KILL A DRAGON (1967)

Meet Jack Palance, international man of adventure.

Not for our hero the high-class world of the Sixties superspy. In Michael D. Moore's movie Palance plays Rick Masters, a smuggler and salvager who lives on his own boat with his pool-hustler girlfriend (Alizia Nur). Their happy repose is interrupted one day when a trio of elderly Chinese gentlemen seek shelter on the boat. They're being pursued by agents of Nico Patrai (Fernando Lamas), a Portuguese who runs the so-called "Mafia of Macao." We were introduced to him earlier as he negotiated in typical hardball style with the Chinese elders on their native island. A ship carrying precious "Nitra-II" explosives has run aground on the island. It belongs to the islanders by right of salvage, but Patrai demands it for himself, or else. The islanders can't move it themselves and can't defend themselves against Patrai's goons. But after seeing a shirtless, shoeless Masters defend himself quite well against several of the goons who storm aboard the boat, they invite him to pick up the Nitra II and move it to Hong Kong. They offer him 1/4 of the take, but he negotiates it up to 1/3.

Fernando Lamas (finger upraised, right) would be a Bond villain if he could.

Masters puts together a motley team including a Scots-Chinese duo who stage fixed boxing-karate exhibition matches and his old pal Vigo (Aldo Ray), now an unenthusiastic tour guide. They battle their way into Patrai's compound to rescue the kidnapped island elders, then finesse their way to the island and the Nitra II. For a while, there's a little suspense over whether the crew will sell the islanders out to Patrai, or whether Palance will score with the island girl who persists in calling him her brother. But in time, of course, the gang will have to fight their way back to Hong Kong....

Don't let the "Dragon" in the title fool you. This isn't a martial arts film unless you count the art of brawling. The title actually refers to the legend of St. George, with whom a surprisingly cosmopolitan island elder equates Rick Masters, Patrai being the dragon. This is really an enthusiastic adventure film with a lot of old-timey pulp flavor, the stuff of contemporary "men's adventure" or "sweat" magazines. It has to be considered a B movie, but vivid location work in Hong Kong and environs and the help of an island full of extras enhance Kill a Dragon's production values beyond its budget. The virtual tourist in me thrills to the Hong Kong footage and the complete lack of fakery involved in filming them. The story itself is silly, the dialogue corny. The elders are prone to proverbs like "Every dragon give birth to St. George who slay it" or "It is the honor of the murdered that he is not the murderer." Even the villain has a hard time taking the story seriously; Lamas can't seem to help cracking smiles or smirks when he's in the power of his enemies. But the story here doesn't have to be taken seriously. It's the star performances that carry the film, whether they're intentionally or unintentionally entertaining.

Above, tourists appear to flinch from the breath of Your Tour Guide, Aldo Ray. Below: "Look, limey, you swish your way, and I'll swish mine!" is authentic dialogue from the movie.

Palance is clearly having fun playing the hero and doing all his own fight scenes in manly fashion, while Lamas is endearingly ludicrous as a vicious criminal overlord in a club jacket and loafers. Aldo Ray seems to have been hammered for the entire production, and that's a shame considering where his career had been, but I can't deny that his shameless turn here, including some time in a dress, added to my admittedly guilty enjoyment of this savory chunk of cinematic junk food. Kill a Dragon is a wild world of cinema campground I'll recommend to anyone who shares my pleasure in the cityscapes of the past, the meta-drama of troubled careers, and Jack Palance kicking ass. Oldtrailer09 has imported the Kill a Dragon trailer from TCM to YouTube. Check it out.

