My Week in Movies -1/16/2021 - 1/22/2021
Second round of my weekly movie roundup series. And the last one that's gonna be late, I promise!
NOTE: Had a very busy week and didn’t get around to watching much. Sorry for the light content, hope you enjoy it anyway! Also, follow my Letterboxd to see what I’ve been watching and vice versa.
Light Sleeper (1992)
Director: Paul Schrader
Writer: Paul Schrader
Cinematographer: Edward Lachman
Music: Michael Been
Another week, another Paul Schrader joint.
After directing The Comfort of Strangers (1990), which he did not write and I have not seen, Schrader got back in auteur mode for Light Sleeper. It’s a laid back little neo-noir in which Willem Dafoe plays a mid-level coke dealer named John LeTour. Susan Sarandon plays his boss, Ann, and Dana Delaney plays Marianne, John’s ex-wife. These characters are united by cocaine (a subject Schrader knows intimately), but are all clean. Cocaine destroyed John and Marianne’s marriage. Giving each other a bump in the club bathroom inevitably degenerated into frantic binges in search of that first pure, euphoric, unreachable high. Now, seven years sober, she can’t even be around John (much less coke itself!) for fear of a relapse.
John is four years sober, though he says he drinks occasionally. Yet, he always has coke around him, often right on his person in neatly folded paper packets as he makes his deliveries. His clients are upscale, he sits in their expensive apartments and listens to their frenzied rants, theories, and stories while they enjoy his product. Ann’s apartment is coke central in Light Sleeper. Piles of white powder inches from his face, John simply weighs it and packs it. Ann seems to have the same relationship to the drug, herself a former addict, but she has big plans to go legit and start selling cosmetics.
How can John not suffer a relapse? Perhaps through sheer force of will, but I don’t think that’s it. He’s a careful man, confident, calm, and discreet during “work hours”, but his quickness to pull over the cab when he sees Marianne out in the rain hints at an impulsiveness, a restlessness. Their brief rekindling later in the film strikes me as an act of pure impulse as well, and we also see Marianne’s impulsiveness come out of hiding. The irrational impulse to be with someone you simply cannot live with. For her, it must feel tantamount to a relapse. Later, John writes the following in his journal:
“I feel my life turning, all it needed was a direction. You drift from day to day, years go by. Then a change comes. I am able to change. I can be a good person. What a strange thing to have happen halfway through your life. What luck.”
For him, it was a sign of something like forgiveness, a patching up of old wounds, even if it’s just for one night. Now if he could change, really change, imagine how many more nights she might give? The coke he is able to hold is not a feat of willpower or some sort of temptation ritual. It’s there because cocaine is his life, first as an addict, then as a dealer. Like a top on a table his life is spinning in place but the coke has always kept it moving. It may be easy for him to stay sober, but it’s not so easy for him to give up his life. What happens after the top starts to wobble?
—Spoilers Ahead—
Like so many Schrader stories, Light Sleeper ends with a man no longer able to control his demons and confounded by the mere fact of his existence. Marianne’s mother has passed away, and John goes to pay his respects but is berated by her: “Every time you come into my life, something terrible happens!” Then he goes out for a delivery to Tis Brüg (Victor Garber), an important and wealthy customer. Marianne is there, partially clothed and blasted on coke. They are both shocked silent until she runs shamefully into the bathroom. He leaves out the front door of the hotel, she leaves off of the roof. That spinning top starts to wobble. So, he waits a bit, gets a gun, goes back, and shoots everyone in the hotel room. He’ll get five, maybe seven, years in prison on account of his cooperation with the police.
In my last post I criticized Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) for the rather arbitrarily bloody conclusion, feeling like he just needed a way to wrap things up. But here in Light Sleeper what we are seeing is a man blowing his whole world to pieces. Brüg assures him he had nothing to do with Marianne’s death, but that doesn’t concern John. All these people had in common was cocaine, and John kills them for it. John and coke is a fiend, a failed husband, a pusher peddling to spiraling addicts, and his association with it helped kill Marianne. He violently purges the drug and all that came and went with it via murder. Stopping short of hoping for it, I certainly believe he expected to die in the process. That spinning top has stopped wobbling; John collapses onto the bed.
“What luck.”
