* Note: This post is so full of spoilers it’s almost ridiculous – so only read the first paragraph if you haven’t seen the film yet.  It’s also more of a personal review than I might otherwise write, mostly because ‘Paris, Texas’ has been resonating deeply with me since I first saw it about 15 years ago.  And finally, the photo credit: some images below are courtesy of the fine folks at the Criterion Collection.

I used to think that Thomas Merton, that earthy paragon of real life mysticism, who left this world too soon, was too wise to have lived in the twentieth century. But then I saw his character pop up in Robert Redford’s excellent little horror film Quiz Show and realised my mistake – his was a profoundly modern spirituality, with the gift of connecting ancient truth claims with contemporary reality, just what we need in these troubled times. Merton says that no one can find true life ‘unless you have risked your mind in the desert’. There’s something about the truth of Sam Shepard’s writing in Paris, Texas, available now in a classy Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray edition that leads me to believe Shepard must be familiar with Merton, and not just because it’s about a man wandering in the kind of desert that has real sand and baking sun. (more…)

Mick Innes as ‘John’ in ‘The Insatiable Moon’, Ponsonby, New Zealand, December 2009

*For the next couple of weeks I’m in New Zealand and will be blogging about the production of ‘The Insatiable Moon’, a movie based on Mike Riddell’s novel.

I’m in Ponsonby’s red light district – the portable gazebos we’re using for shade and comfortable eating are the colour of healthy scarlet; appropriate enough, given that today we turn to one of the most troubling scenes in the movie – a scene in which the hidden shame felt by a character leads to disaster. Everyone’s focused on the task in hand: to portray an awful event as truthfully as possible, without exploiting the audience’s emotions, nor denying the fact that human sorrow is real, and touches to us all. If we’re lucky, we might have an Arthur in our lives, someone who sees through the superficial mores of our culture, resists its car rally speed, and offers a human connection in the midst of the awful things that come to us, hopefully only a few times in a full life.

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Chaos Indeed

One of the questionable delights of Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’, which we still haven’t seen at The Film Talk due to those oh-so-frustrating regional distribution patterns, is the appearance of a demonic fox who enlightens the audience with the motto: ‘Chaos Reigns’.  And so it does, in Trier’s universe, this time round (you never can tell with Lars whether he’s joking or serious; whether he believes in the world of ‘Breaking the Waves‘ which endorses eternal life and the healing of all wounds; or ‘Dogville’, where even grace gives up).  Speaking of dogs, and foxes, the ominous vulpe inspired a rumination on the cinema’s tendency to turn animals into representations of ourselves.  Hence Tuesday’s Top Five List - which, if you, dear reader, like it enough may become a sporadically regular feature of TFT.

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You know Henry Gibson.  He’s one of those character actors who beefed up everything he was in, and indelibly so.  Fully worthy of Jett’s appellation ‘an OTG actor’ (no matter how bad the movie, when he’s on screen, your reflex is to say ‘Oh Thank God’).   You can’t imagine ‘Magnolia’ without his Luciferian bar-loiterer Thurston Howell, stirring William H Macy to humiliate himself with his unrequited love Brad (evoking the sinister sliminess of Richard Burton in ‘The Medusa Touch‘, Gibson here seemed to invest his voice with supernatural powers); ‘The Blues Brothers’ would be poorer (and the climactic, ridiculous chase sequence much less funny) without his absurd white supremacist; and, despite ‘Nashville’s status as a fully ensembled ensemble, it is his character, Haven Hamilton, who sings the overture and facilitates the coda.

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