The double feature (and how to use it) seems to get no consideration when writing about movies. Me, I still recall the Friday night, now seventy years ago, Hurlstone Park Hoyts bracketed The Ox Bow Incident and How Green Was My Valley, a door opening wide into classic Hollywood, that one. Another nice double was Hampstead Everyman running They Might Be Giants with The Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes. Still in the fifties, I had Sydney Film Society program the Delannoy-Stroheim Macao, Enfer de Jeu with Why We Fight - The Battle For China and, intrigued by their different takes on China's pre-WW2 International Settlement, I started thinking about multiple programming. I never did get up the double of Willian S. Hart in Hell's Hinges and Anthony Mann's The Devil's Doorway with the Eye View Group but forty years later, I played director James Cruze's The Covered Wagon with the 1947 Ray Milland-John Farrow California, which had borrowed elements (the ex-army-wanted man-wagon master and the dividing wagon trains) along with the villainous separatist from Cruze's follow-up The Pony Express. This put on show the studio culture, shaped by the phenomenal success of the silents, still thriving in the Technicolor spectacular era. On the other hand, running a couple of Greta Garbos or Fassbinders together always seemed lazy programming.
The Cinémathèque Française's legendary Henri Langlois once claimed that his heritage would be those office duplicator program sheets, which would record connections between the films he programmed on the same evening. Langlois was often full of it, though he loved films and detested the B.F.I., both things which were endearing. What he had really discovered, unlike most of his peers, was that, involved in one film, viewers were receptive to another one which offered contrasting common elements - mood, subject or philosophy- though it might have been made years apart or by different people. The first evening I spent there, they did Jacques Tourneur's The Cat People with the Capra American Madness. Langlois followed the Louise Brooks Miss Europa/Prix de Beauté with Maurice Chevalier in the U.S. Folies Bergere or Murau's Sunrise with Gerard Phillipe in Le diable au corps (great example). I don't think his heirs had got the message when they put on a day of Viva Villa, Viva Zapata, Viva Max and Viva Viva.
SBS is into making their stock into one-a-week seasons but they just came up with a two-movie night that fits nicely. I wonder whether that was intentional.
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| Kristen Stewart |
The tone is set by the opening in a grubby desert community gym, with signs like “Train at Your Own Risk.” Kristen is in the back, with her hand down a blocked toilet. The community‘s only other visible industry is a Louisville Gun Club shooting range, with both businesses owned by her wrinkled dad, a never more imposing Ed Harris, whose real trade is crating up and smuggling long guns across the border.
Such stability as there is is undermined by Kristen’s sister, Jena Malone’s mullet haired wife-beater husband Dave Franco, putting her in St. Clarence's hospital and the arrival of itinerant Katy O'Brian, on her way to Vegas bodybuilder finals. Fairly rapidly, Katy’s made it with father and daughter… and we’re just starting. Kirsten keeps her top on for their first encounter and assures Katy that a steroid shot will have dissipated in her system before she gets a tournament medical check. There is a black FBI man in a suit, presenting his card while drinking in the bar but he’s peripheral.
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| Love Lies Bleeding - Harris and Stewart |
Pretty soon Ed, The Bald Man, is delivering the line “Are you threatening me?” with more menace than we’ve ever heard and Katy, The Big Girl, is going against orders and heading off to the finals roided up. We see the parade of baby oiled contestants and Katy there in an itsy bitsy bikini doing her interrupted routine. Ah, but there’s more, a departure from any realism and a bit of Thelma and Louise to come. This is too much for most reviewers.
Craftsmanship is often superior. You can smell the putrid atmosphere and the lead performances are remarkable. Switches of tone are more questionable.
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| Love Lies Bleeding - Katy O'Brian |
Then we got How to Blow Up a Pipeline, one of the few contemporary English-language fiction films that deal with climate issues. It is made by young people. We know that because a lot of the behind-the-camera talent pull double duty, acting alongside performers recruited from streamed TV. Harvard Visual Studies graduate director Daniel Goldhaber was confirming the promise of his admired 2018 Cam, working in low-cost 16mm. with a confidence that is only occasionally undermined by unnecessary camera movements or the fakey rocket signal effects. The shots of industrial installations are suitably menacing. The piece looks low-budget, with that adding to the conviction.
As befitting a film spun off an activist manual, a lot of the running time is divided between the mechanics of how they are going about their task and incidents which fill in their characters. This is punctuated with locating white-on-black-captioned flashbacks. We learn about the girl, who is dying from pollution-caused poisoning, from her profanity-laced call to the suppliers who won’t issue the medication to save her. There's the farmer reduced to poverty when an Eminent Domain order takes the land his family has operated for generations, leaving him living with his wife’s mother. Add a horny couple who look like their making out will undermine the plan and the black Food Aid worker who says “the way to help people, is to help people!” only to have her objections ground down to the point where she ends up driving the activists’ recycled van.
There is no doubt where the makers’ sympathies lie. The only Establishment representatives we see are a police woman urging the girl from the privileged family to rat out her friends, a deputy drinking with the farmer, who sees him as an alibi and a couple of fossil-fuel Company maintenance men with side arms. There is a bit of Wages of Fear stuff with unreliable explosives and improvised machinery, to set against their care to avoid injuring outsiders or leave incriminating DNA, even when one of the group is bleeding out. This one’s cheer-worthy moment is taking out the inspection drone with a well-flung length of chain.
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| How to Blow Up a Pipeline - Jame Lawson & Ariela Barber |
It’s easy to imagine Donald Trump walking out of either movie indignantly, if he ever took the effort to seek them out.
