Dario Argento Panico

The footage of a young Dario Argento in Dario Argento Panico provides an amusing contrast to the old maestro he is now (he is 83). The acclaimed but notorious Italian director of such gory fever dreams as Suspiria and The Stendhal Syndrome definitely had a lean and hungry look in his ‘70s-‘80s prime, a tense and intense face (slap a mustache on him back then and you had Poe) topped by history’s goofiest mullet. Now he has filled out, wrinkled and grayed, and looks like the grandfather he is, but his eyes remain haunted. (The same is true of present-day Werner Herzog.) Argento’s fans may be disappointed with his output in the last decade or so, but he’s still recognizably the same man who turned murder into beauty in Suspiria. He still has some wild magickal darkness in his aura.

Panico is more or less a standard talking-heads tribute to Argento, who is seen here checking into a fancy hotel to work on a new script, just like the old days. He sits for director Simone Scafidi (who also made a doc about Argento peer Lucio Fulci), as do some of Argento’s family, collaborators, friends, and fans. Not just any fans, of course — Scafidi lands international cult directors Guillermo del Toro, Nicholas Winding Refn, and Gaspar Noé, who directed Argento in 2021’s drama Vortex. It’s del Toro who tees up the best Argento quote of the evening: “Everything in Argento’s movies is trying to kill you.” Yes, indeed, especially if you’re a woman.

Yes, Argento routinely contrived epically horrific deaths for many female characters, and even “played” their murderer’s hands on more than one occasion. He himself claimed he wanted to get across how terrible the violence was. Well. The social part of him may have said and believed that, but the artist side of him didn’t care, it scratched some deep dark itch. Given that his daughter Asia points out how many times a girl or woman is front and center in his films, whose terror and vulnerability against a ghastly killer are always heightened and taken very seriously, I doubt Argento hates women. He talks about watching his photographer mother take pictures of the leading models and actresses of the day. Mom made female beauty pop; son makes it bleed. This, the movie shows us, is a man about whom his daughters and even his ex-wife speak fondly. Like many other artists, he obeys Flaubert’s advice to “be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

The documentary mostly deals with Argento’s peak and greatest hits. It finds time to mention his atypical Five Days of Milan, but passes over late-period Argento like Giallo and Dracula (Argento and I are probably the only ones who liked that one) in respectful silence. There have been a number of other film profiles of Argento; the first major one was probably Dario Argento’s World of Horror from 1985. This one takes its title from the emotion Argento wants to throttle out of the viewer — not just fear or horror but panic, a feeling of powerlessness in a malign universe. Argento wanted to evoke apocalyptic anxiety, and in his best work he did. 

The artist documentary to beat, of course, is Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, though perhaps Zwigoff had the advantage of having unforgettably squirmy material to work with. Simone Scafidi doesn’t unearth any unsavory bits about Argento’s past; this is essentially a puff piece. The anecdotes are informative (though some producer says something I didn’t really get about Argento and Se7en), the analysis often on-target when it comes from ascended fanboy del Toro. (I enjoy hearing him talk movies almost as much as I enjoy his movies.) We can’t escape, though, the inconvenient feeling that the filmmaker Panico celebrates stopped being that filmmaker long ago. Argento could make his late-inning masterpiece. Anything’s possible. I’m certainly rooting for him.

Blazing Saddles

This year, Netflix is curating selections of notable films having an anniversary — 20th, 50th, and so on. One of them is Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, which turns 50 on February 7. The movie has in recent years been conscripted in the new culture war as an example of comedy that “could never be made today,” because the “wokesters” and oversensitive Zoomers would “cancel” it, or some such thing. Yet there it is, on Netflix, with all thirteen “N-words” intact, along with other slurs. Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today because it’s very much of its time — a spoof of ‘70s blaxploitation as much as westerns. Other satirical material with bawdy humor and language continues to be made. It’s just that you’re more likely to see it on Max than in the theater.

The movie, written by two Black guys and three Jews, has its heart in the right place when it comes to race. Today, it might come under fire more readily for its gay-bashing humor. Mel Brooks stops the movie cold during its climax so that Dom DeLuise can direct a bunch of flaming nellies in a song-and-dance number while himself playing a gay stereotype. It’s one of several bumps in the narrative’s road, as a Superposse of bad eggs has a traveling brawl with the heroes and townsfolk and keeps bursting in on other productions or the studio commissary, a shambolic meta-ending not unlike the non-climax of Monty Python and the Holy Grail a year later. The thing is, there’s no mitigating satire here, no gay Cleavon Little figure. It’s just making fun of the faygelehs. It’s not great.

