So these are the problems I have with porn: I’m unconvinced, and it’s not sexy. I understand that there are millions of people who disagree with me, including my husband. To these people, I say: whatever.

I generally enjoy good acting and believable plot. This is not to say that I am incapable of willingly suspending my disbelief; it’s that the suspension can only last so long. In Debbie Does Dallas, there is a shower sex scene that is one of the least convincing scenes I have ever watched. Everyone is supposed to be in high school; the men are clearly something like 35 years old, and the woman in this scene has a scar from a cesarean section. I think there was a used bandaid on the floor, although Mike tried to convince me that it was used chewing gum, as if that were somehow more appropriate to the mood. That being said, maybe porn from back in the day is closer to what I should enjoy than what’s available today since the people look like real people, and they actually attempt to tell a story that contains sex instead of consisting of a nebulously linked series of sex vignettes.

Still, I wouldn’t want to attempt to have a conversation with most of the people in Debbie Does Dallas, much less have them touch me. I suppose the degree to which we are creatures of our time can be comical. While the perhaps naïve seventies idea that porn should have plot is appealing to me, I don’t want to see any of those grody seventies people naked ever again. Being a big fan of twenty-first century hygiene standards, and being a fairly unhairy person myself, I present you with the problem I had last night: the hairy girl ass hole. That’s right. I didn’t know this was something women had to deal with. Unfortunately, the girl having the ass-sex in Debbie Does Dallas didn’t deal with it at all. I couldn’t pay much attention to the rest of the movie because I was on the internet researching the hairy girl ass hole phenomenon that my husband assured me was common. So my rating is pretty much for the film up to the point that the ugly hairy-ass-holed girl takes the cock in her colon.

In Days of Heaven, writer and director Terrence Malick uses an essentially simple story to show viewers exactly how tied to the earth we are. Beautiful, captivating studies of the landscape are punctuated with shots of the farmer’s obnoxious and towering, vibrant and gaudy Victorian-style house. Malick really got this one right. This is what plantation houses feel like: huge monstrosities rising up from parts of the earth so flat you could believe we’re not living on a sphere at all, surrounded by swaths of farmland, cut off from anything that could be considered a community. Community, certainty, accomplishments, friendship, love, life, and even heaven are all fleeting. At some point, no matter how high we fly, how close we get to heaven, we all must return to the ground.

The idea of heaven in the film is really interesting. At one point, when Abby has accepted the idea of making a life—fake or not—with the farmer, she explains to young Linda why she’s doing this. She talks about how hard her life has been in the past, and as the two of them sit indoors for the first time since they’ve been on the farm, relaxing and enjoying the easiness that life can sometimes offer, Abby says, “This is not so bad.” This is a little piece of heaven. A taste. A view. But our protagonists are tied to the earth.

There are many ways that Malick gets this concept across in Days of Heaven. Perhaps one of the most effective ways is his use of animals—birds and dogs in particular. There are birds and dogs everywhere in the film. The migrant workers seem to identify with the birds. Everyone wants to fly, to be closer to heaven. They are usually not successful. Even as the workers come to the farm, leaving the last chapter of their lives in the past, they “fly” in on the tops of the the train cars. The camera’s suggestion of this “flight” is reinforced by the perky music of the soundtrack, which is so different from the eerie music and ambient sounds that had made up the soundtrack before that point in the film.

The circus performers fly in more literally, in their man-made attempts to become like birds—airplanes. This is when I really started to notice the divide between those who long to fly, and those who are content to hunt and live always tied to the earth. Those who manage the earth try to hunt and tie down those who work the earth. Bill, Linda, and Abby are immediately enamored of the flying circus, while the farmer takes a bit longer to see their appeal, because the farmer doesn’t see the point of flying away.

The workers repeatedly identify with birds throughout the film, but the scenes with the hunting dogs are a successful counterpoint to the workers’ need for flight. There are many scenes of Bill and the farmer involved in the various stages of hunting, including an especially striking scene where the farmer holds the dogs off the birds they are hunting. Bill always seems uncomfortable hunting, and at one point, the farmer brings this up. Bill stops dressing his bird, stands, and confesses that he just can’t do this anymore. The farmer doesn’t seem to understand: this is simply a part of life. But Bill is a bird, not a dog. Even in the climactic scene where the farmer/hunter/dog comes after Bill who is working on his bike, Bill kills the farmer, but Bill was the one being hunted. He never initiates fights or confrontations; and when presented with the fight or fly scenario, he may fight, but afterward he always flies. And as I mentioned before, birds and those who want to fly must always return to the earth, and that’s where Bill ends up at the end of the film—dead, returned to the earth.

