This is a revived version of a 2011 Line Out post (these posts were purged from the internet some time after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog).
Since I just caught Martin Scorsese's Hugo, which incorporates magician-turned-director Georges Méliès (wonderfully played by Ben Kingsley), news about Air's upcoming record arrived at the perfect time. It's titled Le Voyage dans la Lune after Méliès' most famous film, i.e. A Trip to the Moon. The label sent the press release the day after the movie opened.
In Hugo, Scorsese doesn't just recreate portions of Le Voyage--in 3D, no less--but he also recreates the making of this 1902 landmark.
For a motion picture adapted from a young adult novel (Brian Selznick's 2007 The Invention of Hugo Cabret) and intended for family viewing, Hugo is a more richly rewarding enterprise than I would have expected. If Air's album is even half as good, it should be worth the wait.
While it's been awhile since I've picked up an Air recording, I remain fond of their haunting score for Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, another period adaptation, so I have a good feeling about Le Voyage dans la Lune.
I should also mention that I'm a big fan of musician/graphic artist/filmmaker Mike Mills (Butter 08, Thumbsucker, Beginners), Air's go-to director. You can sample his work on YouTube or, better yet, in the 10th anniversary edition of Moon Safari, which includes the key videos and a documentary.
Full press release, Hugo trailer, and Méliès' film below. H/t: Steven Fried
Le Voyage dans la Lune is a classic black & white silent film by revered French director Georges Méliès. Released in 1902, this legendary 16-minute film is widely considered one of the most important works in film history, and the very first to use science fiction as its theme, incorporating special effects that were very state-of-the-art at the turn of the 19th century. It was loosely based on two popular novels of the time: Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon.
A hand-colored print, the only one known to survive, was rediscovered in 1993 by the Filmoteca de Catalunya. It was in a state of almost total decomposition, and many years of painstaking, manual restoration took place until 2010, when digital technology finally came to the rescue. Following another year at the Technicolor Lab of Los Angeles, it was finally ready to share with the world. Eager to put a contemporary spin on this classic silent film, the producers decided to approach AIR's Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel, to compose an original modern soundtrack, an enormous honor for French musicians, considering the film's place in the canon of French cinema.
Spurred on by their work on this short movie, AIR decided to develop the project into a full album inspired by the film. Expanding the original musical themes beyond cinematic instrumentals, the album also features the vocal talents and lyrics of Au Revoir Simone and Victoria Legrand (Beach House). The band's lunar fascinations have been evident since the beginning of their career with the release of the seminal 1998 classic Moon Safari. Now in 2012 Nicolas and J.B. have returned to explore the further regions of their very unique musical "space."
A special 3-minute extract of the film will be made available FREE for one week only on iTunes on December 6th. And on that same date, the AIR album pre-order will start including a STRICTLY LIMITED EDITION digital box set featuring the album and the newly colorized, restored film featuring AIR's original score.
Track listing:1. Astronomic Club, 2. Seven Stars (with Victoria Legrand), 3. Retour sur Terre, 4. Parade, 5. Moon Fever, 6. Sonic Armada, 7. Who Am I Now? (with Au Revoir Simone), 8. Décollage, 9. Cosmic Trip, 10. Homme Lune, 11. Lava.
Virgin releases Le Voyage dans la Lune on 2/7/12 in the US and Canada.
As his fourth feature begins, British filmmaker Alex Garland doesn't mess about. There's no prologue, no opening crawl, no exposition dump. The time could be now, or it could be just a few years in the future, because everything looks much the same, except the country is at war. With itself.
In a sense, that's exactly what's happening in 2024 with red and blue state America, except Garland isn't as interested in liberal vs. conservative as in war itself, though the film's primary antagonists, mostly camo-clad white men, have all the markings of insurrectionists. Instead, the director explores what a first-world civil war might look like, sound like, and especially feel like in the 21st century. And how it might affect a combat photographer.
Garland introduces Reuters photojournalists Lee (an effectively hard-bitten Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura of Elite Squad and Netflix's Narcos) by showing them in action, crouching fast and low, hands gripped tightly around their cameras, getting as close to a New York riot as possible, and then slipping away as quickly as they can. In the melee, Lee spots the petite Jessie (Cailee Spaeny from Garland's FX series Devs), an amateur photographer, who gets walloped by a cop. Like a mother hen, she whisks her away to safety. Not only is Jessie okay, but she recognizes the photographer. In fact, she's an ardent admirer who aspires to emulate her.