Neither is the rest of the movie, really. I adore Mel Brooks as a public figure, your hilarious uncle who’s always “on” and says things in interviews that people quote for decades. May he live to be an actual 2000-year-old man. It’s his movies that don’t do much for me (though I have a soft spot for Young Frankenstein for its obvious love for the old Universal horrors and its dedication to getting the look right). As a writer/director, Brooks tends to elbow us too hard in the ribs trying to sell the laugh. Some of the best moments were improvised, such as the “y’know…morons” line, which benefits from understatement (if Brooks delivered the line he’d have launched it into the cheap seats) and Cleavon Little’s genuine chuckle at it.

Little, of course, plays Bart, the railworker turned sheriff — sent to a town ostensibly to guard it but really to destabilize it. A lot of Blazing Saddles’ racial material, especially as regards white scheming against Black people, wouldn’t offend today so much as seeming somewhat mild. Fifty years ago it was radical; then again, so was the campfire flatulence scene, which now plays both tame and obvious. I can say that Blazing Saddles was absolutely necessary for its time. That doesn’t mean it needs to be driven into oblivion now. To say it hasn’t aged well may only mean society has progressed in fifty years, and I imagine Mel Brooks would be depressed if we hadn’t made any strides since 1974.

Well, in some ways we haven’t. Things go in cycles, and fifty years ago a Black man in drag was on TV (The Flip Wilson Show, still running when Blazing Saddles was in theaters), and today some states are trying to outlaw drag queens. One step forward, ten steps back. The true sin of Blazing Saddles is that its humor is broad (Alex Karras’ Mongo punching the horse — Mongo was reportedly Richard Pryor’s main addition to the script) while its style is bland. The almost serene rapport between Little and Gene Wilder as the broken-down Waco Kid, two hipsters finding each other in a backward-ass town, is a source of pleasure. Harvey Korman, onscreen altogether too much, is not. Madeline Kahn, as the legendary Lili Von Shtupp, is majestically concupiscent while not exactly doing much for the then-fresh second-wave feminism. Blazing Saddles may be instructive in terms of the tropes it chooses to challenge (a group of Black railworkers crooning Cole Porter instead of “Camptown Races”) and the ones it chooses to leave unharmed. 

Eileen

When a movie makes you sort of sigh and say “At least it’s short,” that movie might be in trouble. Eileen is not my idea of a great time, but I can understand why others might dig it. It’s bleak and grungy, full of wet New England snow turned gray by car exhaust; the movie feels irritable, with anger governing many scenes. It left me in a ghastly mood — I felt poked and prodded by the plot turns that play with deep, dark emotions for no very good reason. Whatever happens in the film seems devoid of meaning and grace. It has a kind of integrity, though, and I can imagine mopey young viewers falling under its spell. 

The main problem with Eileen (based on the debut novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, who wrote the script with husband Luke Goebel) is that it has the tone of film noir without the mitigating pleasures — the cold, cruel brilliance, the cynical patter, the style. The dialogue in this movie tends towards the incoherently emotional. Everyone is weak and doesn’t think things through. The titular Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), 23, still lives with her drunken father (Shea Wigham), a retired cop sinking into the wastes of his own self-loathing. For work, she clerks in a boys’ prison, a grim and punitive place housing rude and terrible inmates, except for one kid whose reason for being there is more than meets the eye.

Eileen soon meets Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), a Harvard grad settling into her new job at Eileen’s prison as a psychologist. Rebecca seems an oasis of sophistication in this unnamed town in Massachusetts (the film was mostly shot in New Jersey). Everyone else is ignorant and brays in overdone accents. Set in the mid-‘60s, Eileen maroons two smart women in a time when Rebecca’s new boss says “She may be easy on the eyes, but I assure you, she’s very smart.” Eileen is something of a deranged fantasist, daydreaming about blowing her own head off or her dad’s. So it’s never quite clear whether Eileen is imagining the sapphic sparks between her and Rebecca, or whether it’s legit, or manipulated by one or the other.

Thomasin McKenzie is saddled with the worst Massachusetts accent since Julianne Moore on 30 Rock, but when she’s allowed to be quiet she scores. She and Anne Hathaway get a hushed, intimate rapport going, whispering fondly to each other. They had my permission to leave the dreary film behind and go find fulfillment in warmer climes, perhaps in a film by Greta Gerwig. God knows there’s nowhere for them to go in this film. A little over an hour in, the plot takes a pivot that struck me as flatly unbelievable, to say nothing of stupid. The movie throws away whatever McKenzie and Hathaway had built together, and we realize we’re watching a collection of self-sabotaging dimwits. Sigh. At least it’s short.

