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.

American Psycho.

Review #1984: American Psycho.

Cast: 

Christian Bale (Patrick Bateman), Justin Theroux (Timothy Bryce), Josh Lucas (Craig McDermott), Bill Sage (David Van Patten), Chloë Sevigny (Jean), Reese Witherspoon (Evelyn Williams), Samantha Mathis (Courtney Rawlinson), Matt Ross (Luis Carruthers), Jared Leto (Paul Allen), Willem Dafoe (Donald Kimball), Cara Seymour (Christie), and Guinevere Turner (Elizabeth) Directed by Mary Harron.

Review: 

"What occurred to me is that just enough time had passed to make a period film about the ’80s, and say things about the ’80s, and bring out the satire. And that was interesting to me."

As a director, Mary Harron has aimed to make above all else movies with meaningful things to say beyond just the label of feminism. Born in Bracebridge, Ontario in Canada to an actor/comedian in Don Harron, although the divorce and re-marriage in her family led to her living between Toronto and Los Angeles and later England. Her parents liked to take her to films they wanted to see that were generally art films (i.e. not exactly suitable for children), with her early large influences being Alfred Hitchcock. Later studies at places such as the National Film Theatre and she studied English at St. Anne's College, Oxford University before moving to the States in New York to become a journalist. She wrote and created a magazine for what became the punk scene in the city before later becoming a drama critic in later years. In the 1990s, her interest in the life of Valerie Solanas spurred her into wanting to do a documentary (since she was working as a producer on a program dedicated to American pop culture at the time). In turn, this idea was suggested to become a film, which resulted in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol. In total, Harron has directed seven films in over two decades, with the most recent being Dalíland (2022). The movie is based on the 1991 novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis. The original book generated controversy because of its portrayal of violence toward women (as a whole the book is far more visceral in its descriptions by its unreliable narrator in Patrick Bateman of murder along with emotional psychotic breakdowns). Ellis has described the main character of Bateman as being "crazy the same way I was", although he has only admitted this in recent years (he initially stated during the release of the novel that his father was the inspiration while also later calling the book "a criticism of male values that were around me", one that he found easy to observe as a gay man). Ellis had called the book "unfilmable", but Edward R. Pressman bought the rights to film the book in 1992 and persisted for eight years. Numerous names were considered to direct such as Stuart Gordon and David Cronenberg (with Ellis even writing a draft), but Harron accepted an offer to do the film in 1996 under the condition that she could write her own draft. She brought Guinevere Turner on to help write the script while also trying to find the right Bateman (for her part, Turner found the book horrifying alongside really funny while also believing the right spin could make for a "really subversive, feminist movie"). By 1998, Harron thought she found her ideal actor with Christian Bale (at the time mostly known for Empire of the Sun (1987), when he was 13), because she felt he was the only who understood the role as being (in their words) "an alien who landed in the unabashedly capitalist New York of the '80s" when he found the script quite amusing. However, Lions Gate Films tried for a time to recruit Leonardo DiCaprio to star in the film (which Harron vehemently disagreed with), complete with Oliver Stone taking over as director. Thankfully, disagreements between the two led to the return of Harron and Bale, albeit with a small budget of roughly $7 million.

The movie was indeed a modest success at the time of its release in 2000, albeit with a polarized response by some due to the level of violence. Actually, looking back, it is almost as amusing to consider the perception of the film back then as it is to actually look at the film now and share a laugh as the effective satire it ultimately is. It is the work of somebody who may or may not be guilty of murder slipping by in a world focused entirely on lifestyle above all that examines misogyny and masculinity with an awareness and timing that is brilliant to sift through for 100 minutes. Undeniably, the movie is all on Bale and his performance. His method of performance involves plenty of rhythm to go with clarity and control that brings out plenty in isolation and alienation beyond the winning smile shown in a man that in his words is "simply not there". He has the outward charm of someone like Tom Cruise (intentionally done) that is both unsettling and captivating, one who seems to sell every scene he is in (present in all but one) as one of numerous people that we see within the mask they seem to wear (why else does the axe sequence seem to linger on half of his face covered in blood) It is evident that his method preparation paid off for an effective performance that is the perfect act of a warped man in a warped time that shows the vanity of man through people who are never seen working in any scene. The others can only help but drift in the ideal manner when wrapped in the gloss of the 1980s, such as the restaurant trio of Theroux, Lucas, and Sage, or with Witherspoon and her confidence that goes like oil on water when paired against Bale. Sevigny is probably the most sane person in the general web of things, at least because she is in it slightly more than Dafoe and his blend of investigative query/baiting. There are a handful of interesting moments to note (at least ones that have not become Internet memes), ones that show Bale gliding through his environment in the most entertaining of alienated ways, such as him casually admitting his crimes in conversation or him doing a strut right before the axe death with "Hip to be Square" playing.

Ellis described the book as one that he didn't think needed to be turned into a film, since he felt that the ambiguity of the novel would be turned into something "infinitely less interesting" with a medium of film that seemingly demands answers (incidentally, the book later inspired a 2013 musical). The novel leaves it to one's interpretation about what was real and not real, while Turner and Harron's script was intended to show a real effort to have things be real for the main character but at some point "sort of perceiving things differently, but they're really happening." The ending is deliberately meant to confound one over just what really happened (personally, I assume a chunk really happened because watching a movie about murders being shown only to be told they aren't real is dumb as hell). Ellis has been quoted numerous times as to finding the film either as "fine" without being entirely necessary or as one that is "in some ways a complicated movie for me. But overall I like it." As a whole, American Psycho is a worthwhile use of your time for those who are interested in seeing a film that belongs to more than one genre and thus is not instantly easy to peg in one assumption. It is a lean and mean satire with elements of horror that will sift in your head and not escape any time soon after it is finished, which makes for a pretty good time. It is the kind of really good film that may even grow on you further, which probably says a good deal about how far the film's stature has grown in two decades.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.

Next Time: Beau Travail.