It seems difficult to write something new and exciting about a cinematic masterpiece that’s been studied and analyzed for thirty years, so you’ll excuse me if I abandon profundity in favor of enthusiasm. Days of Heaven is of course the second of Terrence Malick’s four film communiqués to the outside world, a beautiful stream-of-consciousness poem that many (myself included) consider his finest. The story may revolve around a love triangle between two farmhands and the farm’s wealthy owner, but I’d like to write about another important character: the land itself.

The farmhands may be caretakers of the land, but their attachment to and reliance on it is absolute; working, but also praying, reveling, sleeping. Time passes in erratic bursts, sounds moving in and out of the foreground, jockeying for position with Ennio Morricone’s fantastic score. Each painstaking edit is a reminder of the monolithic presence of nature and the tenuousness of man’s existence within it. Nature is overpowering, and not to be fucked with. Fuck not with the towering canyons or swaying fields of grain dwarfing humanity, nor with the multitudes of animals who tolerate the passing actions of man.

I tried to keep a tally of the staggering number of animals onscreen, from the first majestic appearance of the buffalo to the otherworldly swarm of locusts that indifferently destroys the farm’s fragile equilibrium. Otters, pheasants, horses, rabbits, frogs, deer, grasshoppers, ducks, wolves, fish, peacocks, seagulls, antelope, cranes, sheep – a never-ending parade of the voiceless who nevertheless form a phalanx of central characters.

And while the land is immutable, the owner’s house is always a distant and flimsy icon, a grim beacon of interiority amongst a people freed by their communion with the earth. It isn’t until halfway through the film that we see the first real interior shot, the human space that locks out the wild and shits on the rhythm of life and makes people suspicious, devious, murderous. Here the illusion of tamed nature is briefly perpetuated, nature viewed through milky glass or glimpsed in a picture book.

But the deception can’t last. Seeds sprout, fires cut a swath of destruction and renewal, a colossal forest crawls towards the sky. But for all its focus on natural law, I think Days of Heaven is still a profoundly human story, and one that resonates precisely because it operates within a humbling context: the entirety of existence.

The Horror! The Horror! The Medusa Touch is just horrifying! Except that it’s just not.

There was a time when I didn’t like horror at all. I thought it was a waste of my movie-watching energy. Then I met my wonderful husband, and many of my opinions changed. The problem, though, is that whereas pre-Mike, I expected little to nothing out of even a classic horror film, he has honed my horror-viddying skills, and now I expect a lot from this category.

This is highly problematic with horror because every year, horror writers and directors up the ante, meaning that what was truly disturbing last year might be merely troubling this year. So, then, how can a horror flick stand the test of time? This is where the shock and creepiness factors come in.

The shock factor could more appropriately be referred to as originality. For example, Rosemary’s Baby has been done. The same idea in a new film could not be shocking anymore. No matter how much gore and scary music and twenty-first century updating you add to it, it’s already been done, and the reason why it holds up, the reason why it’s still scary is because of the originality of its premise. The Medusa Touch also has elements of shock and originality, too, mostly in the basic subject matter of the film, as opposed to any filmic devices that it could have employed.

While the creepiness factor plays in a bit with Rosemary’s Baby, this is where The Medusa Touch really shines. This is mostly achieved through the implementation of the creepy kid. High creepiness levels in children are probably the most effective way to add creepiness to your horror flick. As a child, John Morlar discovers his creepy ability to wish disasters into reality. Apparently, even as a child, his eyes and his gaze are creepy enough to freeze his enemies, hence the Medusa theme in the film. The creepy child element really carries The Medusa Touch and made it interesting for me. The older Burton’s character grows, the less exciting his telekinetic powers seem, the less evil his actions feel, even as the disasters he causes swell in scale.

But I also liked the psychological weariness that Burton’s character experiences, the wish for death or at least respite from his evil gift. So I’m not sure that I would have enjoyed the movie more if its timeline had been confined to John Morlar’s childhood exploits. All of the smallish problems I had with The Medusa Touch immediately after viewing have faded as I’ve considered it for the past couple of days. I can’t think of how to make it better. So while it may not be “horrifying” in the exact way I tend to think of horror—in a more truly scary, contemporary way, I suppose—it seems right for its time and its overall style, and I would guess that it would improve with repeat viewings.