WICHITA (1955)

The 1950s were the golden age of the Hollywood western, but that's because the decade's filmmakers specialized in certain kinds of westerns. It was the age of the "adult" or "psychological" western that focused on personalities under the existential pressures of frontier life. Actors like James Stewart, Randolph Scott and even John Wayne played protagonists who were far from paragons of virtue, and often stepped close to the line dividing law from outlaw. By comparison, the archetype of the "town tamer" seemed old hat. Few of the decade's best westerns were about men cleaning up tough or wide-open towns. When the topic came up, the town-tamer was often portrayed with bitter irony, like Scott's thwarted avenger in Budd Boetticher's Decision at Sundown or Henry Fonda's mercenary marshal in Edward Dmytryk's Warlock. The town tamer survived the decade, however, in the burgeoning mythology surrounding the life of Wyatt Earp. Dead less than thirty years when Jacques Tourneur's movie was released, Earp would be lionized as the "brave, courageous and bold" hero of a TV series, while his deeds were sung ad nauseum by Frankie Laine on the soundtrack of the John Sturges blockbuster Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Wichita deals with Earp's time as marshal in the Kansas town, when he was in his mid-twenties -- about half the age of the actor playing him, Joel McCrea. The story's grounded in an actual event, when Earp led a group of citizens who repelled a gang of drunken cowboys who tried to storm into Wichita on a collective bender. Around this authentic and ultimately nonviolent episode Tourneur and writer Daniel B. Ullman weave a town-taming fantasy that seems more overtly political in its context today than it probably did back in the Fifties.

As in history, Earp arrives in Wichita after spending some time as a buffalo hunter. On his way in, he camps overnight with a band of cowboys driving cattle toward the town. Everyone seems sociable enough, but one of the cowboys (Lloyd Bridges) tries to steal Wyatt's roll of bills while he sleeps. Earp catches him in the act, but the cattle boss Wallace (Walter Sande) makes the men settle their difference with fists rather than guns. Earp prevails, of course, and rides ahead into town. The town is more than welcoming to the cowboys, boasting that "Everything Goes in Wichita." One dissenting voice is the local newspaper editor (Wallace Ford), who lost his wife to a random shot in a previous cowboy binge. Earp intends to start a business in town (probably not the sort the real Earp might open) but when he thwarts a bank robbery the city fathers offer him the marshal's job. He's reluctant at first; his courage isn't in doubt, but he isn't too keen on being a target for every crazy gunman who rides into town. As the cowboys grow predictably out of control and another innocent is killed by random gunfire, Wyatt overcomes his reservations and accepts the star. With the help of crusading young reporter Bat Masterson (Keith Larsen) he rounds up the most rambunctious cowboys and ultimately arresting Wallace for threatening him. Earp warns the worst of them out of Wichita and issues a directive: no one is allowed to wear their guns inside of town limits.

This policy is identified with Earp in other films, most noticeably in Anthony Mann's Winchester 73, in which Wyatt (Will Geer) confiscates all weapons not needed for the film's opening shooting contest. In Wichita, many of the town fathers react to Earp's order with horror. These elders, including the father of Wyatt's girlfriend Laurie (Vera Miles playing a completely fictional character), worry that the edict will keep the cowboys out of town and ruin the town's economy. Most opposed is Doc Black (Edgar Buchanan), who sees no alternative to killing Earp to save the town. Unfortunately for him, the two tough men who respond to his clandestine solicitation prove to be Wyatt's brothers. The mixup results in Wyatt throwing Black out of town. Doc seeks revenge by having Earp assassinated, but Laurie's mother gets shot instead. The Earps and Masterson kill two of Wallace's cowboys who did the deed, and the rest of Wallace's crew, including the vengeful Bridges character, descend upon Wichita to destroy it, Earp or both....

Edgar Buchanan takes aim.

Wichita has an old-fashioned feel compared to the sleek starkness of Boetticher's westerns or the outdoor expressionism of Mann's. I can't really judge Jacques Tourneur's visual sense because I saw a "Starz Play" pan-and-scan stream at Netflix, but a properly proportioned edition is available through the Warner Archive. In any event, this isn't really an outdoor film, and as a town-tamer story it doesn't really have to be. As I noted earlier, Joel McCrea is way too old for Earp at this stage of his life, but he provides the gravitas the producers obviously desired in spite of history. If anyone steals the picture, it's Edgar Buchanan playing a progressively more loathsome character.

