I Shot Andy Warhol.

Review #2519: I Shot Andy Warhol.

Cast: 

Lili Taylor (Valerie Solanas), Jared Harris (Andy Warhol), Stephen Dorff (Candy Darling), Martha Plimpton (Stevie), Lothaire Bluteau (Maurice Girodias), Anna Levine (Iris), Peter Friedman (Alan Burke), Tahnee Welch (Viva), Jamie Harrold (Jackie Curtis), Donovan Leitch (Gerard Malanga), Jim Lyons (Billy Name), Michael Imperioli (Ondine), and Reg Rogers (Paul Morrissey) Directed by Mary Harron (#1984 - American Psycho)

Review: 

"I was amazed, because, apart from saying that she shot him and she was crazy, nobody had ever talked about Valerie Solanas. So I had this idea for an anti-documentary. It was never going to be conventional. My thinking was, what if you took the most obscure person in this glamorous circle, and that most obscure, most despised pariah turned out to be the most interesting person of them all? What if you did a kind of reverse hagiography, where you take this person in the shadows and put them in the center? Now, how I was going to do that, I didn’t know. I just had this burning desire to make a film about her."

I suppose this is the best way to dip the toes into the world of Andy Warhol. Once upon a time, Mary Harron was in the punk scene and into The Velvet Underground, the rock band with a distinct influence within the underground scene that mixed right in with Warhol being their manager from 1966 to 1967. In college, Harron had written a piece about Warhol and his work for a university magazine and even spent time looking upon his movies. When she became a music writer, she was fortunate enough to have a brief interview with Warhol around his studio of The Factory (he subsequently died in 1987). A couple of years later, when working in television, she did research for a Warhol documentary and happened to come across the SCUM Manifesto (self-published in 1967 before becoming commercially published in 1968 through Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press) in a store that interested her because for all the footage and interviews one knew of Warhol and the Factory, one name never really came up with Valerie Solanas. Her interest in doing a documentary happened to crisscross with Tom Kalin and Christine Vachon in doing something...as a film. Harron co-wrote the film with Daniel Minahan (with research by Diane Tucker along with having certain dialogue come from Jeremiah Newton's edited compilation The Letters and Diaries of Candy Darling) and the movie had funding from a variety of companies such as Killer Films and Goldwyn Films International. John Cale of the Underground wrote the music score for the film despite disagreements with Lou Reed. The movie made a bit of money and was enough of a hit with its screening at Sundance that the offer to do the script for American Psycho came right afterwards. The years that followed the release of the movie is fairly interesting. The movie was released by a company that soon went bankrupt and the rights were in murky limbo for a time to where it was barely available on DVD and it apparently was once only available online through a rip on YouTube. Solanas had crafted a play called Up Your Ass that she had given a copy to Warhol that was accidentally misplaced - in 1999, it was rediscovered and produced in 2000 in San Francisco by George Coates Performance Works*. Further information about Solanas came around with the 2014 biography Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol)*.

You might wonder what Solanas (a graduate of University of Maryland, College Park) has to offer in terms of a manifesto. Well, its opening declaration [with one word difference depending on the edition] states that women should "overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate [destroy] the men" (incidentally, there are a few moments in black-and-white that depict stuff from the manifesto being read). She sold copies in bookstores and on the streets of Greenwich Village for $1 (unless you were a guy, then it was $2) and even appeared in one Warhol film with I, a Man (1967). One person associated with Warhol once stated that life around the sphere of Warhol ended up making them "all captives of Andy's magnetism and his outlaw culture". Amidst all of that, Solanas might as well be an imp to these self-obsessed people that can't quite get the recognition they believe they deserve,and Taylor carries the film to fascinating levels of curiosity. It isn't a lament of a "tortured genius" or just a "craven nut" but instead something that teeters in the irony that comes in so many contradictions that can be tragic along with being fascinating. There is a burning, acerbic spirit to her that you can't exactly shoo away as an irrational being because damn it, there are plenty of irrational people to go around anyway, even if most don't go around shooting people and getting their own spin of a bio-drama.  Harris pulls in well with shades of vulnerability and elusiveness (without being a caricature to poke with) that you can't easily grab upon beyond the obvious that might as well reflect how one views Warhol and his art, for better or worse.  The real Solanas spent time in a prison ward and periods of evaluation over her mental state (mainly the paranoid schizophrenia) before she essentially faded into obscurity by the late 1970s and died in San Francisco in 1988 at just the age of 52. Regardless of how one might view Solanas and her view of men (as represented by, say, this exchange here or this one), there is something quite fascinating about what Herron has captured here about someone who lived by their contradictions. As such, this is a worthwhile debut in its capture of a misfit that doesn't judge or defend but instead lets the images and words speak for themselves in entertaining fashion that is a strange little gem.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day

*Apparently, Warhol was quoted in a book in the 1980s that he apparently glanced at the play and was more concerned with wondering if she was actually an undercover cop. By the way, that gunshot was brutal: he got shot in a way that had damage to his lungs, esophagus, liver, spleen, and stomach.

*For one thing, Solanas actually had children at a young age but had to give them away. 

*honestly, the fact that there was an anarchic group named "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker" in the 1960s shouldn't surprise me.

Jesus of Montreal.

Review #2028: Jesus of Montreal.