After chatting for a bit, they go their separate ways, with Lee giving the distinct impression she thinks this kid is a bit of an idiot. She's not wrong--though 23, Jessie looks and acts much younger. If Lee seems condescending or judgmental, it's more that she wants to dispel Jessie's naïve and idealistic views of photojournalism, but without completely scaring her away.
That night, she runs into Jessie at the hotel where she has returned to connect with Joel and Sammy (the always welcome Stephen McKinley Henderson from Devs and Dune), an older New York Times reporter.
Jessie swears--not all that convincingly--she hasn't been stalking her, but Lee has her doubts. The younger woman explains that the hotel serves as a known meeting place for photojournalists, and she wants to get in on the action. To Lee, she's starting to become as annoying as a relentless gnat.
Though she and Joel make a few japes about Sammy's age, he can take it, and he's just as quick to make the occasional self-deprecating remark (it doesn't help Sammy's cause that he hikes his sansabelt pants up as high as they can go). If he's more patient and philosophical than his less seasoned colleagues, he's also a softer touch. Consequently, Lee wakes up to find that he has invited Jessie to join the crew for a treacherous trip to Washington DC where Joel hopes to interview the embattled President (Nick Offerman, also from Devs).
As much as Spaeny impressed me in Priscilla, she's fairly insufferable here, which may be the point, but I was never certain since she's positioned as an audience surrogate, and those kinds of characters tend to be more sympathetic. They serve as conduits to sights and sounds likely to be unfamiliar to most audience members, except she consistently makes the same stupid mistakes, and doesn't seem to be especially perturbed by her incompetence. Even at the end, when she has supposedly learned a thing or two about close-range combat photography, adults in her vicinity are constantly pushing her out of the way of gunfire as if she were a child.
I don't mean to harp too much on Spaeny, but she's also positioned as a sort of Eve Harrington figure, which makes Lee the film's designated Margo Channing, and the final sequence bears out this reading in an exceptionally blunt manner. It just felt as if Garland had combined two archetypes in a way that never fully coalesced. Then again, it's not as if the world is exactly bereft of self-involved young people who are just as likely to endanger themselves as others by letting their passions get away from them.
Though "war" is right there in the title, I found myself caught up more in the interpersonal dynamics than the harrowing battles the photojournalists witness along their travels. In that sense, the film reminded me of Danny Boyle's brilliant 28 Days Later, for which Garland wrote the screenplay. Instead of "rage zombies," it's humans--and high-powered weaponry--that represent the biggest threat to the protagonists.
Though some viewers have decried the film's apolitical stance, I wouldn't go that far. It may not be as pointedly political as they would prefer, but there are numerous references to our Divided States of America, as a 2016 episode of Frontline put it. For one thing, no one trusts the President. He's just an empty suit saying scripted words devoid of any real meaning. He's an Orwellian figure in a shinier package. He isn't Trump, but he's lost control of his country, and he's mostly just cowering in his taxpayer-funded mansion.
Another is the militia man played by Jesse Plemons (reuniting with wife Kirsten Dunst, in a manner of speaking, after their turn as a married couple in The Power of the Dog). His xenophobic cruelty knows no bounds. Though he lacks a red cap, he's got eerie red sunglasses instead. Close enough. As chilling as Plemons was in Breaking Bad, he's absolutely terrifying here.
Then there are the Deliverance-style sadists at the gas station. More of the same, basically. And it's impossible not to recall the incendiary imagery of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol when rebel forces, with the photojournalists embedded, storm the White House at the end.
None of this is to suggest that Garland is giving Peter Watkins a run for the money, but his antifascist sympathies are clear (nonetheless, he has been taken to task for using footage shot by right-wing troll Andy Ngo and by thanking controversial Guardian journalist Helen Lewis in the credits).
For my money, Garland still hasn't topped, or even equaled, his first two science fiction films, Ex Machina and Annihilation (which he hoped to turn into a series), but I'll take Civil War over Men, his decidedly feminist, if unsatisfying take on folk horror. Every one of these films, in addition to Devs, which wasn't renewed for a second season, features women at the center of the action, and it's one of the defining characteristics of his work.
