and light - he’s actually fighting the system in his dreams, as opposed to being swallowed by it in reality.

Winged hero Sam Lowry, in flight during a dream.

Although the less wealthy and poor are victims of an uncaring world – the Buttles, for instance – Gilliam plays all of this for absurdist laughs as opposed to bleak sadness. The film is satire, not a post-apocalyptic look back at a world lost as we inhabit a brave new world. Gilliam has said that Brazil does not take place in the future and even the title card says “somewhere in the 20th Century” (which now of course puts this film firmly in the past). So it’s about our present day where consumerism is most important, a world where a child asks Santa for a credit card, a procession marches by with people holding up “Consumers for Christ” banners, and the guard implores Sam to confess quickly otherwise his credit score will suffer. Twentieth century “satire” here comes dangerously close to full on 21st Century reality.

Consumers For Christ banner parades through the city.

And, I dare say, the film does find a way to have something resembling hope. Well maybe not as far as hope, but one can interpret that, in the end, Sam has found a place unreachable by the overbearing State – his innermost mind. The ending – the very ending, not what appears to be ending with Sam being rescued by the very terrorists he’s accused of being a part of – but the final moment of Sam in the chair humming the tune that’s the film’s namesake. He has gone off into the sunset with a woman he loves, free from paperwork and the dirty city.

Perhaps this is a happy ending? Sam smiling, lost in a fantasy for good.

Or, maybe they’ve already performed the lobotomy and it’s as bleak as saying – whatever you do, the State wins in the end (as does Big Brother in Orwell’s work). It’s unclear here in Brazil, but what’s clear is that the filmmaker shows a man in a chair surrounded by darkness, only to have that darkness dissolve into clouds and the world of his dreams. To me and to several of us in the discussion group, that is a glimmer of something brighter from the outside world.

Sam enters Information Retreival.

Much has been written about the groundbreaking production design and imagery in the film and what’s striking about seeing it now, in the 21st Century, is that this film was made at all. In our current movie landscape, only a two or maybe three directors are able to create an entire world something as big, bold and maniacal as this – perhaps only Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and maybe Denis Villeneuve – without relying upon pre-existing source material. “I.P.” to use the language or our times. And Brazil is a lot for a first-time viewer, we discovered – it’s full of visual gags and stimulation, extraordinary camera work, clever dialogue with that Monty Python-esque British humor inflected throughout. You could watch the film all the way through just for the propaganda signs throughout (“Suspicion breeds confidence.”) And it’s just a utter stroke of genius that this whole thing is set off by a bug falling into the printing machine. A system so confident in its infallibility but yet the tiniest of creatures can cause it to fail.

This set is both excellent in its design but also photographed nearly perfectly by Terry Gilliam and cinematographer Roger Pratt with one of the all time great camera dolly movies.

Brazil is full of big ideas packed into a madhouse of a film. If there’s one thing we’re missing, one sadness at revisiting a work as innovative and inventive as Brazil, is that there are so few of its kind since then. So few original films on that scale that are about ideas. Perhaps Nolan is the only one making inventive big world creation films about ideas. There’s a bleak homogenization in our movies, one big action or comic-book based film looking almost exactly like the next. It’s our version of being surrounded by gray walls.

Are we living in Gilliam’s Brazil or some version of that now? I don’t think it’s as bleak as all that. After all, we’ve all but gotten rid of paperwork.

Paperwork reigns down after Sam disrupts the tube system in Information Retrieval.

Blow Out (1981)

QFS No. 148 - The invitation for August 14, 2024
Brian Da Palma is one of the great polarizing filmmakers of our time, I think I can safely say. He has made some of classic films – Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), the first Mission: Impossible (1996) – but has also made several bombs. Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) was a legendary box-office disaster and Mission to Mars (2000) is a truly terrible film and I dare you to convince me otherwise. But it’s not the financial failures that have made him polarizing.

His thrillers are dark psychological affairs with often erotic storylines, disturbing imagery, and bloody violence. Dressed to Kill (1980) ignited protests over the portrayal of a transgendered person as a deviant psychopathic murderer. Body Double (1984) upset his studio so much that they ended his multi-picture deal. Scarface (1983) was criticized for its brutal violence and glorification of drug use. His admirers are legion, but his critics point to misogynistic tendencies in his films, in particular his thrillers. (Speaking of misogyny, he's been accused – or praised, depending on your perspective – of ripping off Alfred Hitchcock a little too liberally.)

But De Palma never made the same film twice and his filmography is impossible to characterize or really fathom. His work includes: a Stephen King-horror film, a violent immigrant gangster opus, a slick Chicago-set period piece with an homage to a Russian silent film, the launching of a major movie franchise, a war film, science fiction, musical, comedy, thrillers. It’s really astonishing the breadth of films De Palma made, especially for an auteur. The sheer fact that the studio system rewarded De Palma in the 1980s is fascinating, and a sign of the times perhaps. It’s harder to imagine a De Palma-type succeeding now.  

Still, you could make the argument that Quentin Tarantino – who is De Palma Fan #1 – did do just that in the 1990s. Tarantino and De Palma are two filmmakers who have a committed and deep following, in almost a cult-like manner. It’s safe to say that many of his films are indeed being rediscovered as cult classics these days.

This week’s Blow Out is a film that has endured, at least for many cinephiles. Perhaps in part for John Travolta, as he was near the apex of the first half of his career and this is another early star turn for him. Whatever the case may be, this has been on my list of films to see for some time now, so I’m looking forward to finally adding a De Palma film to the QFS List.

Blow Out (1981) Directed by Brian De Palma

Reactions and Analyses:
Early in Blow Out (1981), Jack (John Travolta) is on a bridge recording sounds as part of his work as a sound engineer for a movie production company. It’s a scene that becomes the inciting incident of the film, but at first it simply shows the character’s particular skill and expertise as Jack scans with his shotgun microphone through the night over the river. The scene also serves to show Brian De Palma at his best, putting his directing genius on display. If there’s one sequence I’d show someone from this (or any) film on what it means to tell a story visually, this might be it.

Jack (John Travlota) listening in on a couple while out field recording for his day job, from Blow Out (1981).

We first hear a couple talking near a bridge, in a wide shot while Jack is in the distance who’s listening in. The sound then trails to something mysterious, only to be revealed as a frog croaking. We hear some sort of clicking but don’t yet know what it is, but it leads to the owl hooting. The owl turns its attention, as we the viewer does and Jack does, to the sound of an approaching car. A pop – was it a gunshot or just a blow out?! – and the car spins out of control and goes over the bridge, which sparks the entire narrative journey of the film.

Jack hears the owl.

Hears something else, and a car approaching.

