In short: U-571 (2000)

World War II. The crew – including Matthew McConaughey in his “young star” phase, Harvey Keitel in his “Harvey Keitel” phase, and Jon Bon Jovi in his perpetual “can’t act” phase -  of the submarine of Lt. Cmdr. Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) is sent on a top secret surprise mission to use a lucky opportunity to grab an Enigma Machine from a German U-Boot.

Things do of course become more complicated than that, and soon the US submarine is destroyed and most of its crew killed, with only a handful of men under the command of XO McConaughey alive on a German U-Boot that has seen better days. More tense complications do of course ensue during the attempt to get the Enigma Machine in allied hands.

This is the other diamond in the otherwise naff crown of director Jonathan Mostow, standing at eye level to his pretty damn great Breakdown. In fact, his two good films are so good, I can’t help but think the director must have been exceedingly unlucky with outside forces on his other projects, for the kind of talent for suspense and tense action his two excellent films demonstrate can’t have been a fluke. Obviously, the script Mostow’s working from is of dubious historical authenticity (if you want to know about the actual way Enigma was cracked, Wikipedia and a bunch of sources mentioning many people from exotic countries like Poland, France, and the UK this film has never heard about apart from a tiny mention once the plot is over beckon), and its characters are cut from very typical genre movie cloth.


However, the script does know how to make its shorthand characters just lively enough for an audience to care about their fate, and provides the damn great cast many a good opportunity to sweat and stare dramatically without the plot ever getting bogged down in melodramatics. Instead, things always feel tight, tense and teetering on the edge of catastrophe, Mostow using all tricks of the thriller-style war movie to do a very classic thing: dragging his audience to the edge of their seats. It does help here that the film, despite its historical inauthenticity, is the kind of war adventure that very well knows that war isn’t actually an adventure, so this isn’t only showing heroic pursuits, but men following these pursuits while in desperate fear for their lives, everybody quickly coming to the edge of their respective breaking points. Which, obviously, enhances the tension Mostow creates through masterful staging and editing of the suspense quite a bit.

Three Films Make A Post: Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect

Piercing (2018): Visually heavily influenced by the classic giallo (even the one sheet has the appropriate colour), Nicolas Pesce’s film, is placed somewhere between horror, general weirdness, and a very dark comedy about the ways people navigate their darkest desires. The whole thing is classed up by having Mia Wasikowska and Christopher Abbott going through all the stylized and ambiguous motions they are supposed to go through with the proper amount of suggested darkness and mystery. As an exercise in tone and style, the film is highly successful, evoking the mental states of its characters through sound and vision; I’m just not sure it really succeeds at doing as much with this as it could, not really seeming to go anywhere.

Ella Enchanted (2004): With a script that involves the talented hands of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith (who can make teen comedies do really clever and charming stuff and make it look it easy) I was expecting a bit more from this mock fairy-tale version of Cinderella about a young woman (Anne Hathaway) cursed/gifted with the inability to refuse an order, living in a fairy-tale land that does it damndest to evoke The Princess Bride (they even hired Cary Elwes) but is much too beholden to randomness and genericness to get there. But then, there are three other writers listed too, so it’s anyone’s guess how much of what made its way on screen is their fault. Tommy O’Haver’s direction is competent but also corporately bland in a way that is not a good fit for any comedy, and most of the film just barely gets by on Hathaway’s charm. The feminist subtext isn’t terribly involved, and too many of the film’s clever ideas aren’t actually.

Holy Smoke (1999): This comedy/psychodrama directed by Jane Campion, in which Harvey Keitel plays a charming asshole deprogrammer hired to brainwash Kate Winslet’s character back from her love for an Indian guru is usually treated as one of the director’s weaker films, and it is relatively easy to see why, even though a weaker Campion film is still better than anything various male big name critical darlings deliver on their best days (cough, Woody Allen, cough).

But there is a reason why comedy and Campion-style psychodrama are not usually genres that are combined - they don’t really come together well at all, and the film has quite a few moments when the comedic parts and the deep, tour-de-force character exploration (wonderfully portrayed by Winslet and Keitel) seem to belong to completely different worlds, or into completely different movies. This problem is certainly exacerbated by how awkward quite a bit of the film’s humour is.


And still, even though it is sometimes a struggle to get through the funny bits, Campion’s willingness to let ambiguities and complicated contradictions in and between characters stand and explore these spaces between them while keeping the social and all that comes with it in mind is so admirable, her ability to let certain things stand unresolved because they are not truly resolvable is so great that I’m rather okay to have to fight with the film a bit.

Star Knight (1985)

Original title: El caballero del dragón

There’s trouble afoot in the realm (consisting of his castle and one measly village, apparently) of the Count of Rue (José Vivó). His main henchperson, the ironically named Klever (Harvey Keitel, apparently having come to medieval times via New York, dubbing himself and therefore thee-ing and thou-ing with a Brooklyn accent that won’t leave a dry eye in the house) is overly ambitious and permanently annoys him with his wish to be knighted as well as with his painful attempts at wooing the count’s daughter, Princess (medieval titles work rather strangely around here it seems) Alba (Maria Lamor). Alba for her part can’t stop going on about wanting to find true romantic love – but please not Klever’s. To make the poor count’s life even more miserable, his priest Lupo (Fernando Rey) and his alchemist (Klaus Kinski as…a nice guy) don’t get along, either. Oh, and his vassals don’t love him either, which might have something to do with him being a bit of a tool and – being a member of the ruling classes – a parasite.