If I found Cailee Spaeny irritating for reasons possibly beyond her control, I came away more impressed, as I often am, by Kirsten Dunst. Unusually for a former child actor, she makes no attempt to present Lee as likeable, in favor of respectable, but Jessie isn't wrong when she says, "You're pretty when you smile," which she doesn't do often. She's just a strong woman doing a tough job against unbelievable odds, much like the women of Annihilation.
Dunst's character represents a past--an experienced, dedicated journalist--that is rapidly disappearing, while Jessie--an easily distracted amateur--represents the future. It's no wonder Lee's smiles are in short supply.
Civil War opens Thurs, Apr 11, at the Uptown, most everywhere else on Fri, Apr 12. Images: IMDb (Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura), AnOther Magazine (Cailee Spaeny), the IMDb (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Decider (Brendan Gleeson, Cillian Murphy, and Naomie Harris in 28 Days Later), Screen Rant (Spaeney and Jesse Plemons), and Yahoo Movies (Dunst).
"It's a revolting exploitation film."--Jean Dietrich, The Courier-Journal
When Matt Stone (Chad Walker) was a boy, he awoke late one night to find his mother entertaining a soldier (Blood Feast's Bill Kerwin). He couldn't figure out what they were doing, but he found it disturbing, and so the minute the man became aggressive, Matt grabbed the nearest sharp implement--his deceased father's samurai sword--and plunged it into his abdomen. It isn't clear if things would have blown over or if the guy really intended to rape his mother. Afterward, Matt puts his pinky in the corner of his mouth in a proto-Dr. Evil gesture meant to convey little-boy confusion.
William Grefé, a Florida filmmaker known for B-movie schlockers like 1967's Death Curse of Tartu--presents this opening sequence in black and white before switching to color to introduce the fully-grown Matt, now played by William Shatner in excellent form. It's up the audience to decide whether Matt was always a sociopath or whether protectiveness of his mother made him murder out of necessity. Instead of gratitude, though, she expressed deep disappointment afterward, and that appears to have stuck with him. One way or the other: the incident shaped Matt Stone. And not for the good.
As the opening credits dance across the screen, Matt watches a beautiful belly dancer (Paula Dimitrouleas) shimmy in a silver sequined outfit. He cuts a striking figure in his Herb Tarlek-style 1970s threads with a cigarillo in one hand, a cocktail in the other, and a smarmy, lustful look on his face.
After her performance, Matt invites the dancer into his convertible while the middle-aged Helen (Marcia Knight) watches from a nearby car, seething.
After his dalliance, Helen, who has been supporting Matt, confronts him. As they argue, anger escalates on both sides, leading Matt to bark, "Big, tough broad, aren't you?," at which point he strangles her to death, leaving Helen leaning against the car door, tongue lolling to the side of her mouth, a Grefé signature as much as the random shot of a (fully-clothed) lady's ass.
Instead of a sense of relief, Matt seems shocked by his own strength. For all his fear and rage, he isn't a complete monster, and he had only meant to shut her up--not to kill her.
Nonetheless, his animalistic cry of anguish afterward could be read as regret over the loss of his meal ticket as much as that of a fellow human being. It's also possible he's simply scared of getting caught by the police, so he thinks fast, puts the key in the ignition, turns it, and pushes the car into the lake, where it sinks beneath the water.
Matt may be free, but he has apparently been sponging off of rich widows for years, using his charm and good looks to reel them in. Shatner was 43 at the time, just young enough to play this sort of character, but the clock is ticking on Matt's slimy lifestyle, and he doesn't appear to have any other skills. Grefé only doles out as much information as necessary, and not a jot more, so it isn't clear if Matt ever even received a proper education.
If he has a car, and the cash he swiped from the Helen's wallet, Matt lacks any visible means of support. His victim also left him with a scratch across his face, but it will heal in a convenient instant. In short order, he composes himself, packs up his belongings, and heads to Tampa to find a new benefactor. Grefé then introduces single mother Ann (Jennifer Bishop, terrific) and her bratty 12-year-old daughter, Tina (Kim Nicholas, irritating, yet effective).
Matt meets Tina first, completely by accident. As he's driving, he spots the small blonde, who has ditched school, hitchhiking in order to visit her father's grave. I was afraid, at this point, that Matt might also revealed as a child molester, but once again--as terrible as he may be--he has his limits. If anything, he seems to think he's doing a good deed, and in a manner of speaking, he is, since someone even worse could have picked her up.
