Film Freak Central

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ken Ogata, Kenji Sawada, Yasosuke Bando, Toshiyuki Nagashima
written by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader (Japanese screenplay by Cheiko Schrader)
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer A little more than halfway through Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a fragmented, multifaceted cinematic biography of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Mishima expresses nostalgia for an afterlife that existed only in the distant past. "The average age for men in the Bronze Age was 18 and, in the Roman era, 22," Mishima reckons aloud, in voiceover. "Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful." Like the rest of the film's narration, the passage is quoted from Mishima's published work, in this case an article he wrote in 1962, eight years before his death at the age of 45 by seppuku. "When a man reaches 40, he has no chance to die beautifully," Mishima continues. "No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live." In 1984, when he made this film, Paul Schrader was 38 years old. He had just come off the commercial misfire that was 1982's Cat People, a straightforward studio assignment he tailored to address his signature concerns about sex and death, putting them in the context of a dark fairytale with intimations of incest and bestiality. It wasn't a good experience. Coked out of his mind for much of the shoot, Schrader fell into a dead-end affair with Nastassja Kinski that he hoped was something more; she wanted nothing to do with him after the movie wrapped, and Cat People's disappointing box-office receipts closed the door on his Hollywood career. He thought of suicide. He scurried away from Hollywood, heading first to New York and then to Japan, in search of a life change. That's where Mishima came in.

First Reformed (2018) - Blu-ray + Digital

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles, Victoria Hill
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Walter Chaw The title character of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest is consumed by his inconsequence. Determined to make a difference, he can't even make an impression on the vile inhabitants of the little town that is his parish. It consumes him. It kills him. No one notices. There's nothing to notice. Bresson doesn't even bother to show it. The priest's voiceovers become more urgent, though his faith never flags. He develops terrible stomach pains he seeks to soothe with an austere diet of bread soaked in wine: the Host, I guess, that nourishes communion with the holy spirit, but also the cancer in his gut that consumes him. His last words? "All is grace." Paul Schrader, raised in the Dutch Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, which basically believes that Christians don't earn their salvation but rather receive it as a gift they don't deserve, has made it his life's work to react against his faith--and to live it, too, when reaction fails. Towards the end of his new film, First Reformed, the priest, Toller (Ethan Hawke), writes on his church's whiteboard "Will God Forgive Us?," which is less Calvinist--God already has forgiven us--than a sign of a faith in severe crisis. Schrader's riffed on Bresson's film before with his script for Taxi Driver, still his best-known work despite a career littered with masterpieces of individual fears, men in isolation from God, and spiritual self-loathing. In Taxi Driver, the Priest is a sociopath driving through a Times Square hellscape, praying for the apocalypse to come as a purifying, obliterating rain. He tries to kill himself, but becomes a hero instead. First Reformed is either less cynical or more cynical than that. It's complicated.

Telluride '17: First Reformed

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles, Victoria Hill
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Walter Chaw The title character of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest is consumed by his inconsequence. Determined to make a difference, he can't even make an impression on the vile inhabitants of the little town that is his parish. It consumes him. It kills him. No one notices. There's nothing to notice. Bresson doesn't even bother to show it. The priest's voiceovers become more urgent, though his faith never flags. He develops terrible stomach pains he seeks to soothe with an austere diet of bread soaked in wine: the Host, I guess, that nourishes communion with the holy spirit, but also the cancer in his gut that consumes him. His last words? "All is grace." Paul Schrader, raised in the Dutch Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, which basically believes that Christians don't earn their salvation but rather receive it as a gift they don't deserve, has made it his life's work to react against his faith--and to live it, too, when reaction fails. Towards the end of his new film, First Reformed, the priest, Toller (Ethan Hawke), writes on his church's whiteboard "Will God Forgive Us?," which is less Calvinist--God already has forgiven us--than a sign of a faith in severe crisis. Schrader's riffed on Bresson's film before with his script for Taxi Driver, still his best-known work despite a career littered with masterpieces of individual fears, men in isolation from God, and spiritual self-loathing. In Taxi Driver, the Priest is a sociopath driving through a Times Square hellscape, praying for the apocalypse to come as a purifying, obliterating rain. He tries to kill himself, but becomes a hero instead. First Reformed is either less cynical or more cynical than that. It's complicated.

Cat People (1982) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nastassia Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O'Toole
screenplay by Alan Ormsby, based on the story by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer Amid the American horror boom of the late-1970s and early-1980s, when everything old was new again and once-dormant studio properties like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, and The Fly were suddenly valuable franchises, the script for a remake of Cat People, one of the most subtle of all horror classics, somehow ended up on Paul Schrader's desk. Why Schrader? Dumb luck, mostly. Certainly he had no great love for the source material, a 1942 horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur that Schrader famously (and charmlessly) claimed "isn't that brilliant." But he must have seen in the raw material the opportunity to make a deeply weird movie, one that fused a new mythology with a contemporary melodrama of fear, desire, and violence. The result is not just a personal expression of Schrader's own sex-and-death preoccupations, but a sort of high-water mark for the quixotic attempt to meld visually sophisticated erotica with commercially savvy narrative storytelling.