Ironically, town tamer films had some subversive potential, even during the conformist, McCarthyite 1950s. Wichita milks much of its drama from the fact that, as far as some rich and powerful people are concerned, town taming can be bad for business. There's a hint of a similar idea in at least one other Fifties western, Robert D. Webb's The Proud Ones, where Robert Ryan's law-enforcement efforts are resented by many townspeople who fear a similar effect on their local economy. What did Fifties audiences take away from tales in which businessmen tolerate and even cultivate corruption if they can make money from it? I'm not sure. On another issue, I have a gut feeling that Wichita's original audiences reacted to its spotlighting of Earp's gun-control measures, which would probably have made the film controversial were it released now, without batting an eye. "Gun control" simply wasn't a hot-button or ideological issue in 1955, as far as I know. I don't mean to suggest that everyone then would be against the NRA today. It's more likely that people didn't even think about the topic, that few people if any worried either about a proliferation of guns (except maybe among street gangs) or about the government taking their guns away. Confiscating guns didn't make Wyatt Earp a fascist or a commie in their eyes; it made him a town tamer. The funny thing is that more people nowadays probably think their own towns need taming, but wouldn't think of adopting Earp's methods. Wichita is probably more interesting to me as an almost ahistorical artifact than as a work of drama or art. It lacks the subtlety of character of the best Fifties westerns as well as the powerful visuals -- and its history is mostly bunk. But the story is engaging enough and it's fun to see actors like Bridges and Buchanan play heels. If it seems mediocre to me it's because I can't help judging it by the highest standard set by its contemporaries.

MACHINE GUN MCCAIN (Gli Intoccabili, 1969)

No relation to the future Senator then stewing in a POW camp, Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) finds himself suddenly pardoned after twelve years of a life sentence and greeted outside San Quentin by a son he barely knows. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, though; the son is a criminal who tells Dad that he was sprung with a well-timed bribe so he could take part in a plan to rob the Royal casino in Las Vegas. McCain is wary. The plan looks good, but his boy's associates are "Hollywood fags" and he can smell a set-up a mile away. Still, he may as well take the money they're giving up front and live a little. Casing Vegas, he falls fast for Irene Tucker (Britt Ekland) and marries her practically on the spot. But as he continues to ponder his options, the plot is already collapsing around him. His boy was put up to it by Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk), who runs six western states for the Syndicate but wants a piece of Vegas. Rebuffed by the Royal, Charlie puts the robbery plan into motion, only to abort it when he learns that the New York dons own shares in the casino. Eager not to offend, no matter how he resents his subordinate standing, Charlie wants all trace of the conspiracy wiped out, and that means wiping out McCain and his son.

Cassavetes and Ekland cruise Vegas, and their luck looks good at first.

Trusting his instincts, Hank McCain escapes a death trap but loses his son in the process. Then, as if on general principles, and with only Irene to help him, he carries out the Royal robbery plan. It involves a lot of explosions: several throughout town to divert the fire department, then several inside the Royal to justify his arrival disguised as a fire marshall. Against the odds, he cleans the place out single-handed. Adamo and his right-hand man know that this is McCain's handiwork, and when they discuss him within earshot of Adamo's unfaithful wife (Florinda Balkan), she rats them out to Don Francesco (Gabriele Ferzetti), who deals with them as if they were still in on the plan. Now all the Syndicate's resources are focused on tracking down McCain, who hopes desperately to flee the country. With the escape routes closing fast, he and Irene have to turn to his former lover and partner in crime (Gena Rowlands) for their last chance at freedom....

I don't know if the explosions were part of the original casino caper plan, but Peter Falk takes the fall for them anyway.

