3 Mulligans

Everyday around noon I get to transform into Doug McClure’s character from the film Satan’s Triangle. At the very end of the movie, an obscure made-for-television feature from the mid-’70s, he’s pushed out of a helicopter by a possessed priest while flying over the ocean. We see his lifeless body floating, face down, but after the priest decides to take control of him, his head jerks up, eyes open wide, maniacally scanning the waterline for more evil things to do or people to occupy. And that’s where I come in.

Whether this power comes from someplace evil or someplace else matters little to me, because now I can accomplish anything. And no matter what I happen to be doing when that lift takes hold, I feel my head jerk up and my eyes pull open wide. The effect this priest has on me, going from TV screen to my body, I’ll bet, is really something to see.

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Lately, I’ve had a hard time finding a movie that grabbed me, but that’s partly my fault. I’ll put something on late at night and it feels like I’m just trying to get it watched and returned to Netflix or the library just to see what else shows up. It’s sort of an elongated version of clicking on a tantalizing internet link. (Will it be an interview with Herzog? The egg contest from Cool Hand Luke? A documentary about the Petr Sís mural in New York? Oh: just boobs. Only in this case, instead of a 2-minute loading time, it’s more like 3 days.)

But it’s partly the movies I’ve chosen, too. The Last Winter, minus a few sparks from Ron Perlman, was absolutely flat, despite the gushing reviews and the promise of a spook-filled enviro-disaster. Oh: just ghost elk. The Box was mildly interesting, but it runs afoul of the most basic law of human curiosity and the desire to solve a puzzle: the very quality of being intriguing makes a likely explanation and satisfying conclusion less possible. And the more baffling something is, the less likely a movie is to wrap up well. (Plus, every time Frank Langella was on the screen, all I could think about was him enraged in Dave: “Was he on the Trilateral Commission? Was he a senator? Was he in Who’s Who in Washington nine years in a row?!”) Scott Pilgrim didn’t even make it to the end before I wondered to myself how many strands of spaghetti noodles were left in the cupboard.

Most disappointing of all was The Beatles Anthology. I was shocked at how shoddy the editing and archival work was. There was no attempt at putting material in context (such as the scene of drunk and fighting Germans on the street: was it from a movie, was it news footage? when was it taken? and what did it have to do with the Beatles? was it even from Hamburg?) and the editing was terribly annoying (such as the multiple clips all spliced together of the band performing Twist and Shout). The film suffered from being a terrible mixture of letting the band speak for themselves (unfortunately not very illuminating) and lousy and selective archival footage, with no one to analyze anything critically (what about the wives/girlfriends? what about the band rivalries? what happened to Stuart Suttcliffe?) Oh, and the unbearably long scene of city names scrolling up the screen in huge letters? I got it, the Beatles toured a lot. But what I also got was a headache. After disc 1, I deleted the rest of the series from my Netflix queue.

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I used to wonder what made a documentary great. Was it just the subject matter that I liked or the way it was presented? After watching The Devil & Daniel Johnston the answer was clear. It has to be both.

At an early age Daniel Johnston was unable to fit in with his surroundings. While under his parents’ Christian umbrella his siblings got jobs, got married and had families. Even his friends – though artists themselves – understood life’s practical side, but Daniel wasn’t buying any of it. This wasn’t due to a rebellious phase; he was simply following his own agenda and understood little else. He drew, made films, recorded music – he also worked at McDonald’s – but nothing about what he created was studied or modeled after anyone’s work. As a lifelong friend recalls during an interview, if he wanted to draw he simply grabbed some paper and started drawing. But as he became increasingly fixated on his hobbies, specifically his songs and the messages behind them, he’s diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

His life story is heartbreaking but has its share of triumphs, the greatest being that this film exists. Assembled from hundreds, maybe thousands, of pieces from his archive I can’t imagine the process of sifting through everything, knowing that only a fraction could be used to summarize his life so far. Home movies, short films, drawings, photos, cassettes of music and conversation, performance footage, and interviews span a period of over 40 years. His family, friends, and business partners – even a few celebrities – talk about the effect he’s had on their lives yet each story feels like a mini documentary in itself with Daniel at its center.

Comparisons will be made to Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Brian Wilson but on a more personal level I couldn’t help being reminded of the late John Wright of Port Huron, Michigan. Like each of them, Daniel Johnston followed an individual path but their lives had striking similarities.

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Last night I was up until 4:30 in the morning watching Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces (2009). I hadn’t stayed up late with a movie like that in what seems like years and years. By the time I finished, I was wide awake and just wanted to stay up thinking about the movie, enjoying how it made me feel. To some extent, this is just another Almodóvar movie with by now very familiar themes: family, sex, illness, mothers and sons, and with the usual stable of actors. But even if his movies all bear an unmistakable stamp and don’t vary much, so what? For me, it works every time.

The plot of Broken Embraces, like most of Almodóvar’s movies, is interesting and original, but certainly takes a back seat to the storytelling itself and the dialogue and emotions of the actors. Here, a blind filmmaker recollects a pivotal time in his life when he vied for the love of a beautiful woman, fighting against the wrath and jealousy of a rich industrialist who has become obsessed with possessing her. In the hands of a Hollywood director, this story would be much different and would focus on the main character’s transformation. We would see lots of scenes of the filmmaker in agony, desperately unraveling spools of film and holding them up to his eyes searching in vain for an image. Then there would be a spiritual breakthrough and an inspiring montage of the filmmaker putting together his life’s masterpiece. But this is Almodóvar and we never see such scenes. The blindness is subdued, almost an afterthought. Instead, the movie starts with the filmmaker seducing a lovely woman he has just met on the street and we later learn that despite his blindness he is a successful screenwriter. More characters are introduced in both the present and in the past (as the main part of the movie unfolds in a recollection) until finally we see at the end of the movie how the two different timelines converge.

This is probably not Almodóvar’s best work and lacks the depth of emotion I felt in All About My Mother and the romance of Live Flesh. Loose plotlines at the end of the movie wrap up too neatly and suddenly for my taste. Still, even slightly rehashed Almodóvar leaves me feeling happy and awake — even at 4:30 in the morning.

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