Though Tina is grateful for the ride, Matt shocks her when a dog darts into the road, he accidentally drives over it, realizes what he's done, and plunges on ahead. Tina knows in an instant that something is not quite right with this guy. Later that afternoon, Matt just happens to visit the notions store her mother owns and operates while she's positioned on a ladder, arranging a display. Just as Ann (Jennifer Bishop from Grefé's Mako: The Jaws of Death) slips and starts to fall backward, she lands in Matt's sturdy arms, and a spark is ignited. To Grefé's credit, this isn't as hokey as it sounds.
At first, these are just chance encounters. Matt books a motel room, and immediately tumbles into bed with the pretty, flirtatious hotel clerk (Marcy Lafferty, Shatner's lady love and future wife). He isn't looking for anything more than a good time, and he gets it. In his commentary track, Grefé says that Shatner insisted he cast Lafferty. That sort of thing can be problematic when an actor's squeeze lacks skill, but she's a lively, sparky presence.
The scenario shifts into overdrive when Matt meets Julia (The Baby's Ruth Roman in a fine and feisty turn), Ann's outspoken, maternal friend. The two widows pal around with Clarence (Flying Leathernecks' James Dobson), a gay-coded character who is never explicitly identified as such, though it's clear he harbors no romantic or sexual intentions towards the women.
Julia invites Matt to join them for dinner at her mansion--which comes complete with fish tanks and suits of armor--in hopes of matching him up with her lonely friend. Matt has also convinced her he's a financial adviser who can boost her stock earnings. He passes himself off to Ann in a similar manner, though he's also attracted to the more age-appropriate option.
If Matt charms the adults, Tina remains convinced he's up to no good, so she sets out to find proof beyond the dog incident, which her mother brushes off as a made-up story. After all, the girl would rather not see her mother date anyone ever again, and not just scheming sleaze-mongers like Matt.
In his commentary, Grefé notes that Matt was a lady killer in Tony Crechales' original script, titled Want a Ride, Little Girl?, but he wasn't a con man. He also explains that Tina was intended to be sympathetic, but whether due to Nicholas's inexperience or his hurried direction, the Miami native comes across as a brat. As Matt puts it, she's a "mean, jealous, vicious little girl." He's not wrong, but she's also clever, perceptive--and correct.
The dinner party is such a success that Matt asks Ann out on a date. Everything seems to be going swimmingly as they stroll through the park on a Sunday afternoon until a woman carrying balloons bumps into Matt just as he is about to head up the escalator. With Ann out of earshot, Matt hisses, "You fat--people like you should be ground up and made into dog food!"
After he catches up with his date, she asks, "What was that about?" He says it wasn't anything, and they go on their way...all the while watched by a muscular, Japanese-American mystery man named Karate Pete (former weightlifter, professional wrestler, and cult actor Harold "Oddjob" Sakata).
Tina also watches the pair whenever she can sneak away from the house. When she sees her mother enter Matt's motel room, she becomes more dedicated than ever to exposing his rot.
Once Ann has left, Matt heads out to meet up with his former cellmate. Though he tries to reason with the thug, Pete threatens to expose him if he doesn't give him a cut of the action. Matt makes some vague promises, as is his wont, and takes his leave.
Meanwhile, Tina escalates her brave, if foolhardy campaign by entering Matt's unlocked car to hide in the backseat and follow him to his next meeting with Pete.
After exchanging words and fisticuffs, Matt manages to get the drop on the guy and strings him up by a rope in an attempt to strangle him. In real life, this stuntman-free stunt didn't go as planned; Shatner broke his finger and Sakata nearly met his maker.
When Pete manages to free a hand, he pulls out a knife and cuts the rope, leading to an inspired chase through a car wash. Pete may be strong, but he's only so fast, and Matt runs him over with his car. It's the end of Pete and the end of Matt's financial obligation--and Tina saw the whole thing.
She makes herself Matt's next target when he later spots her exiting his car. He chases, but doesn't catch up to to her. Ann then invites Tina to join her and Matt on their second date, leading to surreptitious looks between the two whenever Ann's gaze drifts elsewhere. The minute Tina gets her mother alone, she tries to detail the horrors she witnessed the night before, but once again, the besotted Ann brushes off her increasingly tall tales.
All the while, Matt's past haunts him, and Grefé frequently cuts away to the incident with the soldier in addition to encounters with the previous women with whom Matt has tangled. Not only is his situation growing more desperate, his mind is growing progressively muddled, so he sets out to do all he can to get Julia and Ann to willingly hand over their money, and then abscond with the spoils as quickly as humanly possible.