Gli intoccabili ("The untouchables") is the second of two movies John Cassavetes made in Italy after The Dirty Dozen made him bankable there. While making Italian films was usually a mark of American career decline, for Cassavetes it was a fundraising venture for his independent directorial projects. One imagines that he was instrumental in getting Falk and Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavetes) cast in Giuliano Montaldo's film, and that all their salaries went into funding Husbands, which came out the following year, shortly after Machine Gun McCain itself reached the U.S. Montaldo tells us on the Blue Underground DVD that Cassavetes was clearly champing at the bit, second-guessing the director for the first week of shooting and growing jealous when Montaldo directed Rowlands. Nevertheless, the Cassavetes gang seem fully committed to the project, with the man himself striking the right hard-boiled tone and Falk playing especially intense as the volatile Adamo. Rowlands has only a "guest star" role but her scenes prove to be the key to the picture.

Montaldo (who remains active at age 81 and has a new film coming out this year) explains on the DVD that, like many other filmmakers, he was fascinated by the idea of organized crime operating like a big business, the more ruthless for being increasingly impersonal. Hank McCain is supposed to represent an older, virtually obsolete criminal type -- hence the machine gun, presumably. When he reunites with Rosemary, the Rowlands character, we learn from news clippings that they'd been notorious years earlier as the "Machine Gun Lovers" until they'd been caught and imprisoned, him for life, her for 18 years (she was presumably paroled). While the chronology suggests the time period of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, Montaldo probably wants us to think more along the lines of Bonnie and Clyde. Whatever his intention, Hank and Rosemary are clearly meant as criminals from another epoch, a more honorable and romantic era for Montaldo's purposes. While Hank didn't exactly rush back to her once freed, we see clearly enough that she still carries a torch for him, and that their feelings for each other remain mutual. Rosemary exemplifies this romanticized oldtime criminal chivalry when she kills herself rather than rat out Hank, and Hank finally lives up to the dubious ideal when given an ultimate choice between flight and fight for Irene's sake. Seen this way, Hank's story becomes faintly reminiscent of Roy Earle's from High Sierra: an old-guard criminal freed only to take part in a questionable robbery and run away with a much-younger girl. When you compare Machine Gun McCain to High Sierra you see how Montaldo makes his point about the deromanticization of crime. Roy Earle and Hank McCain have somewhat similar ends, but unlike with Earle there's no sense that McCain has "crashed out" and is now "free." There's no one left with empathy enough for McCain to even suggest the notion.

Montaldo made his name internationally with his previous film, Grand Slam. Like that one, Gli Intoccabili is a caper film, though the caper doesn't dominate the story this time as it does in Grand Slam. It's more perfunctory about its caper because it ends up being a one-man operation, but the caper format gives Machine Gun McCain a different feel from other Italian crime movies. It really feels more American, not only because of the Cassavetes infiltration and the extensive location shooting in Vegas and elsewhere but because the story is more plot and character-driven and less sensationalistic than the typical shoot-and-chase film. McCain may disappoint as an action film (and many more violent Italian crime films are brilliant works in their own right), but Montaldo and co-writer Mino Roli compensate with their attention to character, while the Cassavetes gang hold up the acting end admirably. Their presence makes McCain a film-historical curiosity as well as an entertaining relic of a Vegas milieu that has itself largely vanished since it impressed Montaldo with its cold, merciless modernity.

BlueUndergroundInc has released an outstanding DVD of the film, and has uploaded a trailer for it to YouTube.

Holden and O'Brien in THE TURNING POINT (1952)

William Dieterle's 1952 noir is a case of a screenplay trying to do too much at once. About fifteen minutes into it, I thought it had the makings of a great film noir, but by the halfway point -- or should I say "turning point" -- the movie had moved on to other things. And at that point it still had a shot, but before long it was heading in yet another direction. With the cast it had, it should have been much stronger. But let me explain it a bit more. In an American city that looks a lot like San Francisco, law professor John Conroy (Edmond O'Brien) is appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the rackets allegedly led by Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley). Conroy's girlfriend Amanda Waycross (Alexis Smith) joins him on the job, which reunites him with his old pal Jerry McKibbon (William Holden), now a high-powered newspaper reporter. Adding to the old home week feel, Conroy hires his father (Tom Tully), a veteran cop, to be his special investigator, despite the older man's clear reluctance. Dad's reluctance is explained to us soon enough; unbeknownst to his son, the old cop's been on the take from Eichelberger for years, and he only accepts John's offer so he can spy for the racketeer.