What De Palma does, and what Alfred Hitchcock also did so well, was to bring out attention to whatever the director wanted us to see. He puts the owl in close up, with Jack small in the frame behind him. We see the frog in foreground, but small and little, almost invisible the way it was to Jack but for hearing it. When we need to pay attention to something, De Palma puts it front and center.

Jack sees the car, then hears the blow out - or is it a gunshot?

Then, when the “accident” happens, we’re far away and don’t have all the details – which is exactly how Jack is experiencing it. This is textbook filmmaking, a sequence that should be mandatory for directors to show how to accurately direct the audience’s attention and to show first-person perspective in filmmaking.

Jack sees the car launch from the bridge. 

De Palma, however, tops this by returning to the sequence and scene of the accident when Jack finally has a moment in a motel room with Sally (Nancy Allen) passed out on the bed after returning from the hospital. Jack listens to his recording and we return to the scene, hearing it and seeing it through Jack’s eyes. But now, we’re in different points of view, a fleshing out of the scene. The couple on the bridge is now seen from Jack’s perspective. The frog is clearly visible, now from a new angle. The owl, in close up, looks right at us and turns to the car approaching – but a new angle.

Then, the terrific shot of a flash in the bushes, the tire exploding – all with Jack and his headphones superimposed on the action, as if we’re in his head seeing and hearing it happen. It’s extraordinary – the stakes of this scene are high, this is what is setting up the central tension of the film. Jack has proof it wasn’t an accident, but an assassination attempt. Will anyone believe him?

Jack "hearing" the gunshot and hitting the tire while we see it - the shot is one of De Palma's masterstrokes in Blow Out.

Throughout Blow Out, De Palma’s work with cinematographer Vilmos Zigmond brings an elevated artistry to a suspense thriller, much as Hitchcock did a generation earlier. De Palma and Zigmond seem to know always where to put the camera to tell the story in the most compelling way possible. Take the opening sequence. In what feels like it could very well be the actual opening sequence of the film – a tawdry Halloween-esque opening that explores into a sorority house – is actually the film-within-the-film that Jack is working on. The scene goes on past what we expect for such a misdirect and it goes on for quite some time, finally revealed after a woman is about to be stabbed in the shower where her scream defies credulity and the images freezes. We’re now in the sound mixing room with Jack and his co-workers.

The sequence is itself a work of technical mastery – as much De Palma’s and Zigmond’s fine construction as it is Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam, who executes the vision with his new device with perfection. Without having seen Blow Out before, I truly thought this was the beginning of the story. And what is serves to do (other than perhaps a comment on De Palma’s overt misogynistic tendencies, which we’ll get to) is to introduce us to Jack, his area of expertise, and also that he’s living in a sort of trashy B-movie world. The scream is a bit that will be returned to again and pays off at the end.

Film-within-a-film opening sequence ends in the mixing room.

Introduction to Jack and his line of work.

But before Blow Out ends, we’re treated to De Palma’s masterful attention to detail. For three quarters of the movie, roughly, De Palma’s attention to extreme detail is exacting, the way it is for Jack. We see close ups of the photos of the crash, frame by frame, as an editor would have to do. We watch all the practical and technical manipulation of the esoteric machines that shoot animation cells or string audio tape through a splicer, with chalk marks on the frames for reference. It’s tactile, the way filmmaking was, with physical levers and tapes that can be demagnetized. For a filmmaker who is part of what is likely the last generation to be trained in both analog and digital formats, all of this warmed my heart to see and that of several of us in the QFS discussion group.

The tools of sound and filmmaking.

Jack studies the stills of the car crash.

Jack cuts sound the old fashioned way.

Speaking of old-time filmmaking – Travolta portrays a sound engineer with utmost accuracy. Having known and worked with several, I can say that Travolta doesn’t feel like an actor playing a sound engineer, he somehow brings an authenticity to the role with his clear love of careful listening and focus. He fits perfectly into the role of Jack and I would’ve bought all the Travolta stock I could after this film – which is only funny in retrospect considering the following nosedive his career suffered until his resurgence in 1994 with Pulp Fiction (directed by De Palma Fan #1 Quentin Tarantino). But here in Blow Out, Jack is compelled to do something, anything he can, with the knowledge he has. He can’t believe how no one belives him and encounters forces out there, unseen, that are dangerous and are trying to manipulate our world.

This post-Watergate paranoia remains a fascination of mine. It was in the air - something or someone is manipulating you; you are being watched; no one can be trusted - and maybe not even your own eyes. Not too long ago we selected Klute (1971, QFS No. 128), one of Alan J Pakula’s paranoia films of the era or even Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful The Conversation (1974). Blow Out fits right in. But the conspirators here are almost comically incompetent. They hire a … hitman? Or maybe just a psychopath in Burke (John Lithgow). Looking at the entire picture, Burke reveals himself to be utterly terrible at his job. He’s supposed to disable the car with the presidential candidate, but instead he kills him. (The plan, of course, was pretty faulty from the start.) Then he kills the wrong woman who he thinks is Sally. And then – he does kill Sally but gets killed in the end too. That’s not to mention that Burke, for no apparent reason, kills a prostitute in the train station just for fun! This is not the “professional” you should hire when attempting to commit political violence.

Sally dies before Jack can arrive with fireworks from Liberty Day igniting above them. The conspiracy wins.

In the end, the unseen forces win. Not only did they eliminate the candidate from the contest, but they’ve essentially eliminated all trace back to the conspiracy. Only Jack knows, but he has no proof and is haunted by the burden of being the only one with the truth.

The QFS group mostly agreed that the film would be an unqualified masterpiece had De Palma was able to stick the landing. The final quarter of the film is something of a disaster, which lead us to speculate whether De Palma felt the need to amp up the action given the larger budget he received when casting Travolta in the lead role. For some reason, Jack drives directly through the Liberty Day parade to get to the subway exit to where Burke is heading with the captured Sally. In an attempt to save one person, Jack nearly kills hundreds before crashing into a wall, getting knocked out, an ambulance comes (off screen) and when he comes to, he escapes the ambulance and gets to Sally too late. It’s preposterous and in many ways doesn’t fit the tight thriller that De Palma crafted leading up to it.

Jack's "superpower" is his attention to detail and sound.

The film showed Jack as an intelligent artistic type with a “superpower,” for lack of a better term – to be able to discern specific sounds. The story is setting up for him using this skill to solve the puzzle or to save the day – perhaps by hearing the clicking sound of Burke’s watch garrote, or by being able to hear Sally’s whereabouts more readily. Instead, De Palma focuses on Jack having to overcome past demons by wiring Sally – something he did in the past before he got one of his undercover informants killed. That haunts Jack, and so the story focuses on overcoming that part of his past. He fails with Sally, just as he did before, which led one of us in the group to conclude that the moral of the story is: don’t let Travolta put a wire on you because you’ll end up dead.