Who knows, Eileen might appeal to glum teenage nihilists. There isn’t much poetry in it, though, visual or verbal. Even when I myself was a glum teenage nihilist we had risk-taking stuff like River’s Edge, which at least was about something other than that life sucks and we’re all trying to escape it. (It also debunked that point of view, while Eileen dines out on it.) Eileen is directed (by Lady Macbeth’s William Oldroyd) as a string of blandly composed scenes heightened by abrupt gory shocks. The movie is unpleasant bordering on unsavory. It draws us closer with vague lesbian vibes and then squanders our attention on plot-centered drama that feels (despite a difficult monologue honorably delivered by Marin Ireland) pulpy and something you’d expect to find in a Lifetime movie. Eventually the film and Eileen have nowhere to go, and that’s exactly where they go.

The Boy and the Heron

Much of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterful new film The Boy and the Heron deals with grief, desolation, and the need for a veteran creator to contend with his own legacy. Heavy stuff, but moment to moment, there is such enormous pleasure in the little things that Miyazaki takes care to animate. When the wind picks up, it stirs hair, beard hair, even eyebrows and eyelashes. When people climb into and out of a pedicab, or cycle rickshaw, the conveyance tilts or sinks or lifts according to the weight of the passengers. As wild as the events get, they hold to a rigorous sense of physical realism. Everything in the frame has been thought about — why animate it if it shouldn’t be there? why not animate it correctly if it should be there? — and every frame is dazzling, and sometimes more than that. Some of the images gleam with an almost cruel beauty.

Because of all this, and because of an incredibly dense narrative loaded with bizarre creatures doing irascible, not-always-understandable things, The Boy and the Heron is, like other Miyazaki, the sort of banquet that may strike some as a bit much. Miyazaki will give you more movie than anyone else or die trying. It’s frankly too much for the eye and brain to take in at one sitting. That’s not a demerit in a movie marketplace that frequently gives us not enough movie. But I do advise just going along for the ride, letting the enchanting milieu wash over you, and not getting caught up in “what’s going on.”

What’s going on is that Mahito, a boy growing up during World War II, misses his mother. She died in a hospital fire. Mahito’s dad soon takes up with Natsuko, his late wife’s sister. Mahito and his father move out of Tokyo and in with Natsuko. A gray heron appears to Mahito and claims it can help him find his mother. Mahito is also looking for the pregnant, missing Natsuko. Along the way there are pelicans, and strange little ambling servants and their doll counterparts, and little globes called warawara that ascend from some sea world to the surface world to become human souls, unless the pelicans eat them, unless the master of fire Lady Himi torches the pelicans first. 

Some of the fierce gush of Miyazaki’s imagination seems borderline punitive. He doesn’t want to give us our bearings in mundane reality (even while respecting the lumpy, creaky physics of the “real world”); past a certain point it’s just chaos. (Miyazaki is said to have appended a statement to a preview screening: “Perhaps you didn’t understand it. I myself don’t understand it.”) It’s a classic love-it-or-loathe-it experience; I can’t imagine someone just shrugging at it neutrally. Miyazaki must set out to show us something we’ve never seen before (or never seen it this way before) in every scene. And he’s got so much plot here, so many pet themes to attend to, that the film runs about two hours, and I hate to say it, but we begin to feel the time. The pacing feels anecdotal; it’s like looking into separate boxes filled with magical things — we don’t feel much continuity between the scenes. This happens, then this happens, then something else happens. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of Terry Gilliam’s films play similarly.)

Yet The Boy and the Heron, for all its ornery refusal to cater to newcomers’ sensibilities, feels like a work of high devotion and high craft. (Miyazaki and his sixty animators hand-drew every frame; the finished film has some CGI augmentation, as every Miyazaki has since Princess Mononoke.) Some critics seem to want it to be Miyazaki’s swan song, though he has said he wants to make another film — the core of the thing has that farewell-tour vibe to it, an artist accounting for what he’s brought into the world. If you watch it (a second or third time) with that in mind, it might hang together more neatly. But what Miyazaki is doing here isn’t neat, and shouldn’t be. It’s his artistic legacy all bound up with sorrow and bereavement and the impossibility of sensitive souls to live in a cold sharp world but living in it anyway. Why? Because, Miyazaki says, damn it all, it’s worth it. And so The Boy and the Heron is worth it.