William Holden pauses to watch Tom Tully take a walk in The Turning Point

Right there, I thought, you had potent noir material, but there was already something odd about the film's approach. The father-son story would be plot enough for a noir if the son were the central character, but Turning Point isn't really about John Conroy. Sure, O'Brien gets plenty of screen time, including a great scene in which he interrogates a cagily indignant Begley in a televised hearing, but mostly we see him and everyone else in the film through Jerry McKibbon's eyes. That could still work, since we can still empathize with someone reunited with an old friend who finds out something terrible (Dad's betrayal) the friend doesn't know. But in short order Jerry himself becomes a betrayal, starting an affair with Amanda behind Conroy's back. It turns out, however, that Conroy isn't quite as clueless as he seems. In a nicely written scene, just as Jerry and Amanda try to convince him not to quit the investigation, John makes it clear in one sentence, without histrionics, that he's on to them both. There's something almost Arthurian about this triangle, since all three people are plainly good guys, but there's also something forced about it, since I didn't really feel much chemistry between Holden and Smith.

A demoralized Edmond O'Brien sulks despite the entreaties of his so-called friends.

This being 1952, someone's got to take the fall, but not before more plot complications kick in. Along the way, Conroy's dad has been whacked for threatening to turn, and the man who shot him in a pretend-robbery was in turn shot down on the spot. McKibbon encounters this last man's widow, who can name the second shooter and potentially bring down Eichelberger's empire. Jerry saves her from some goons in a diner but loses track of her. As the widow frightfully makes her way to Conroy's office, McKibbon gets a tip that takes him to a boxing arena, where he's been set up to be taken out, he being the only good guy who can identify the widow. Someone squeals to Conroy, but it's Amanda who rushes to the arena to rescue Jerry, forcing the question of which of the lovers will pay for their indiscretion....

What really hurts the film is that neither Holden nor O'Brien seems fully committed to it. Holden's character is almost voyeuristically omniscient and doesn't seem weighed down by conventional responsibilities. He can come and go wherever he wants, whenever he wants, as if his job was wandering plot device rather than deadline-bound reporter. Holden just seems to float through the picture; even after Sunset Blvd., he doesn't yet command the screen as he would from Stalag 17 forward. Edmond O'Brien, arguably a definitive noir type, doesn't get to play that type here. He has to be a bland authority figure instead, and he invests the part with all the blandness in his power. Alexis Smith's part is simply underwritten; her character is in the picture just so there can be a triangle. The only actor fully on his game here is Ed Begley, who's masterful as Eichelberger. He's convincingly businesslike in his ruthlessness and defensive about his vocation. When you think of all the bluster Lee J. Cobb would have brought to this role you really appreciate what Begley does with it. Tom Tully is also very good as Conroy's compromised father, but we don't really get enough of a character around whom the whole film could have been built.

For the most part, Turning Point isn't noir in the strictest visual sense. It makes effective use of locations like many noirs, but it's low on expressionistic shadows and other obvious noir devices. Director Dieterle does come up with several strong set pieces, including the shootout that kills Conroy's father, the hearing showdown between Conroy and Eichelberger, and especially the climactic sequence at the arena. Dieterle milks this for maximum suspense as a gunman lurks on the catwalk above the action, waiting for his chance to shoot McKibbon, then pursues him urgently as the crowd flows out of the arena following an abrupt knockout. Overall, the film isn't really as bad as my disappointed review may suggest, but given everyone involved, it should have been much better.