It's one of a number of plot and logic holes, including loose ends that never are addressed. The news guy (Curt May), is he on the up-and-up? How did he know all that about Jack? We’ll never know because that doesn’t pay off. How could Jack possibly be left unguarded in the ambulance after nearly running over people in his Jeep and crashing into a department store display? Why would it matter about the dead man’s reputation now that he’s dead? Just to protect his family? And why didn’t the people who were trying to embarrass the candidate simply just go with the usual plan Sally and Manny (Dennis Franz) do all the time – burst through a room and take pictures of the candidate in bed with Sally? Did Sally kill Manny or just knock him out? And so on.

Despite all of the above – including the questionable third act of the story – the film remains an essential piece of filmmaking. The sequence on the bridge alone is worth the price of admission. When Jack discovers all his tape has been demagnetized, De Palma has the camera spinning steadily on its access, panning around the room as Jack gets into a panic, heightening the anxiety. It’s incredibly effective and I found myself feeling the same thing the character felt - which is exactly the goal of a director in telling a story cinematically and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done quite as well as it’s done here. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, it would be gimmicky. But here, it’s perfect.

The shot after the continually panning shot is this overhead that shows all the mess left after Jack's frantic attempt to see if any of his tapes still work.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up one particular aspect of Blow Up that’s dogged De Palma in much of his work, and that is his misogynistic tendencies. First of all, Sally is portrayed as an utterly clueless ditz, incapable of fighting for herself and seemingly out of it the entire time. She is so thinly portrayed and not even given a moment on screen for her to grasp that she almost died if it wasn’t for Jack saving her. In the only scene in which Sally shows any depth comes as she’s sharing with Jack her dreams of being a makeup artist in the film business. To which Jack blows her off as unserious and childish. The opening itself, the salacious POV through the women’s dorm ending in the shower, is fun for teenage boys and of course is evocative of those types of slasher pics De Palma may be lampooning, but is definitely on the gratuitous side.

But if you look more closely at this opening section – the final shot is of a naked woman in the shower, as mentioned above. The actress’ scream is inadequate and it’s Jack’s job to fix it. And he does in the final scene of the film – he uses Sally’s final moments of her life that he recorded and puts in the film. The only worth this woman, Sally, brings to the filmmakers is her sound, her primal cry out to the world. And it will live on as coming from the mouth of a naked woman in a shower. For someone like De Palma who delved into the deep psyche of humans and often has darkly sexual storylines, this feels like it’s no accident.

One of Sally's (Nancy Allen) final screams, eventually used in the trashy film Jack is working on.

A charitable way of looking at the ending is that this final sound of Sally will haunt Jack him, and will be his torment, and only he will know how she exists forever in this film. The less chartable way of looking at this is that all a woman is worth is to be seen on the screen as sex objects, to be used even in their final moments for entertainment and as a commodity. Perhaps there’s something in between, but it’s bleak nevertheless.

How do we square De Palma? I have trouble with him, to be honest. I love much of his work, but he revels in the profane, the salacious, and seems to be able to only make male characters fully human. (People level this latter critique against Hitchcock, too.) Yet, there is true artistry in his best films. He creates iconic images and uses the language of past filmmakers to his advantage, creating something new and indelible. Hitchcock’s legacy appears in most of his films, but there’s also of course Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966 for Blow Out), Sergei Eisenstein (from Battleship Potemkin, 1925, for The Untouchables, 1987) and others along the way. Tarantino, for his part, takes inspiration from De Palma and thus the circle of filmmaking continues.

It's hard to place De Palma in the pantheon of great American directors, but he must be among them. And it’s easy to argue that Blow Out is his finest work, warts and all. Perhaps like the filmmaker who crafted it.

Planes, Trains and Automobies (1987)

QFS No. 129 - The invitation for November 22, 2023
John Hughes is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers and, I dare say, one of the reasons I wanted to become one myself. The only reason we haven’t selected one of his movies yet is that I have seen basically all of them – especially the ones he directed. There are a few he wrote that I haven’t yet seen, but truly it’s hard to remember a time when I hadn’t seen a John Hughes film.

While he wrote and produced a ton, he only directed eight movies.** Most of those eight have withstood the test of time and to talk about Hughes is to talk in superlatives. There might be no better movie about ditching school and having a dream day than Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – easily one of my favorite films of all time, one that takes on a mythic status for kids who grew up near the city of Chicago. The Breakfast Club (1985) is class struggle as told through high school and has never been topped. Sixteen Candles (1984) is a defining movie of the 1980s coming-of-age subgenre and Weird Science (1985) is a true teen boy’s dream film. Uncle Buck (1989), though perhaps on the second tier of his work, is one of the great John Candy performances of all time – topped only by this week’s selection.

And that’s only his directing work. He produced a ton of films and also wrote ones he didn’t direct, including National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) – probably the most quoted road-trip movie of all time – and Home Alone (1990), which exploded across the screens when it came out and remains arguably one of the greatest Christmas films ever made.

Which brings me to this week’s selection. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is one of those films that, when you came across it on television back when we used to channel surf, you had to just sit down and watch it. It sucks you in. A prefect odd couple road trip movie, set just before Thanksgiving with two men trying to get to Chicago in time for the family dinner. Steve Martin as his strait-laced uncomfortable best; John Candy in a performance has depth and heart that undergirds the sweet annoying comedic veneer. Consider that this and Midnight Run (1988, QFS No. 64) came out within one year of each other – two classic odd couple road trip films that are up there with some of the great comedies of all time. Well, that’s pretty terrific.

John Hughes was great at setting up a finish line, a destination or an event that the film was building up towards. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off it’s the end of the school day. In Some Kind of Wonderful (1985) directed by Howie Deutch, it’s the prom. In Vacation, it’s getting to Wally World. Here, it’s Thanksgiving, just over the horizon, Chicago as the film’s Oz. Hughes was a master of mainstream storytelling, but with depth and heart. He just knew how to make his comedies feel somehow meaningful in a bigger way but simple and grounded. I once worked with Howie Deutch, one of his long-time partners, so I have a few fun stories I remember that I’ll try to share in the film chat.

So watch (or rewatch for the 523rd time) Planes, Trains and Automobiles and join us to chat about it. I have two extra tickets to go see it at the New Beverly on Tuesday, so hit me up if you want one. This is going to be a great one to see with a crowd.

It’ll be our last group chat for a couple weeks, so I hope you’ll be able to join on Thanksgiving Eve and discuss what we’re grateful for – which hopefully includes the work of John Hughes. See you then!

*Low bar, I know. I can’t think of an actual “Thanksgiving movie” but this one comes close, even though I’d call it a buddy picture-road trip movie more than a Thanksgiving movie. Scent of a Woman (1992) could arguably make the same claim, but that too is a sort of road trip movie over Thanksgiving weekend. 