They certainly don’t make movies like Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch these days, and that’s a crying shame. It’s wickedly clever and features a host of excellent performances, including wonderful turns by Richard Burton as John Morlar, a dying writer who may possess the ability to kill with his mind, and Lino Ventura as the dapper French detective sent to discover who tried to murder him. It’s a picture that happily defies categorization, starting as a very mannered murder mystery and ending as a supernatural thriller.

The film plays with illusions of choice beautifully – or as Ventura puts it so eloquently as he passes a war memorial, “To build a cenotaph, first choose a million victims.” As Morlar descends into madness, he comes to see his own hand in every death and disaster the world over, and with increasing flippancy he dispatches the people that surround him. Does his choice, however wanton, eliminate or enforce the arbitrary nature of death? Indeed, when Morlar himself is confronted with death, the audience must ask whether or not they believe in his power, and if they do, is his attempted murder really his method of committing suicide?

Labyrinthine logic of this nature abounds, and for the most part the film stays on the rails. The dialogue is exceedingly clever and worth the price of admission all by itself. Burton is a whirlwind and naturally reaps the choice lines, although Ventura’s casual, confident style is the movie’s secret anchor. Morlar’s psychiatrist Zonfeld, played by Lee Remick, is definitely the weak link in what should be a solid trio of memorable performances, although the character’s linear trajectory could be more interesting than it appears at first glance – from the second she met Morlar, did she cede control of her actions to his will?

Not content to remain a pure psychodrama, the film also blithely juggles Freud, nuclear proliferation and a homosexual relationship for Ventura. With so many interesting themes and two such charming leads, the film suffers most from being as short as it is. But though some dangled threads are never pulled, there’s little to keep me from recommending The Medusa Touch to anyone looking for wit, class, and some devilish twists.

From the Everyman-style naming of the characters to the ridiculous soundtrack, The Driver’s attempt at drama lands closer to farce, a wet dream for the TNT network weekend movie scheduling team. Softer cat and mouse parts of the final chase that would be naturally tense without a soundtrack are paired with apparently random jazzy trumpet honks and squeals. There’s never any music during conversation scenes, and this is countered by a strange, “sneaking henchman” score during the robbery sequences.

Ryan O’Neal’s character is smooth and convincing, a subtle performance. Everyone else seems heavy-handed, like they thought they were in a theatrical production instead of a film. The detective calls the driver “the cowboy” the whole movie, since calling him “the driver” clearly wasn’t silly enough. Every conversation with the detective made me think of the boss from the British version of The Office. He was downright uncomfortable to watch, but unfortunately, The Driver offers neither comedy nor social commentary. Along with the cowboy theme, the detective is big on one-liners, like he thinks he’s John Wayne, wishing he were as cool as the driver but knowing he’s not and making up for it with witty banter: “I’m gonna catch the cowboy that’s never been caught. Cowboy desperado!”

Maybe it would have been better as a silent film. That way the distracting soundtrack wouldn’t matter; additionally, “the detective” wouldn’t have been able to speak, so maybe it would have been reasonably enjoyable. As is, I found The Driver boring and annoying, perhaps because action movies have changed a great deal throughout my lifetime, but perhaps because it’s just not a good film. It shouldn’t matter when a movie was made. There are classics that were made before my parents were born that I still find relevant; why should I second-guess myself because an action movie hasn’t stood the test of time?

Hot on the heels of our joint review of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, it’s time to take a look at an early work by another writer-turned-director, Walter Hill. Hill is an icon, writing or co-writing the first three Alien movies and Peckinpah’s excellent heist pic The Getaway, in addition to helming perennial underground favorite The Warriors.

The Driver has developed quite the cult following amongst car-chase aficionados, and it’s easy to see why. There are three first-class chase sequences spaced evenly throughout the picture, and each one has its own stunt set-piece and funky internal logic. The best of the three is definitely the staged chase in which Ryan O’Neal, as the titular unnamed protagonist, shows his skills to a trio of potential clients by systematically destroying their car during a parking-garage psych-out. The chases are very composed and serene by today’s standards: the first is completely silent except for the persistent wailing of police sirens – wordless, no soundtrack – many cuts to O’Neal’s stoic face set in concentration but no glimpses of the pursuing officers, until it starts to seem like he’s being chased through Manhattan by a pack of eerie howling wild animals.

Outside the car, O’Neal does his best Steve McQueen impression and keeps his mouth shut, fitting right in with the film’s stark aesthetic. Hill’s vaguely noirish structural riffing is great fun an even half of the movie, and a little hard to swallow the rest of the time. The dialogue is as hard-boiled as it comes, and not always for the better – some lines clearly read better on paper. Bruce Dern hams it up as the detective bent on bringing O’Neal to justice, but his performance clashes with the overall tone, and I found myself impatient for the police-related interludes to end. The film locks into a tight groove in the last 30 minutes, but by that time the meandering stylistic inconsistencies almost kept me from jumping back in for the ride.