HOUSE (1977)

On the box cover, the Criterion Collection tries to prepare viewers for Nobuhiko Obayashi's film by describing it as "a Scooby-Doo episode directed by Mario Bava." I can do better than that. Think instead of Suspiria directed by Sid & Marty Krofft and you get closer to the actuality of House, and I mean that in a "best of both worlds" way. That's not to say I'm the biggest fan of either the Kroffts or Dario Argento, but the work of each has its virtues, and Obayashi's movie will remind those who know of both. For about the first fifteen minutes, however, my reaction was, "What the hell am I watching?" How else can you react to such deliberate cheesiness? I assumed that Obayashi was sending up something, presumably the Japanese teen-girl culture of the Seventies and the sorts of TV shows it favored. But without a firm frame of reference I could just as easily assume that Obayashi is a madman with an idiosyncratically offputting aesthetic sense. In one sense, he is a madman; House was his feature-film debut after a career as a cutting-edge director of commercials. Anywhere on earth, probably, you're playing with fire letting such a person make a feature. But such was Obayashi's reputation, I assume from the trailer, that Japanese audiences were expecting something profoundly weird.

Thanks in part to the director's daughter, who contributed story ideas, that's exactly what everyone got. House (which is the film's original Japanese title, spoken in one's best spooky voice) is the story of two teenage girls, Gorgeous and Fantasy, and their trip with five friends to Gorgeous's aunt's house. Gorgeous lives in a world of blazing colors, artificial skies, and a suspicious new stepmother her dad picked up on the way back from a movie-scoring gig for Sergio Leone in Italy. Eager to steer clear of her new mom, Gorgeous gathers her pals -- Fantasy, Mac (the fat one), Sweet (the helpful one who loves cleaning), Melody (the musical one), Kung Fu (self-explanatory) and Prof (ditto) -- to visit her poor crippled aunt, still pining for her lost lover, a WWII flier (shown in silent-film style footage), after all these years. Normally Auntie has only her ubiquitous white cat Blanche for company. But she brightens up as soon as Gorgeous and her friends show up -- and start disappearing. And soon she's on her feet and dancing, and jumping into refrigerators. Initially, only the tragically-named Fantasy suspects that something's very wrong, but a horror soon emerges that nobody can deny.

House soon turns into a special kind of gorefest. Obayashi isn't aiming for the visceral shocks of his horror-film contemporaries. Instead, he evokes the uncanny in cartoonish ways that underscore the magical nature of the menace threatening the girls. If someone's dismembered, her limbs fly around a room for a while, sometimes retaining some life of their own. The effects have a cut-and-paste look that somehow seems exactly right for the sort of film he made. Those alienating early scenes of deliberate fakery were really building blocks of a unique cinematic idiom into which Obayashi could translate genuine terror while remaining faithful to his corny source-aesthetic. While for someone else the gag might have been to destroy these silly girls with realistic violence and gore, for Obayashi the point was to tell a tale of primal horror (with not a few hints of pubescent rites-of-passage) the way a 13 year old girl raised on TV and manga might envision it. Against all odds, it works, even as Obayashi schemes constantly to break the mood with the cat's silly dance across a keyboard, Kung Fu's outbursts of frenetic action (she has her own authentically cheesy soundtrack motif) and occasional cutaways to the desultory trek of Mr. Togo, the girls' hoped-for savior, toward the dreaded house. Despite it all (and perhaps despite is the wrong word) the cumulative effect is honestly horrific, and the coda ("When my friends wake up, they're hungry") is indisputably chilling.

In House the horror leaps up and bites you in the ass -- literally. It may also literally chop your fingers off, so use House with caution and only after reading the instructions carefully.