**This surprised me, given his outsized influence on the 1980s in general and my childhood in particular.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) Directed by John Hughes

Reactions and Analyses:
I have seen Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) so many times it’s virtually impossible to remember a time when I didn’t know every word of the film. Not only because I love the movie, but also I grew up in a time when it would rerun on television quite a bit, and when it did I was powerless but to sit down and watch it. But I had never seen it in the theater before – I would’ve been a tad too young in 1987 to see this one when it came out – so when it appeared on the New Beverly calendar during Thanksgiving week, I had to take the chance to see it. And since we hadn’t selected any of John Hughes’ work for QFS, an opportunity for an in-person viewing for an online discussion was one we couldn’t pass up.

At its core, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a story about class. Hughes says it himself in this terrific oral history of the making of the film published by Vanity Fair November 2022:

I like taking dissimilar people, putting them together, and finding what’s common to us all. Part of the point is there are a privileged few who operate between New York and Los Angeles or London and Paris. But if something screws up and they get off the exclusive track, it’s someone like Del Griffith who knows how to get them home. What kept the movie going was the opposites—two dissimilar guys. If it weren’t for a storm, someone like Neal Page would never meet a guy like Del.

We see this in so many of his films, most notably The Breakfast Club (1985), where students from different social classes are forced to meet and work together. It struck us in the group that there is no current filmmaker filling this role as it pertains to class divisions, at least no one that comes to mind. And definitely no one doing it as authentically as Hughes – perhaps Harold Ramis and John Landis come close. Frank Capra is the one who probably came closest to Hughes forty years earlier. The Capra comparison is probably most apt, though I’d argue that Hughes seasons his happy endings with a little bittersweetness whereas Capra I’d say applies a little syrup.

And in many ways, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is entirely about class privilege. Neal (Steve Martin) can usually skate by with his wealth and status, but right away, his first indignity, is having to take a city bus to the airport. His next one is being denied his rightful place in first class on the airplane. Until his credit cards burn to a crisp in the car fire, Neal is able to rely completely without physical cash whereas Del Griffith (John Candy) has to count every coin and needs to use his wits (shower rings as earrings!) to scrape together additional cash. And it’s upon Del that Neal depends – he sees the benefit of kindness and being content with your true self. And Neal, too, by eventually coming around and seeing Del’s innate kindness, gets Del to finally admit that his wife is dead and he has no place to really go home to.

Neal and Del in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) Directed by John Hughes

The beauty in this film (and perhaps all of Hughes’ work) is that no person is all one thing – Del is not all annoying; Neil isn’t just a jerk. They’re humans, with flaws, but with several dimensions to them (The Breakfast Club does this particularly well… but you can argue that Ferris in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986, is the one Hughes character that’s less flawed than his other characters). And it’s through Hughes’ writing and casting that he’s able to make this happen. Few people humanize and cast “real” seeming people like Hughes can, and for a moment let’s set aside the obvious goofy charm of John Candy in this legendary performance. Look at all the other minor characters in the film – they’re all incredibly quirky but they feel fully real, fully human. Owen who takes them to Wichita (Dylan Baker), Edie McClurg as the rental car agent with probably the greatest button to a scene you can have, long-time character actor Larry Hankin as “Doobie” the cab driver, the hotel clerk (Martin Ferrero), Michael Mckean as the cop who pulls them over – all feel “real” or “real-ish.” Hughes’ world feels like our world because it’s populated by real people. Compare this with, say, the Farrelly Brothers or even the Coen Brothers who rely more upon caricatures and quirk than humanity.

There are so many memorable scenes that come to mind from Planes, Trains and Automobiles, aside from the profanity laden minute-long rant by Neal, which of course is legendary as the only reason the movie receives and “R” rating. The first time Neal talks with Del in the airport. When they’re on the plane together. The first Neal rant in the hotel is so eviscerating and bitterly hilarious that I had forgotten it happens so early in the film. The car burning down and then them driving it, and in particular the scene when they’re pulled over - which is a scene that still makes me laugh just thinking about it.

Watching this again, I argued that some of the 1980s cheesiness doesn’t hold up but much - the use of still frames and sappy music in particular. That didn’t bother the rest of the group. For me, this one scene in particular feels definitely of its time: when Neal verbally tears into Del at the hotel, Del is deeply hurt as he takes it in stride. Yet, he’s also self-aware of his personal flaws. At that moment, the music starts and, for my taste, this it’s a bit too much. John Candy is so good, so empathetic in his performance in that scene that for me, the music is unnecessary. Hughes uses it and would definitely be in line with the practices of a mainstream film of the 1980s. The ending montage of Neal piecing together that Del has been lying about his wife and home has a similar feeling of maybe being a touch out of date. Still, it is an effective way of being in Neal’s mind at that time. And the conclusion of the film, though satisfying, lays it on thick. Long live the ’80s!

That is to say, much of the film still retains an emotional gravity, especially given that it’s a comedy. When Neal later in the film is able to pay for a hotel room by bartering his fancy watch, Del can’t do the same (despite having a Casio) and is stuck sleeping in the burnt out car. Neal looks out the window - and again, he’s not just a jerk, he’s just wound up a little too tightly - Neal relents and asks Del to come inside and stay with him. It’s sweet and still pretty moving, given how many times I’ve seen the film.

A final note on my attachment to Hughes - he’ s a fellow Chicagoan. What this meant for me, growing up near Chicago when his movies came out, is that he captured a feeling of the city as a place that felt like the center of the world (with Ferris Buller’s Day Off being the prime example - they literally treat Chicago as their playground and hallowed escape from the drudgery of high school). The city was the center of my world, to be sure, and I was surprised when I got older and found out that Hughes’ movies set in and around Chicago was an outlier, not the norm.

From Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) Directed by John Hughes. I’m required by Chicagoan law to tell you that this skyline is fiction. There’s no view of the Chicago skyline like this off of that expressway in Chicago.

But being from the Midwest more broadly I think informs Hughes’ filmmaking as well. He writes about people that were familiar to him, about people he likely grew up around. It’s dangerous, of course, to generalize about a people of a paritcular region, but I always found that there are some common traits in the people I grew up with: unpretentious, generally kind, would bristle against injustice, and yes, you would run into someone like Del Griffith - chatty, no filter, unable to turn it off, generous to their core. And you’d also find people like Neal Page - prickly, uncomfortable in their own skin, but deep inside are reluctantly kind. Hughes captures these people in all their glory, throws them together, and creates true and earnest portrayals of humans in a way that we need to have return to big screens now and forever.

Beetlejuice (1988)

QFS No. 125 - The invitation for Ocboter 25, 2023
Well, it’s been 124 films in and we’re just now getting to see our first QFS selection of a Tim Burton film. I’m pretty surprised by that, but perhaps it’s because I’ve seen pretty much all of his films from his golden era of the mid 1980s until the 2000s. And then the 2000s hit and, well, the films start getting to be very much hit or miss.

