I

The other night ni was kind enough to recommend The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bogdanovich); tonight I had a chance to watch it.

Thank you very much, ni.

I had seen Bogdanovich movies before I knew his name, and I only really knew his name after viewing The Third Man on DVD a number of years ago; he provided an interview/commentary.

The Onion A.V. Club is conducting a series of "favorite movie years," and one of the first to be covered was 1974. One of my favorite years. As Noel Murray mentions, "By 1974, emerging 'New Hollywood' directors Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola had made their initial splashes and were settling into becoming reliable working filmmakers," and it's hard to argue with a year that includes Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Chinatown. But that "New Hollywood" can be seen emerging a few years earlier in such works as The Last Picture Show.

I can't say it "has everything," but it is fascinating, and it has a lot. It has smart cinematography. It has psychological realism and acting that is sometimes a bit raw (understandable given how many of the actors are just 20 in it) but often naturalistic and worn down to emotional cores. It's all show rather than tell, and it shows intelligently, respecting its audience.

When I read the cast list I wondered, given all these people, how had I not seen it? Ellen Burstyn. Cloris Leachman. Eileen Brennan (whom I know mainly from Clue [?!]). Randy Quaid. Jeff Bridges. Cybill Shepherd.

It's a Texan The Graduate without the emo-revisionism. It's a cast of older women (except Shepherd) and younger men.

II

It's not an unstructured narrative; quite the opposite, it's almost formalistic in its rigor, but it's a rigor that seems loose, not tied down by a grand plot, but singular conflicts.

And in its middle, at the center, stands Sam.

Damn I love Sam (Ben Johnson), a man who peeks in here and there in the first half and who is gone in the second, and it's that farewell he gives and that road trip to Mexico in the middle (exactly in the freaking middle) that shifts everything.

The return to town from Mexico is out of a twilight zone. The town is suddenly dead, and when the young protagonists find a cop in his car I half expect the latter to be a corpse. With Sam goes the soul of the town, and what was previous youthful hormones and experimentation becomes desperate emotional yearning. Playfulness becomes cold-hearted manipulation. Youth becomes nostalgia.

The winds and sand and leaves do not lay bare the inhumanity underneath until the end.

The Last Picture Show is a movie out of time looking back at the past; it's based on a 1966 Larry McMurtry novel and takes place between 1951 and 1952. But anyone who grew up in the west experienced its milieu into the 70s and 80s.

When the bus rolls into town to take Dwayne off to Korea and I read Trailways on its side I was reminded of all my Trailways bus rides up the Salmon River.

III

The Last Picture Show was set in a still all too familiar past; in the thoroughly forgettable Ultraviolet Milla Jovovich states via voice-over, "Hello. My name is Violet and I was born into a world you may not understand." The director, Kurt Wimmer, has a limited imagination (he's interested in futuristic dystopian authoritarian states run by father figures and combatted by by individuals who face no real opposition except stray bullets and conspiracies until they have their ultimate show-down with big-bad-daddy), but it is an imagination, and it's an imagination that is too great for what he puts on the screen.

The movie begins with a mintues-long montage of exposition guided by Milla's voice-over. Nothing in the movie develops, least of all organically, from psyches or events. Instead we have top-down control and manipulation of chess pieces and the occasional but ill-motivated illusion of feeling. Why does Garth (Wiliam Fichtner) suddenly declare his love for Violet in the 3rd act? Because it seems like a good time to do so. Whereas The Last Picture Show is full of good actors whose names you know, so many in fact that you wonder why you haven't watched it earlier, Ultraviolet is hard-pressed to present anyone memorable, and the best, most well-known actor in it, Fichtner, is throw-away.

Ultraviolet is the evil spawn of Resident Evil and Æon Flux birthed by surrogate mother Equilibrium, but its true lineage is seen when compared to 300, another "movie" composed of fascinating still shots by directors who do not know how to make images into scenes and scenes into arcs or narratives. In fact, until its third act Ultraviolet seems to consist of two sorts of shots: CGI and soft-focus close-ups. There are no transitions, only sharp cuts, between CG action shots and close-ups; the rhythm that made Equilibrium an interesting post-Matrix take a Logan's Run and 1984 aesthetic is sorely lacking here. In fact the battle scenes consist of two attributes: they are impossible to follow and they make no choreographic sense.

But there are ideas here. This, again, is conceptual art. I see the production design, the colors, cultural details that are never explained, and I realize that Wimmer is just a crappy fantasy author not in the body of a fat 50-year-old man dying of heart disease or similar, trying to get out his 3, 6, 12-book epic, but in a  younger, hungrier Hollywood-adjunt frame. And somehow he got appointed director.