Things become really complicated when an UFO the populace takes for a dragon lands at a place charmingly dubbed “the Mouth of Hell”. Soon, Alba is abducted for a bit by its pilot, one Ix (Miguel Bosé), while she is sneaking out of the castle for a bit of gratuitous skinny dipping, and falls in love with him. Alas, interspecies romances are difficult, particularly since Lupo sees the devil everywhere it’ll get him ahead and Klever would really like to improve his place in life by a bit of dragon slaying.

I have no idea how Fernando Colomo’s deeply peculiar SF comedy came about, or how he managed to cast Kinski, Keitel and Rey, and I’m not too sure about what this thing is actually supposed to be about. exactly. I do know I rather enjoyed my time watching a dubbed PD print – with all the potential for cuts, the heart-breaking full screen image, and the generally mediocre visual quality that comes with this sort of thing - of it.

The film’s comedy is broad but not beholden to slapstick. Instead, is consists of a series of asides against church, state and authority figures that somehow take up most of the running time, some running gags like the regular appearance of a Green Knight who has a hell of time with his inability guarding a bridge or the local peasantry regularly having to dye their single piece of clothing a different colour depending on their count’s mood of the week, and a smidgen of perfectly undramatic yet somehow charming plot.

One really shouldn’t go into this one expecting excitement brought by narrative or storytelling. The joy – and I for one found a lot of joy hidden away here – is all in watching Keitel pretending to be a very stupid would-be knight or Kinski being benign, or just in being held in pleasant anticipation of the peculiar or goofy thing Colomo will come up next. That last bit is a surprising source of funny, silly and pleasing moments of the sort that will keep a slight pleased grin on the face of any viewer as childlike as I like to be when watching a movie.

As a surprising bonus, the production design – particularly Ix’s space ship – isn’t half bad, the castle looks homely enough, and even the bad print can’t hide that the photography is nice to look at too. That’s quite a lot of pleasing and enjoyable nonsense for one’s fifty cents.

Blue Collar (1978)

Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel) and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) work in a Detroit car factory. Despite their racial mix, they're drinking buddies, sharing their frustrations with the petty indignities of their bosses, the indifference of their union, their increasingly painful economic situation, and a complete inability to be honest to their families about anything (it's the old "a man's gotta provide for their family, but sure as shit ain't gonna talk to them" song).

One day, when money's getting even tighter for various reason, most of which are quite out of their control, the trio decide to rob the safe of their local union. The three men's amateurish robbery is successful in a way, but the loot's only six-hundred dollars and some paperwork, far below what the thieves were expecting. In the following days, the union claims to have been robbed of around 20.000 dollars.

On closer look, one of the notebooks among the papers the trio robbed has rather interesting contents. Looks like the union is loaning out large amounts of money for illegally high interest rates to very dubious people in places like Vegas and New York. Perhaps it would be a good idea to make a blackmail attempt? Turns out it truly isn't, and soon enough, Zeke, Jerry and Smokey are in even more above their heads than before, and a matter of casual crime turns into a matter of life and death that will - at best - break open all the rifts between the men, and might just possibly kill someone.

Paul Schrader's directorial debut Blue Collar is a strangely under-watched and underappreciated movie, despite Schrader's clout as a writer (at the point Blue Collar was made, Schrader had already scripted Taxi Driver and Obsession), the great central cast, and the fact the movie's pretty damn great.

At least it is if you have interest and patience to sit through the loose yet detailed way Schrader begins to explore his characters' lives and world. At first, I actually thought the patient and slow way in which Schrader introduces the audience to the facts of his characters' lives were a mistake, or rather, an exercise in a kind of flabby self-indulgence not atypical of parts of 70s cinema. As a matter of fact, I was wrong about that: every scene that seems aimless is actually important to characters, mood, and sense of place of the film; the seeming lack of direction mirrors the lost and directionless inner lives of the characters.

In this context, it is not much of surprise Blue Collar becomes increasingly tight once the characters are caught up in the consequences of their little robbery, and all even imaginary opportunities disappear for them. It's at that point all humour - before an important part of the film's tone - disappears from Blue Collar, the tone becoming grim, even nightmarish. Once the working classes are not playing the game they're supposed to play anymore, playtime is over for them until they're submitting to the system they're caught up in again, or are left by the wayside completely.

Schrader's rather daring approach to plotting his movie about the betrayal and self-betrayal of the US working class would probably not pay off as well as it does if not for his eye for telling details that not just make the characters believable as part of their time and place but also prevents the preachiness inherent in the material from taking over by showing flawed, sometimes stupid, men and not martyrs to a cause. As films interested in truthfulness go, it's really rather brilliant.

And that's before you even take the core trio of actors into account. I am particularly excited about Pryor's nuanced performance of the film's most complicated character. Pryor uses some of the usual mannerisms and bounds of his comedic characters as something Zeke wears like an armour, with the truth about who he is shining through in small, subtly played moments suggesting a fragility as well as an astonishingly large ability to lie to himself. After this, I'll have to take Pryor seriously as a serious actor. The quality of Kotto's and Keitel's performances is of course self-evident and utterly unsurprising.

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