Anyway, we’ll discuss Tim Burton’s legacy and work together so let’s save it for then! But let’s go back to the late 1980s when Beetlejuice comes out. Tim Burton comes out of Cal Arts as an artist with a through knowledge of the horror films from a generation before him. He hit the film scene with a terrific visual style and a unique take on the macabre, the unusual that’s on the fringe of horror and camp, between something that feels like a B-movie and something that feels like a big-budget whimsical fairytale. It’s hard to refute, but there are few directors of the last 40 years who have carved out a visual style so distinctive that their very name becomes shorthand for that style – “Burton-esque” if you will.

Burton’s first feature film was Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) which is a very goofy film road-trip adventure with the eponymous main character who is somewhere between an adult and a child. Not that long after that, he’s hired to direct Batman (1989) – which is astonishing when you think about it. A major studio put a legendary comic book in the hands of Tim Burton, to be the first one to create the Batman movie franchise. It would be akin to Wes Anderson given the reigns to Star Wars.

Burton pulls it off and puts his indelible stamp on Batman, very much leaning into the comic book and not the campy 1960s TV show – but also not the nihilistic action films they become under Christopher Nolan 25 years later. Burton brings a comic book to life and focuses on the eccentric as he does in all his films. Note how this approach, however, failed years earlier with David Lynch at the helm of Dune (1984), in which Lynch focuses on the unusual and grotesque above the adventure and main plot. It’s amazing a studio was still willing to give someone like Burton a shot given how much of a disaster Dune was financially.

Continuing on with Burton – Edward Scissorhands (1990) is quintessential Burton in its art direction, its unusual main character and it’s off-kilter and melancholic feel. Ed Wood (1994), continues in that fashion. There are number of hits he has going forward that feel original – Big Fish (2003), Sleepy Hollow (1999) and his various stop-motion animated films.

But I feel Burton went awry when given the duty of remaking films. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) is a real doozy as is Planet of the Apes (2001) – a film so bad that they remade it a few years later as if this one hadn’t happened, consequently launching an entirely “new*” franchise on the backs of very mediocre films (which we call it in the industry with the technical term: “today’s Hollywood”). Alice in Wonderland (2010) is utterly dreadful and borderline embarrassing as is Dumbo (2019). I could go on about this but you get what I’m saying – Burton’s work is (or was) at its best when he was given freedom to create something original.

And in those films, you’ll see one major common element: off-balance main character anti-heroes. If Edward Scissorhands is quintessential Burton, then this week’s film is probably peak Burton in that regard. (Note I have not mentioned the name of this week’s film three times because I know what happens when you do.) What is the difference between “quintessential” and “peak,” you ask? Well, join us to discuss this, Beetlejuice and also the legacy of Tim Burton.

Beetlejuice (1988) Directed by Tim Burton

Reaction and Analyses
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Beetlejuice is in its conception of the afterlife. With film’s ability to portray a physical realm with , verisimilitude what happens after you die has been a source of curiosity of filmmakers for more than a century. Constained only by one’s own imagination and influenced by religious traditions, previous artistic renderings of the afterlife, the post-death speculation has been rendered in the movies quite a bit, of course. Examples range from the painterly What Dreams May Come (1998) to the simple pulsating points of light of angels communicating from the stars in It’s A Wonderful Life (1947). There are courts for adjudication as in Defending Your Life (1991) or documentary testimonial interviews in the simple but terrific Afterlife (1998). There are so many more visions of the world of the dead - Coco (2017), Heaven Can Wait (1943 and 1978), Enter the Void (2009) - but these are a few that came to mind. And that doesn’t even touch upon the spirits of the dead walking among us with something left to do (Sixth Sense, 1999, or Ghost, 1990, for example).

Beetlejuice envisions a waiting room, akin to American DVM or any other bureaucratic institution, processesing and helping the recently (or not-so-recently) deceased continue into the afterlife. The afterlife waiting room scene is a pure stroke of Burton-esque genius. Every single character in that scene has a story about their life and their death just by seeing them. There is almost no explanation needed because the costumes of each dead person is so vividly portrayed. The magician’s assistant sawed in half, the office worker who’s been flattened by a car, and of course the hunter with the shrunken head and the tribesman - an entire story unto itself. These scenes are so genius and evoke the Star Wars (1977) cantina. Both are vibrant and bursting with the imagination of the filmmakers and tell stories all their own. (Also - this is the first time I caught that everyone working in the Beetlejuice waiting room all had committed suicide, now doomed to an eternity in civil service. Otho was right!)

The post-mortem processing center, as envisioned by director Tim Burton in Beetlejuice (1988). Those who committed suicide are condemned to work in the civil service - Burton’s trademark grim humor.

Most everyone (but, importantly, not everyone) in the QFS group had seen Beeltejuice but it had been some time. A few things stood out upon this rewatch and the first most obvious aspect is that the title character is barely on screen. He is on screen for 17 minutes. Seventeen! He’s teased and referred to quite a bit, of course, and appears in an “ad” on television, but in my memory of the film he has an outsized portion of screentime. That’s the kind of impact the character leaves on the memory, because when Michael Keaton comes on screen he just completely takes over, with that manic Jim Carrey-energy. He’s so obnoxious and simply lights the film on fire whenever he’s on screen. And man is Beetlejuice perverted. To distract him they have to create an afterlife brothel, which is pretty hilarious. That, in addition to glib jokes about suicide including Lydia (Winona Ryder) actively planning to do herself in - it struck me that this is definitely a film made in 1988 and not 2018.

The story at its core conceit is in part about the perils of making a pact with a gangster, a madman, a devil - and what the costs are. The costs here are that Lydia will be doomed to be stuck with a gross fellow. Yeah, that’s a sort of high price? The script, though textbook, has flaws that became apparent during viewing and discussion that I’ll get to below.

The opening shot of this film is excellent. What appears to be a helicopter or crane shot over the village, combined with Danny Elfman’s unforgettable score only to land on a wide shot of the (model) home. It’s not until the tarantula crests the roof and Adam (Alec Baldwin)’s hand reaches down to pick it up do you realize you’ve been seeing a model for the duration of that shot.

Opening shot of Beetlejuice (1988) is not a helicopter shot over a small town, it turns out.