While House proved a sleeper hit in Japan, it never played American theaters until the 21st century. I suspect, though, that Obayashi had influence beyond his home islands. It wouldn't surprise me, for instance, if House had some influence on Peter Jackson's early films, since Kung Fu's climactic battle with ghostly forces reminded me slightly of some of the action in Dead Alive. Closer to home, I could believe that Obayashi's use of stop-motion and other gimmickry influenced later Japanese cult spectacles like Tetsuo the Iron Man. I guess I assume it had to have an influence on people because I can't imagine anyone forgetting House once they saw it. You might like it or hate it, but it'll probably be one of the damndest films you've ever seen one way or the other. This subtitled trailer will give you some idea of what Toho calls "the first fantasy horror film" Janusfilmsnyc uploaded this one to YouTube.

Wendigo Meets BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Crap makes good fertilizer sometimes. There probably couldn't have been a Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series with all its virtues, for instance, without Fran Rubel Kuzui's craptastic film of Joss Whedon's screenplay, with all its faults. It won't surprise constant readers to learn that the Buffy TV show is one of my friend Wendigo's all-time favorites, but that doesn't make him forgiving toward the movie in any way. Once upon a time, he'd given a second-run film a chance because he thought the title sounded funny. Later, he'd had to overcome his revulsion at the movie to give the show a chance, and it was quite a struggle. Given what Whedon had in him, what went wrong the first time? Wendigo thinks the film is too much an Eighties-style teen comedy, and a Valley Girl comedy at that, on top of being a vampire comedy at the end of a long streak of especially lame vampire comedies. Whedon later figured out how to keep things funny and scary, but that balance is missing in the movie. The direction is unambitious, as are the cinematography, effects and makeup, and the end result is pretty much inept, and hopelessly dated the moment it appeared.

Buffy (Kristy Swanson) must master many weapons for the struggle against the undead, no matter how long it takes.

It may be unfair to judge Kristy Swanson against Sarah Michelle Gellar, but it can't be helped either. Swanson is vapidly pretty, but that seems like all the shooting script demanded. Donald Sutherland pretty much phones it in, while Rutger Hauer is clueless as the master vampire. That's a shame when you recall that Anne Rice once described the young Hauer as her ideal movie Lestat. For David Arquette and Hilary Swank, this film is just a skeleton in the closet. It says something about a movie if you can say, as Wendigo does, that Luke Perry actually gave the best performance.

With a cast of quirky actors including (from top) David Arquette, Paul Ruebens and Rutger Hauer, why do Buffy's vampires come across as simply stupid?

Whedon reportedly pleads innocent due to directorial and studio interference, but it's not as if he had the core of the later series anywhere in his original screenplay. You have to do a lot of worldbuilding for a genre TV show that wouldn't have seemed necessary in a movie. Nor does a movie need to introduce the ensemble cast that made the TV Buffy a trend setter. So there's no hellmouth, no "scooby gang," no Angel and only the implicit hint of the Watchers in the form of the Sutherland character. There's so little conceptualization going on that Buffy doesn't even have a last name. Were all of these left on the cutting room floor? Unlikely. Apart from the concept of a lineage of physically gifted "slayers" (rather than "hunters" armed primarily with knowledge) the Buffy movie makes no real contribution to modern vampire lore. But Whedon's screenplay probably did have a different tone that was lost, if he had any individuality at the time. He may have needed time to distance the concept from its Valley Girl roots. Had the movie been made in 1996, it may have been more like the show, all else being equal -- or equally bad.

Kuzui occasionally aims for a sensual, dreamlike effect (above) but most often goes straight for the cheese (below).

What irritates Wendigo the most about the Buffy movie is the sense that nobody really cared about making a good or really funny movie. In its lack of ambition Kazui's movie reminds him more of a Saturday night SyFy movie than the series that rose from its ashes. The word is that the movie's being remade without Whedon's participation, Wendigo's advice for the remakers is: don't bother even looking at this movie.

While you contemplate the future of the lineage, let's look back with neo93612 at this Perry-narrated, Ruebens-centric trailer from 1992.