Cast: 

Lothaire Bluteau (Daniel Coulombe), Catherine Wilkening (Mireille), Johanne-Marie Tremblay (Constance), Rémy Girard (Martin), Robert Lepage (Rene), Gilles Pelletier (Father Leclerc), Roy Dupuis (Marcel Brochu), Yves Jacques (Richard Cardinal), Cédric Noël (Pascal Berger), and Denys Arcand (The Judge) Written and Directed by Denys Arcand.

Review: 

Here we are on another Canada Day, 10 years to the day of an offbeat decision by Movie Night (read: me) to review films that touched upon the spirit of Canada on the occasion of the nation's most significant holiday. Although I have not done a film review on the day for each of the past ten years, I find it to be an interesting experience to see just what the folks north of the border have to offer in cinema, no matter what province or language that involves. Enjoy.

"You can't live with Jesus's principles today and expect to come out alive. Something horrible would happen to him, like it did 2,000 years ago." - Denys Arcand.

I am not religious, but I do know there is one key thing to remember when it comes to films: if you are having some sort of fun while seeing it, that is all that matters in the end. Denys Arcand was born in Deschambault in Quebec to a devout Roman Catholic family whose mother was once a Carmelite nun. He studied at the Université de Montréal in history and was interested in filmmaking. While in school in 1962, he collaborated with Denis Héroux and Stéphane Venne on a docufiction film with Alone or with Others, which notably had future Direct Cinema pioneer Michel Brault as cinematographer. Despite this, he did not initially believe he would make a living doing so in Canada, owing to the National Film Board of Canada not really hiring at the time of the 1960s. However, he happened to have luck on his side when he tried applying for a summer job and found the NFB needed work on a series on the history of the country for schools. This included such material such as Cotton Mill, Treadmill, a documentary about the conditions of workers in the textile industry in Quebec that was so controversial that it was delayed from its filming in 1970 for release only in 1976 (it wasn't even kept clean, but the uncut version does exist in boxset form now). At any rate, Réjeanne Padovani (1973), his second feature and first as both writer and director, ended up being screened at the Cannes Film Festival that he called an early thrill. However, the next decade would see him struggle to get films onto the screen the way he wanted, which saw him do one feature, a couple of documentaries, a TV series, and a unique venture with The Crime of Ovide Plouffe (1984) that involved it being connected with a TV miniseries that was released two years after the film. However, it was his next film with the sex comedy-drama The Decline of the American Empire (1986) that made his biggest impact. He used the 1980 Quebec referendum and My Dinner with Andre (1981) as inspiration, which resulted in the then-biggest hit in Quebec history that included a nomination for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a sequel with The Barbarian Invasions in 2003.

Jesus of Montreal (known in French as Jésus de Montréal) had probably the most interesting timing to come out, as it was released one year after The Last Temptation of Christ, a controversial film in its own right involving, well, you know. At the time of filming, Arcand described himself as an atheist, one who left religion and discovered sex and drugs at 15 but also noted that the teachings would stay with him for his life. The basis for the film came with auditions from his previous film, which saw one actor come to read while apologizing for his beard due to being playing Jesus in a "Passion Play". Arcand seems to feel that in the thousands of years since the Biblical times, one really has only learned that the story of the Passion is a "metaphor of an artist and his struggles and temptations". Like in the film, Arcand underwent research within Christ and scholars that found that a great deal of mystery still existed within (as such, the debate in the historical and theological sense about Jesus is reflected within the play, which even features the a noted soliloquy from Hamlet). As such, what we have here is a fascinating satire, because the argument that is presented here comes from what happens when the New Testament really does become a matter of art imitating life. As such, the characters become one with numerous figures, such as with Bluteau's character seemingly becoming Jesus (Girard's character, a parallel to Saint Peter, is playing an actor recruited while being seen doing recording for a pornographic film, for example). With a runtime of 118 minutes (with a primary language of French with small bits of English), it makes a curious film to view in the lens of both spirituality and within humanity. It posits that if there was a man like Jesus here on the Earth now, they would likely find hypocrisy within the ranks of religious teaching and oppressors just as one had found before. Overall, one finds a journey that goes from recruiting apostles (actors) to the ultimate act of a redeemer. Bluteau proves to be an excellent figure to capture the essence of one who may very well have become more than just a child of God, one who thinks that there has to be more to life than just quietly waiting for death, and he exudes an earthy confidence to make it matter more than just being a subdued allegory. Far from blasphemy, he really does make for a spiritual center to cross everything together as a man who die for one's sins, whether that involves artistic integrity or something more. Wilkening and Tremblay make up the two sides of allegory of Mary (one being Magdalene and the other being the "Mother of Jesus"). They arise from the recruitment of Bluteau for actors of all walks of life to be in a revised "Passion Play", and they are each effective here, most significantly with Wilkening and her knowing qualities that are apparent from her first scenes spent finding why doing the play is far more important than being gawked at for a commercial. Girard and Lepage make for entertaining pieces as the other key part of the apostle actors recruited to deal with the teachings beyond just playing bits for relief (the latter is found narrating about the vastness of space and where life will be in millions of years...with a script that is said later to be valid today but possibly change later). Pelletier may be the Judas figure, but all he really is a man trapped between the line of where he wants to rest within religion (in authorities vs. reason), which is more than can be said for Jacques, who is basically thought to be a corporate Devil. As a whole, no matter how much one is into religion, there will be something for everyone within this film in how it establishes just what matters most in a world where hope is thought to be the most irrational and unyielding of emotions that makes life bearable when you search for a path to salvation, and this works well as film of both the theater and theology, so take that for what it is worth.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.