Katherine O’Hara is so fantastic, especially when they’re possesed and singing “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” - boy that scene just comes out of nowhere and still is such goofy fun. The performances, everyone agreed, are overall solid but I personally felt that Winona Ryder was … not. Or was she just in a different movie? When Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam are trying to scare off the family but they fail and Beetlejuice, when they first “hire” him, becomes a giant snake, Ryder’s Lydia screams “I hate you! I hate all of you!” and it’s just totally odd. But now I’m thinking that this is a flaw of screenwriting to some extent. She is playing the quintessential Burton misunderstood teen goth girl, but isn’t given enough rope or scenes to be truly surprised, develop a rapport, then to earn a feeling of betrayal at that moment. The film, though following a sort of textbook “Save the Cat” type of script, it felt that it was thin with a noticeable lag in the middle of the script. Also, when Barbara comes in riding a snake, they’re violating the mythology of the story. No where beforehand was the snake anything other than something preventing their escape from the home. Where did she get the idea to do this? And how? And how did that work so easily? The filmmakers blow past the logic there in order to tie it up with a bang. Also - no one really has a character arc.

And yet, it’s still a classic, unique story that still holds up - Beetlejuice’s perversity aside. In fact, several in the group agreed that the scene where Otho conjurs up Adam and Barbara in their wedding clothes and they steadily age and start to die as a particularly harrowing and moving scene. It’s one that stayed with me, and several of us, over the years.

Last point - it’s truly amazing to me is that someone at a studio saw Tim Burton’s work and said “yes, that’s the man who we want to direct Batman (1989)!” In similar fashion, George Lucas strongly considered David Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi (1983) - Lynch of coruse did go on to direct a (rightly) trashed Dune (1984). Regardless of the results, the very fact of this is really astonishing. Both are such visionaries but with such avant-garde or “quirky” filmmaking styles, making movies in the equivalent of a hand-painted VW van, were given the keys to drive a street-racing Ferrari. What a different time! Nowadays, if you make some really terrific independent film or two, you could be considered for a Marvel film or perhaps helm a spinoff for a big-budget streaming series. But to launch the Batman franchise and truly ignite an era of comic book film adaptations? Amazing. Instead of dwelling on that long-gone past where studio executives were willing to take high risks, I’m choosing to see that as inspiration for all of us working away here in Hollywoodland.

The Player (1992)

QFS No. 123 - The invitation for October 4, 2023
The Player will be our first selection from the works of master Robert Altman since way back in 2000 with one of our early QFS selections, McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971, QFS No. 11). Unlike the Western setting of that film, The Player storyline takes place and is set in Hollywood.

 I know the basic setting and concept only from people who have told me about the movie because … I have never seen this film. This admission is usually met with the following response: What – but you work in the film industry! Yes, dingbat, I know that and yes, you’re right, it’s borderline shameful I haven’t seen it. I have no excuse, though I have attempted but failed over the years to remedy this problem by finally seeing it, including at numerous local theatrical screenings that I’ve missed for one reason or another.

Which is why I’m excited to see this now and discuss with you! I’m also curious to know what 1990s Hollywood thought about working in 1990s Hollywood and what it’s like to be working in that same industry 33 years later. I remain a big fan of Mr. Altman’s filmmaking and this is a major gap in my knowledge of his work that will soon be addressed.

The Player (1992) Directed by Robert Altman

Reactions and Analyses:
As someone who works in the film business - as do most people in the QFS discussion group - I was struck how deeply cynical The Player (1992) is. I shouldn’t have been; the spirit of the film reflects what was almost certainly Robert Altman’s perception of the industry at this point in his career.

Altman comes to prominence in the 1970s with the great wave of American auteurs and finds critical acclaim for his films, especially Nashville (1975), MASH (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). These films all feature his voice as a filmmaker, with long fluid camera movement and at times a documentary-type approach to dialogue and interaction between the characters in the film.

But then, in 1980, he directs Popeye (1980) which utterly bombs in the box office. You could see the aftershocks int he 1980s - Altman has a long string of unremarkable films. Or at least films that have not endured the way his other films have. While other ’70s auteurs, like Martin Scorsese, Alan Pakula, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma find their way with bigger budgets and films - not to mention George Lucas and Steven Spielberg - it’s Altman who is likely up against forces attempting to curtain his maverick spirit. He’s coming up against corporate filmmaking and isn’t really able to break through.

Until he makes The Player, ironically, in 1992. His scathing indictment of the Hollywood system is the film that actually brings him back into the Hollywood fold. As one member of the QFS discussion group posited - this is a really bad movie about making really bad movies.

Personally, I don’t think it’s a really bad movie but it’s definitely a movie that skewers movie conventions. It’s spoofs crime movies, romance movies, thrillers, and of course - the repeated take down of the long-standing complaint of filmmakers everywhere: Hollywood’s desire for a happy ending. The nearly eight-minute opening shot is of course often discussed - a continuous tracking shot complete with zooms gives allows us to spy. We listen in through windows or walk-and-talking conversations about movies, film gossip, and truly terrible script pitches. The Graduate 2, pitched by the writer of The Graduate (1968), Buck Henry, is straight-up genius. It sets up the gossipy world we’re about to enter and is reminiscent of the terrific camera work that’s a hallmark of all Altman’s films. I was particularly reminded of Nashville, another exploration of an entertainment industry but with a less acerbic tone.

Part of the nearly eight-minute long opening shot from The Player (1992) Directed by Robert Altman

But back to Hollywood’s ubiquitous desire for happy endings - this is probably Altman’s biggest gripe and obviously the thing he never really does in his films. They usually end with something ambiguous or even tragic, as in McCabe & Mrs. Miller or bittersweet and off-kilter as in The Long Goodbye. Here, to achieve his happy ending, it’s all satire. Tim Robbins as “Griffin Mill” is struggling to keep his prominence in the studio, fighting the upstart Peter Gallagher (“Larry Levy”). He’s being stalked, then kills someone. He’s then suspected of murder. Then runs from the law. Then is caught. But then a year later, he’s running the studio. And gets the girl. It’s searing and brutal what Altman is saying here - immoral psychopaths run the film business. Altman has claimed this is light satire, but this feels more like a brutal takedown and indictment.

The fascinating thing about this movie is the abundance of cameos. It features the most amount of Oscar nominees in a single film - because they’re all playing themselves. Except then you get Whoopie Goldberg (“Detective Susan Avery”) who shows up and is holding an Oscar in her first scene - but she’s not playing herself, an Oscar winner and former host. It’s just on the edge of being too cute for its own good.

Flowers and the perfect life crowd the frame in the final shot of The Player (1992), a parody of Hollywood’s desire for happy endings.

Shameless people who will suffer no consequences - if this ever was a film for the #metoo era, or to show the conditions that bring about people who act without fear of repercussions, this is it. It was particularly unnerving to watch this during the WGA strike - not only does a studio executive actually murder someone, but there is another studio executive (Larry Levy) who comes up with a story idea just by reading the paper and says writers can be eliminated. Despite being definitely a product of the early 1990s - as evidenced by the phones and in-car fax - it is more than relevant for today in that respect.