The Vanishing (1993) + Hardcore (1979) - DVDs

THE VANISHING
**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Todd Graff, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

HARDCORE
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring George C. Scott, Peter Boyle, Season Hubley, Ilah Davis
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers 1993 was the year that American remakes of two estimable foreign thrillers became instant poster boys for Hollywood condescension. While John Badham's Point of No Return is every bit as egregious as they said it was (although I prefer its "Cleaner" sequence with Harvey Keitel to Nikita's field test of Jean Reno's Léon persona), George Sluizer's The Vanishing, an Americanization of his own Spoorloos, often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its forerunner--or is at the very least too provocative in its departures to dismiss out of hand. A lot of people wondered how Sluizer could desecrate what had been the crowning achievement of his career in this way, but what artist wouldn't jump at the chance to view a piece of work through the looking glass without physically altering the original? (A kindred impulse drives novelists to sell the screen rights to their books.) All I can say is that the end result is more seductive than, say, Vanilla Sky, or Christopher Nolan's Insomnia.

Focus Puller: FFC Interviews Paul Schrader

December 17, 2002|A pivotal member of the small group of film-school 'brats' to single-handedly manufacture in 1970s America what is arguably the most important and vital decade in the history of the medium, Paul Schrader (screenwriter of such seminal texts as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and writer-director of Hardcore, Blue Collar, and Light Sleeper, to name a few) follows up his brilliant Affliction and his disappointing Forever Mine with the new film Auto Focus. Another in a line of Schrader-helmed biopics (Mishima, Patty Hearst), Auto Focus follows the rise and mysterious murder of "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, locating the TV actor as a man discovering his masculinity in an ascetic, downbeat way reminiscent of the work of Schrader's hero, director Robert Bresson.

TIFF '02: Auto Focus

**/****
starring Greg Kinnear, Willem Dafoe, Rita Wilson, Maria Bello
screenplay by Michael Gerbosi, based on The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers I find it curious that, in my experience, TIFF-goers keep mishearing or misspeaking Auto Focus as "Out of Focus," what with either title applying to some degree. The former speaks to the self-centredness of the movie's subject, "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, the latter the shambles his life became, and aye, there's the rub: it's too easy to tie a bow on Auto Focus. Greg Kinnear is affable as Crane, who used his fame and fortune to get laid as often as possible, documenting it all with a newfangled technology called videotape supplied him by bottom-feeder John "Carpy" Carpenter (Willem Dafoe, sparkling as usual). In the latest issue of CREATIVE SCREENWRITING, script doctors Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (self-appointed kings of the biopic as the writers of Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Man on the Moon) touch on a difference in philosophy they had with Auto Focus director Paul Schrader that boils down to Schrader's controversial belief that addicts are born not made. By imposing this thinking on Michael Gerbosi's screenplay (adapted from the Robert Graysmith book The Murder of Bob Crane), Schrader imbues the early frames of Auto Focus with a sad inevitability: Chided by his highschool-sweetheart wife (Rita Wilson) for keeping a collection of skin mags in the garage, he makes excuses as desperate as those of an alcoholic, and we intuit that the celebrity he'll achieve through "Hogan's Heroes" will just enable his compulsions on a much grander scale. But once the fall from grace comes to pass, Auto Focus bears out as your typical junkie opera with tits instead of needles, right down to the proverbial pledges of going straight. Though sociopathic, Carpy emerges as the real tragic figure here--a wingman whose thirsts aren't quite so easily quenched. One pines for a glimpse of his life post-Crane as a parasite without a host, but it's prohibited by the picture's abrupt ending. Auto Focus, too, is only interested in the star. PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Forever Mine (2000) - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound B- Commentary B+
starring Joseph Fiennes, Ray Liotta, Gretchen Mol
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers Paul Schrader's fragmented, risqué melodrama Forever Mine tells the tale of an exceptionally well-read Miami Beach cabana boy named Alan (Joseph Fiennes) who steals the heart of Ella (Gretchen Mol, an old-fashioned bombshell), the wife of councilman Mark Brice (Ray Liotta), and pays for it: first by being sent to jail an innocent, then with a bullet in the head. (The jealous husband does the deed.) But Alan survives and, unbeknownst to Brice and Ella, steals a new identity for himself, that of a Miami druglord called upon fourteen years later to act as the politico's criminal liaison in New York. Haunted Ella finds herself compelled by this scarred stranger and his thoughtful glances.

Blue Collar (1978) - DVD

***/**** Image B- Sound C+ Commentary B+
starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Cliff DeYoung
screenplay by Paul Schrader & Leonard Schrader
directed by Paul Schrader

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Blue Collar gave me pause. On the one hand, it's a no-excuses lambasting of management control and union corruption, railing against those who conspire to keep labour powerless and pliable. On the other, it offers no avenue for redress, throwing its protagonists' lives out the window in an attempt to be modishly downbeat. The film is constantly at odds with itself, riling us into an angry mob while limiting the outlets for that anger, assuming that no political solution is possible and thus chopping everyone off at the knees. The result is a compulsively watchable film that never figures out what it's trying to say, contained as it is within a boundary that keeps it from investigating the true nature of the problem.

Affliction (1998)

***½/****
starring Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on the novel by Russell Banks
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers

Wade: "I get to feeling like a whipped dog some days, Rolfe. And some night I'm going to bite back."
Rolfe: "Haven't you already done a bit of that?"
Wade: "No, not really. I've growled a little, but I haven't bit."

Why Paul Schrader chose to adapt Russell Banks's disquieting literary novel Affliction is no great mystery: its story follows an arc similar to that of Schrader's best known works, such as his screenplays for Scorsese's Taxi Driver and his own Hardcore. Affliction's Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), like Travis Bickle before him, is a man who fixates on exposing corruption in repression of his own violent past. In Bickle's case, planning the assassination of a governor perhaps defers the pain of Vietnam, from which he was honourably discharged; Wade has been afflicted for years by his father Glen's wickedness.