The Driver is an interesting, even charismatic little picture that always keeps a close orbit to its all-important chases. But it’s clear that at this point in Hill’s career he still had one foot in his screenwriting shoes and one in his directing shoes, trying to figure out how to walk a straight line without hopping on one leg.

Precious few exploitation films retain the power to shock and disturb as decades pass and audience tolerance evolves, making Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave, the great-grandma of the rape/revenge genre, all the more impressive. By turns reviled or sheepishly apologized-for, the time is well-past due for a reevaluation of this picture.

Grave’s dirty secret, of course, is that it is neither as bad as one would expect from the genre in terms of artistry, nor as unrelentingly horrifying as the sensationalistic title or poster would suggest. Zarchi is no genius, but he’s smart enough to build tension slowly and let more innocuous scenes linger unnervingly long, keeping the viewer off balance by interrupting any natural cadence. The lengthy spaces surrounding the film’s more acute atrocities ramp up the panic-inducing quotient considerably.

The gang rape is truly distasteful, and in a genre practically devised to portray rape as titillating, Grave is notable for being deliberately and monumentally uncomfortable. I find it interesting that none of the scenes of sexual violence are as protracted as what Maggie has coined the “foreplay rape” scenes, those scenes of harassment and dehumanization that precede the act of physical violation. The short, sharp shocks never last long enough to blunt their edges; this is mettle-testing material.

Despite an enjoyably epic castration scene (complete with operatic score), the revenge portion of the picture is more uneven and sports an utterly weird aquatic denouement. Part of my ambivalence towards this second act stems no doubt from my fundamental problem with the rape/revenge genre’s structure. The murderous retribution of the survivor, The Revenge, has always struck me as a particularly male-oriented brand of feminist wish-fulfillment. Are the emotions of any survivor as simple as homicidal rage? An eye for an eye can make for a superficially satisfied audience, but can this ultimately reductive view truly satisfy after such a harrowing and thought-provoking first act?

Within minutes of the start of the film our lady is skinny dipping in the river behind her newly rented summer house. There’s a very voyeuristic shot of her from across the lake, which feels even more so, since we’ve already seen her naked in close-up; the distance isn’t to spare her nudity, even in this early stage—it’s to show that someone is already watching.

Time and again, this film suggests there is much more to rape than the actual act. There is an interesting sort of foreplay rape that begins soon after the woman arrives in the small town. All of the times that the woman is victimized, in various ways, and forced to participate in the games of the men, form this foreplay rape. The foreplay is in the catcalling, in the interruption of her writing with constant childish speedboat antics, and perhaps most obviously, in the theft of her boat while she is still in it. While none of these acts are overtly sexual, it is clear that the rape has already begun. The woman is not in control of the story of her life—a theme that she runs with later as the second half of the movie unfolds.

For a subject that seems fairly commonly addressed, at least on CSI and similar shows, rape is still polarizing. Some people just can’t watch it. While the CSI view of rape is generally very clinical and filled with medical jargon and a clear victim and bad guy, watching a rape scene is entirely different and usually not done very well. I think this film does it amazingly well, which for me means convincingly, without seeming unnecessary.

The idea of the individual viewer’s threshold for any disturbing subject comes up again and again at our house. It seems like we’re always having people over and attempting to coax them into watching something that’s just a bit beyond the pale for them. One of the things that is difficult for some people to watch is rape. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to watch rape scenes if I had been raped, so in a way I feel a bit guilty for the strange brand of catharsis I feel when I watch a convincing rape scene. Every time the subject arises I recall statistics from my undergrad days, stating that 1 in 4 women are raped at some point, and while watching I feel both fear and relief that it hasn’t happened to me. I think this film really establishes the concept of rape as a change in a person’s master status. Instead of thinking of oneself as “white” or “female” or “a writer,” the first thing that a rape victim identifies herself as is “rape victim,” —a point that is driven home when our protagonist’s master status changes once more from “rape victim” to “murderer.”

The viewer or voyeur question is relevant for the entirety of the film. As she’s being chased through the forest, there’s a shot of an “innocent” bystander, who doesn’t even flinch as the pursuit continues. In each individual instance of rape, there are three voyeurs, whether holding down our victim or simply watching as her broken body is beaten down further. Are we also accomplices?