The entire film is worth it to see the payoff of Habeas Corpus coming together and basically doing all the things that the director claimed they wouldn’t do - sell out and make it commercial. The fact that they have Bruce Willis, who is probably in the top 3 greatest action stars in the world at this time along with rising star Julia Roberts in this fake movie within the movie is truly fantastic. And the movie is so bad that it’s perfect for the “light satire” Altman wants to portray here.

Blood Simple (1984)

QFS No. 4 - The invitation for May 20, 2020
I have some peculiar blank spots in my film knowledge, many of them shameful for a filmmaker. Here’s one: I admit it, I have never seen Blood Simple, first film of the Coen Brothers (Miller’s Crossing, Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men, Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, A Serious Man, True Grit.)

I listed all those other films in the parenthesis just to prove that yes, I do quite love their filmmaking and movies and yes I’ve seen all of those, you jerk. I just can’t explain it, but by chance I have never seen the film that put them on the map.

BUT – and this should give me some snobby filmmaking cred to help repair my damaged reputation from revealing the above  – I did see  A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (2009) which is the MANDARIN LANGUAGE REMAKE with GERMAN SUBTITLES in a theater at the BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL. Take that, you judgmental fellow film snobs…

Regardless, I’m looking forward to watching what I assume and hope is an English language production. Because I can’t read German or follow Mandarin. And looking forward to finally watching the biggest part of the Coen Brothers’ origin story as filmmakers.

Blood Simple (1984) Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

Reactions and Analyses:
After the opening preamble, the first scene shows Abby (Frances McDormand) driving with Ray (John Getz) in the rain. For maybe two minutes it’s a two-shot from behind the driver and passenger, the rain is pouring down the windshield and so pitch black that you can’t see anything outside the window and barely anything inside the car. When headlights from outside the window flash up, blinding the frame, there’s a moment to readjust your eyes to the scene - which remains the same two-shot.

There’s something about this beginning that is not only ingenious from a filmmaking standpoint but also provides a set up for the story. The two are talking about a having gun that was a gift from her husband, that she’s leaving her husband (who is not the driver), and the man who is driving works for the husband. The setup is classic - gives us an expository framework, explains some of the setup, sets a mood, and suggests something ahead. The two aren’t yet having an affair but they’re about to start one.

Opening sequence from Blood Simple (1984) sets up story, conflict, character, mood - and is done on the cheap.

And while that’s all excellent storytelling, the ingenuity of the Coen Brothers’ opening here is in the filmmaking. The filmmakers didn’t have a lot of money - it’s their first film and this is a bare-bones independent production in which they had to virtually panhandle for to raise funding. This is a very inexpensive way to shoot this scene. The car is almost certainly not moving, water is probably being sprayed on the windshield while someone on the crew shakes it. Someone else is mimicking street lights. Add rain sounds, car noise and haunting music and you can pull this scene off. The remaining elements - a shot of the moving road that precedes this one, a shot of the bumper coming to a stop on the road - and you’ve got a low-budget, high-impact scene and the audience will feel as if they were in the car with these two characters, moving through a rainy Texas night.

Of course, in addition to production cleverness, you also need the artistry. The artistic filmmaking that follows is entirely contained within the first five minutes of the film and continues apace throughout. About halfway through the film, after Ray discovers that the husband Julian (Dan Hedaya) is dead and decides to hide the body - that sequence is entirely without dialogue for 18 minutes. And it is textbook suspense storytelling. Ray makes the discovery, then makes a decision, then has to prevent the other employees at the bar from discovering the body. He has to get it out, dump the bloody clothes in the incinerator, has to dispose of the body. But the body isn’t a body - it’s Julian, and he’s come back to life! He now has to kill a dead man, but a semi truck almost smashes into them! Then he finally gets the body into a hole but there’s enough life in Julian that he raises a gun but there are no bullets and Ray gently takes the gun from him. He makes the harrowing choice to bury Julian alive - a choice that haunts Ray throughout the remainder of the film.

“How could he have survived that long” is a reasonable question. But it leads to a pretty fantastic sequence in Blood Simple.

It’s the meat of the film and it’s just on the border of believability (that Julian could have lasted that long), but that’s the one thing that requires a tiny suspension of disbelief. Everything else seems entirely plausible - the messiness, the panic, the confusion, the opportunity. If movies have taught us anything, it’s very difficult to dispose of a corpse. And especially difficult if that corpse isn’t yet a corpse.

The ambient sounds, the sparse use of music, the darkness and shadows, lit by headlights or neon signs in the bar or the light from the incinerator - all of this is textbook filmmaking. This 18-minute sequence should be required study for all filmmakers. The choice of shots, when to move the camera, when to be on a close-up, the framing relative to the horizon, the staging of the actors and action. The film is a neon-inflected film-noir, with cigarette smoke floating up in soft purples and blues, with a pace that keeps moving without feeling rushed. Blood Simple feels like the assured hand of an expert filmmaker, not first-timers as Joel and Ethan Coen were in 1984.

People, rightly so, talk about the final shot of the film of the dripping faucet as one of the enduring images of the film. I’d argue this opening sequence holds equal significance artistically and narratively.

Final shot from Blood Simple from the dying Private Detective Visser’s point of view.

One of the fun things about watching Blood Simple is knowing that this is the starting point of the Coen Brothers, their origin story. People who get in over their heads and try to navigate criminal behavior without any real ability to do so. Characters like Private Detective Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) who totally lack self-awareness and usually morals. And some John Carpenter-esque camera angles - the super-wide angle lens fast-moving Steadicam shots or objective angles on a bloody finger or feet walking.

Blood Simple does make it difficult for you to root for any one in particular. Everyone is a sweaty, greedy, selfish maniac. Perhaps Abby - but she’s no saint either. She’s This is a hallmark of the Coens as well. They’re not in it for heroism or a clean ending, not in the way Hollywood has conditioned us to expect. They show people - at times overtly quirky folks but usually just ordinary people - in all their messiness, dealing with primal human emotions. Love, pain, hatred, fear, paranoia and, very occasionally, joy.

Ray drives away in the morning mist after burying Julian in Blood Simple. The location feels real, like we’re in small-town Texas complete with sweat and airborne bugs landing on faces.

There’s something oddly pure about Blood Simple - and I don’t mean the plot of course. The craft is expert level but the story is simple despite the twists and complexities of the relationships. From the vantage point of forty years after this Coen Brothers origin story, there’s a parallel with Wes Anderson. Not stylistically, of course, but in how their films evolve. There’s a “Coen Brothers” film that becomes iconic, the way there are “Wes Anderson Films.” The characters behave in a way you expect them to behave in a style you expect - that’s what makes Anderson and the Coens have a similar feeling, career-wise, from how I look at it today.