This leads to threats, arguments, breaking and entering, physical altercations, a chase through a graveyard and a funeral home, and some rather bloody kills--even a fish tank doubles as a weapon. It would be a crime to say more, but Grefé wraps the film up in satisfying style.
Though there's some psychological complexity to the premise, I don't mean to make Impulse sound more sophisticated than it is. It's a low-budget production that was shot in 15 days and designed for the grindhouse circuit where it thrived despite, and maybe even because of, some pretty damning reviews. If anything, it's only through a stroke of luck that it turned out as good as it did, because it might have faded from view without Shatner's participation. Not least because he doesn't phone it in, though Atlanta Journal critic Barbara Thomas, among others, felt otherwise when she wrote, "William Shatner is the poorest excuse for a deranged killer we've seen in many a day." (Suffice to say, female critics did not dig this film.)
As Grefé explains in his commentary, he and the producer were heading out to Hollywood to cast the film when they ran into the actor in the Miami airport. They buttonholed Shatner to explain the project, and amazingly, he said yes. Right there on the spot. As Grefé adds, Shatner received no points on the original Star Trek, so he wasn't exactly riding high in the early-1970s, and though he has a reputation for his sizeable ego, he and Grefé got along so well that they would work together again on a series of Bacardi minimovies. Sadly, Shatner has since dismissed the film as the result of cash-strapped decision-making, even as it has only grown in estimation over the years.
If Impulse would still probably work without him, bolstered by solid performances from Jennifer Bishop and Ruth Roman--who appeared in Hitchcock's 1951 masterpiece Strangers on a Train--Shatner makes the film the cult hit it would become, to the extent that it's now available as part of a two-disc set bursting with over 15 hours of extras, including short films, featurettes, commercials, a postcard-sized portrait of Matt Stone suitable for framing, and earlier Grefé features, like black and white 1966 docudrama The Devil's Sisters and the seriously unfunny, money-losing 1973 comedy The Godmothers with Mickey Rooney and Billy Barty.
Grefé even provides a commentary track for the former, a roughie about sex trafficking in Mexico that isn't always easy to watch, and nor should it be, but the real story is more horrifying than anything the director depicted.
Like many people who grew up with Star Trek, Shatner became an icon in my world, and I've continued to follow some, but not all, of his big- and small-screen projects, especially the great Columbo guest appearances, and all five seasons of Boston Legal, which David E. Kelley spun-off The Practice on the strength of Shatner's scene-stealing turns as entertainingly fatuous attorney Denny Crane.
Though I took a pass on cop show T.J. Hooker and short-lived sitcom $#*! My Dad Says, Shatner made Boston Legal destination TV, especially in his scenes opposite James Spader's Alan Shore--a character also introduced on The Practice--in which the unlikely duo regularly upped each other's game.
In the case of Impulse, there's another performance-enhancing detail worth mentioning, and that's the costuming. Grefé worked out a deal with a local haberdashery to supply all of Shatner's outfits as Matt Stone, and they contribute to the appeal of both character and film. Most every shirt has the loudest print imaginable, everything is made from slick polyester, and bizarro accessories, like a big white pimp hat, add to the skeevy effect.
In the years to come, Shatner would become a certified award-winner with a fistful of Emmy statuettes, but he's always been a contentious figure when it comes to his talent. Is he a bad actor who is enjoyable to watch simply because of a unique alchemy of charisma and vibes or is he a good, but highly idiosyncratic actor whose staccato vocal inflections and feral gestures indicate genuine dramatic skill? I believe both things can be true. He's irresistible for comedians to impersonate, and yet there's no one else like him, and he's riveting in Impulse from start to finish. It isn't necessarily an Academy Award-caliber performance, but for what it is: it's perfect.
The 4K restoration of Impulse, constructed from an archival 35mm release print, is out now in a two-Blu-ray set from Grindhouse Releasing. Images from GR (William Shatner and Chad Walker), DoBlu.com (Kim Nicholas), The Bloody Pit of Horror (Shatner with Jennifer Bishop and Ruth Roman), House of Self Indulgence (Shatner and Nicholas), Indiewire (Star Trek-era Shatner with tribbles), and the IMDb (Sharon Saxon in The Devil's Sisters).
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