Hard Boiled (1992)
Director: John Woo
Writer: John Woo, Barry Wong, Gordon Chan
Cinematographer: Horace Wong
Music: James Wong Jim, Michael Gibbs
If you type “hard boiled 1992 body count” into google, you’ll find a number of sources with somewhat conflicting numbers. It looks like crazed gunman (and also cop) Tequila (Chow Yun-Fat) kills about 80 people while Alan (Tony Leung), another cop working undercover as a Triad, only kills about 50. The total body count in this insane cacophony of bullets, sparks, flames, and blood called Hard Boiled seems to be somewhere around 310. Conducting his actors, extras, and stuntmen to perfection, director John Woo made a true masterpiece out of a massacre.
I feel as though there’s not much left to say about this movie. The action is spectacular, with shotguns that blow entire cars to pieces, sub-machine guns held in one hand fired with precision accuracy while the other hand operates a pistol, men diving off of tall locations firing dual pistols (again with pinpoint accuracy). The set-piece shootout in the tea house is remarkable in it’s ability to convey who’s who and what’s what before any character is formally introduced. The warehouse raid is a stunning bit of film-making, with the melodramatic killing of Uncle Hoi (Kwan Hoi-San) followed by the heartless massacre of his crew by Alan, and then the spectacular police raid that ends in a scene so fantastic that I chose it to represent the film in this post.
I have argued, and expect to continue arguing, that Hard Boiled is the best action film ever made. Yes, many aspects of it are ludicrous, your disbelief must be suspended for the entire two-hour runtime, and it is hyper-violent in the extreme. But, I will also argue, it is not sadistic in its violence. Woo once said that he’d love to direct a musical, and you can see those choreographic impulses in every shootout in the picture. It’s not about blood splattering, limb dismemberment, and disembowelment. Go to the late-period Rambo movies for that type of thing. While John Rambo pins a man to a wall with arrows in Last Blood (2019) then proceeds to slowly carve out his still beating heart, undercover cop Alan makes paper cranes in honor of those he’s had to kill. Time is taken in between the bloodshed to draw these characters clearly and set the moral stakes. Even though the villain, Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong), is clearly portrayed as a psychotically greedy mass-killer, his death is more about Alan’s sacrifice than blood-soaked vengeance.
To beat up on modern action movies a little more, the ultra-slick and undoubtedly fun John Wick franchise makes its hero an unkillable death machine. They’re cool looking movies with outstanding martial arts and gunplay choreography, but the CGI blood, faceless goons, fake looking guns, and sterile sets make it all seem like more of a video game than a film. Hard Boiled has guns that blow out your speakers, characters who look and dress in distinct ways, sets that look lived in. This is a bloody film but it does not fetishize murder. It’s simply a classic Cops and Robbers story set in a hyperreal world.
A weird interpretation of the events at the end of Light Sleeper. Tis thinks LaTour reported him to the cops (true) and makes arrangements to have him killed. LaTour doesn't want to go see him; Tis insists that he goes to make the drug deal. It's LaTour's suggestion that Ann goes along, after he can't get Robert to go instead ("Tis won't deal with fags"). The idea that you're pushing that LaTour is some sort of psycho avenger who goes there intentionally to murder is not supported by most of the plot.
LaTour buys a gun for self-defense - during the deal, when he and Ann try to leave, Tis and his hired thugs prevent them from leaving. LaTour's final shooting of the thugs and Tis is not by any stretch of the imagination pure self defense (he shoots first with the thugs, although no-one involved seems to have any idea how to shoot, adding to the piquancy of the scene). Tis is reaching for a gun when LaTour shoots him (although to be fair it seems like LaTour might have shot him anyway).
Had the privilege of watching Hard Boiled and The Killer for the first time as am at-home double feature (thanks quarantine) last year. I know 'balletic' gets tossed around a lot when discussing Woo and his direction of action, but it remains 100% valid in my eyes. Hard Boiled, and to an extent I believe Heat after it, defined what I think a lot of modern filmmakers and moviegoers think of as 'good' action, even if it is an ineffable concept for them. I think you hone in on those concepts really well - clarity in chaos, an overwhelming of the senses (huge audio combined with grand firearm theatrics), combined with a relatively simple plot.