For the Coeans, it’s goofy or quirky characters in bizarre situations that can range from realistic to overtly stylized. And at the root of it is money. People need money and are thrust into situations where ill-gotten money gets people in trouble and it spirals out of control. The Big Lebowski (1998), Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), Raising Arizona (1987, but the money is kids), Burn After Reading (2008), The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) - all have something to do with money and usually people who don’t have any but need some and do something they usually wouldn’t to get it.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing in any way. A generation earlier thoroughly enjoyed an Alfred Hitchcock film in much the same way - suspenseful, twists, ordinary people getting in over their heads. And now, there exists a Coen Brother Movie archetype. There wasn’t one in 1984. So I try to put myself in that time when watching Blood Simple, of seeing a Joel and Ethan Coen film for the first time without any additional knowledge of what are the expected beats and twists one might expect in one of their films. If you look at it that way - Blood Simple is nothing but a dark, thrilling, suspenseful, film - an explosion of film talent splayed across the screen that, hopefully, continues to endure well into the future.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

QFS No. 2 - The invitation for May 6, 2020
SR note: Since this was only the second time we had a virtual film chat, the invitation format had not been standardized as this was a novel concept for all of us. Enjoy!
Thank you to all of you who joined our first ever Quarantine Film Society get together last week. It featured filmmakers, filmmaker adjacents, and civilians. It was a lot of fun and technology only failed us (well just me) once.

But it was a success in that we talked about the movie, about filmmaking, and went off topic a reasonable amount of times. So wonderful to see you all who joined – we spanned three time zones!

So this week, let’s pick something perhaps totally opposite from the elegant, graceful, fantastical imperial China depicted in last week’s selection. Since we’re all living in the apocalypse or perhaps the early stages of it, let’s watch something informational and perhaps a little cautionary.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Yes.

Okay, two confessions: first – I truly love Road Warrior and Mad Max: Fury Road. Second – I have never seen Thunderdome save for a few glimpses on WGN while growing up in Chicago.

As perhaps with you, “thunderdome” is my stand by phrase for anything that has no rules with chaos as its only governing principle and where destruction is the norm. It entered the zeitgeist after this film and entered our collective lexicon even if you haven’t seen the movie.

Related point – if you come to our home you will see that we have our fenced-in children play area in our main room which we have dubbed “Baby Thunderdome.” No holds barred, very few rules and the only directive is “to survive.” So far, both children have. But for how long?

One of my crowning achievements as a parent is to make the term “thunderdome” part of our family’s daily vocabulary. Truly, nothing will top that. It has become canon.

Anyway, I really admire George Miller’s commitment to this kinetic and unflinching version of the apocalypse and I want an excuse to watch it – and to help prepare for our real-world version thereof. And also I’m looking for additional tips to make our baby version of thunderdome approach this on-screen version even more.

So here it is. Join us if this crazy departure is worth your time.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) Directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie

Reactions and Analyses:
Written in December 2023 - In hindsight, this seems like an odd choice for our second film. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is not exactly a work of art that has endured the test of time. (You could argue that The Road Warrior, 1981 and Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015 have.) But in May 2020, it definitely felt like we were on the brink of an apocalypse and, well, let’s prepare ourselves with the insights from a film that shows our possible near-to-distant future.

Why is this film so vastly inferior to its predecessor and its successor? It has the same basic set up and premise as those films do - a single man, in a post-apocalpytic wasteland, looking out only for himself, finds himself bound by his moral code to care about others and to guide them in their quest - despite his desire for solitary survival.

Not knowing anything about the film other than the word “thunderdome” becoming a part of the standard English lexicon and that “thunderdome” appears in the titles, it seemed as if Thunderdome would have a more definitive narrative role in film. The title prepares the viewer to imagine that that Thunderdome will perhaps represent a climactic or thematic aspect of the film. “Fury road” certainly does - a mad escape route, a main thoroughfare literally and figuratively for that Mad Max movie.

But here, Thunderdome happens almost at the beginning of the film. Very early on, Max (Mel Gibson) has to fight in this gladiatorial arena against Master Blaster (Angelo Rositto, Paul Larsson and Stephen Hayes - which is amazing that it took three people to portray this wild creation). Ultimately, Max survives, does not kill Master Blaster, but Aunty (Tina Turner) wins and exiles Max into the Wasteland.

Mad Max (Mel Gibson) swinging through Thunderdome in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) directed by George Miller. The sheer inventiveness of the Thunderdome concept is pretty astonishing and worth examining for its art direction, costume design, special effects and stunt work.

Brief aside about Thunderdome - the set piece is a true stroke of George Miller genius. It’s perfectly conceived, and I mean that in a filmic sense. It’s entirely impractical as a way of adjudicating disputes and is almost illogical in how it could’ve come to be. Setting aside that, it’s a perfect terror-dome by which all other terror-domes are measured - the art design, the filmmaking, the novelty of it - this is all pure Miller.

The rest of the film doesn’t really follow suit, in part because when you showcase your most ingenious idea up front, it’s hard to go anywhere after that. There are exceptions, of course - you could argue that the battle on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back (1981) puts its greatest set piece up front with the battle on the snow planet to start the film. Following that model, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome would have to have its emotional “set piece” at the end. It’s not a film that sets up an emotional set piece, and certainly not in the way The Empire Strikes Back does of course.

The chase sequence on the railroad tracks is also pretty spectacular so there is a companion action piece in the film. But our criticism of the film is certainly not in its action pieces, which remain top notch even when seeing the film thirty-five years after its release.

It’s entirely possible that this film is far too unusual compared to the others in the series. Road Warrior is straightforward in its concept, as is Fury Road, in its basic plot. But the plot in Beyond Thunderdome is convoluted. The film focuses far more on the world created than the plot. So then you’re forced to reckon with how unusual it all is. In that I mean - let’s start with Bartertown. It’s powered by literal pig shit. The Underworld is really a disgusting place that, even now, I’m wincing just picturing it. The interlude of the tribe of children and teenagers is long and trying to be overly sentimental but it’s odd and defies logic. They are descendants of a crashed 747 when the apocalypse began, which is a truly inventive creation - but thinking about it for a few seconds it doesn’t really make sense how they exist. I know that all of the Mad Max films stretch credulity, but there are aspects in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome where the stretch is either a bit too much or there are one too many. Throw in a weak plot, then you have a recipe for a film with astonishing visuals but very little else.

Aunty (Tina Turner) and Max in the Thunderdome. Just give us more Thunderdome, that’s all we want.

I don’t think we gathered valuable insights into what to expect or how to survive our own seemingly inevitable apocalypse by watching this film. Still - no one pictures a post-apocalyptic world as inventively as George Miller. This film reminded us just how difficult it is to create that world and how masterfully he has done it in the other iterations of the Mad Max saga.