CERTIFIED COPY (Copie conforme, 2010)

Overheard outside the theater, after the show: "It was very French." Mais non, it was written and directed by an Iranian, Abbas Kiarostami, working away from home for the first time. As far as I know, he was a tourist, not an exile, and in a way Certified Copy is a tourist's film, though Kiarostami's less concerned with landscape than with the human-scale experience of tourism. He uses lots of long takes and tracking shots through Tuscany during his characters' allegedly random trip. His style, which has set the tone for much of the Iranian film industry, has been called a kind of neorealism. It's mimetic and immersive rather than conventionally dramatic, though this film will seem more dramatic than his others because much of the dialogue is in English. As a rule, Kiarostami gives you a strong sense of place and time, and that remains true here.

Maybe the confused cinemagoer quoted above gets to the issue of the film. Identifying the Iranian's effort as "very French" may mean he was successful at evoking if not copying the sensibility and alleged difficulty of French film. It helps to have Juliette Binoche involved. She seems to be the Meryl Streep of the rest of the world, the go-to actress for globally ambitious directors. When Hou Hsiao-Hsien ventured outside Taiwan to film in Europe, he hired Binoche for The Flight of the Red Balloon. The actress is fluent in English, has an Oscar to her credit, and may be the nearest thing we have today to a globally-recognized star who doesn't pretend to fight for a living. She won an award for her work here at last year's Cannes Film Festival, while the film itself got a more mixed reception. Kiarostami has been panned for derivativeness and obscurity but praised for allusiveness and playfulness. His style is definitely an acquired taste because he doesn't employ conventional attention-grabbing dramatic devices. Most American viewers will depend on the actors to carry them through the rough patches, but Kiarostami has paired Binoche with a movie novice, the British opera singer William Shimmel. I think he did all right but his work was cut out for him by an initially deliberate vagueness about his actual relationship to the Binoche character. That vagueness may prove fatal for the film for many people.

Shimmel plays a British author promoting his new book, Certified Copy, in Italy. Binoche attends his lecture (and has a reserved seat) and later brings him multiple copies of the book to sign when he visits her art shop. Since he has time to kill before his train leaves, they decide to take a purportedly random road trip that soon proves less than spontaneous. While critics feel obliged to ruminate upon the significance of copies and the meaning of the author's thesis on copies, as if this were a film by Walter Benjamin, there's only one "copy" that really means anything to the story. Explaining this may spoil things, so read cautiously. It emerges eventually that the protagonists are an estranged couple, and that their ultimate destination is the town where they were married 15 years ago, the object being to rekindle that initial spark. The author's thesis is that a copy is just as good as the original depending on its meaning for the owner or viewer, but the film's thesis is more ambivalent. Experience isn't the same as art, nor repetition the same as reproduction. You can't expect a do-over to have the same result, though different may not necessarily mean worse. Kiarostami actually ends the film with a kind of cliffhanger, a will he or won't he moment whose unpredictability may be part of the director's point.

Copie conforme could seem like a film about nothing to some people, and it's not as if everyone's obliged to see significance in the couple's troubles. I was entertained because the main characters impressed me as intelligent people and the actors did their jobs well. My only hangup is with the early vagueness about their relationship. The fact that the Binoche character takes a reserved seat for the lecture implies a close relationship with the author, but their encounter at the store comes across like a first meeting of strangers. Later, at a restaurant, Binoche "pretends" to a waitress that Schimmel is her husband, and at times it seems like the couple is engaged in a questionably-motivated role-playing exercise. Maybe I'm misinterpreting these scenes but it also felt as if Kiarostami was trying to trick the audience for a while. Fortunately, the film gets stronger once the trickery is set aside and Kiarostami grounds himself in emotional truth. He's a humane director even if his style seems pretentious or off-putting. He's interested in inspiring empathy, and if you're interested in experiencing it, Certified Copy should prove a mostly rewarding experience.

The trailer was uploaded to YouTube by trailers.