Movies: Don't you think it's time you stopped your crying?

All apologies to the New Colony Six for the title.

Who knew that Dario Argentio's Mother of Tears, the third and possibly last installment of his "Mothers" series, would be such a stumbling block for me? This is the second effort I'm making at this review.

The first attempt, not so cleverly framed as a phone conversation betwixt myself and the director, was posted yesterday. It was up for about five minutes when my wife, host of a very successful literary news and book industry blog, told me that I should really take it down. She said it was too nasty and bitter and was more an "I'm an angry jackass" piece than a review proper. She was right. The Interwebs has got enough "I'm an angry jackass" pieces to last us all several lifetimes, so I took it down.

For those who clicked over from yesterday's link on the League of Tana Tea Drinker's aggregator site, my apologies. For you, I present the only salvageable section of the seven-page rant:

CRwM: . . . You even work in a few in-jokes for the hardcore fans. That's nice of you.

DA: The monkey.

CRwM: Yeah. The monkey.

DA: Well you saw what they said about the monkey. How can people hate on a monkey? Monkey equals rad.

CRwM: That's why the UN-recognized standard global unit of fun is the barrel of monkeys.

DA: That's the very point of monkeys! Who doesn't want a monkey in their movie? Nobody, that's who.

CRwM: People are weird.

Weird indeed.

Today we do take two . . . and action.

Being aware of the critical/fan reaction to Mother of Tears before sitting down to watch the film myself, my initial reaction was, oddly enough, pity. I actually felt bad for Dario Argento.

For years, Argento's been flogging the dead horse of his shtick. He's made a name for himself creating flicks with nonsensical, elliptical plots. He's really good at this and he's managed to avoid either "cause" or its dutiful handmaiden, "effect," for many years. He's peopled his flicks with wooden, semi-disposable actors and actresses who don't act in these films so much as get they get stage-managed. Even when Argento had a future Academy Award nominee on cast, he managed to level them down to the status of prop. Stylistically, his rep rested mainly on three things: absurdly and unintentionally comical POV shots, washing scenes in colored lights so heavy-handedly that it looks like his shots were composed in crayon, and an enduring commitment to graphic violence.

In any other genre, this impressive list of creative limitations would have prevented him from becoming even so much as a dead link on some other director's IMDB page. But this is horror. Aside from the sizeable cult of tastemakers whose primary aesthetic interest seems to be the promotion of crap that one is supposed to enjoy ironically - the so-bad-it's-good-set that keeps the rotting corpse of exploitation cinema dancing around like a shopworn marionette - there's a strong sense across the community that any regrettable lack of skill, repeated often enough and earnestly enough, becomes traditional. Aside from one or two genre classics, most of what he's cranked out over the past three decades is notable for its stubborn adherence to his "style," constituting the aesthetic equivalent of a remarkably prolonged adolescence.

Despite the monotony of this output and the inevitable onset of diminishing returns, most of his fans never left him. Although their defense of his work came to sound more and more like the sort of intentionally-missing-the-point-complements one makes regarding the athletic performance of physically retarded children. A few die-hards even go so far as to suggest that Argento's actually "too good" for all those basic filmmaking skills he seems to lack.

That makes the reception of MoT cruelly ironic. Argento finally produces a pic that begins to meet some reasonable minimal expectation of quality. It has a plot that is built out a logical chain of interlinked occurrences, it's built it around the performance of a two-time David de Donatello Best Actress Award Winner, and it subtly integrates he's signature stylistic flourishes in such a away that they work with the film rather than feeling like a like a suffocating layer of slick but irrelevant armor. He nods to his previous films and pulls from the newest on-going source of inspiration, high art from the Renaissance and early Enlightenment.

So, after actually showing some glimmer of artistic development, Argento's fans ditch him. They more than just ditch him: They showed up in droves to absolutely shit all over your work. It's like some horror-geek version of DSP. People frame the film in terms of a personal betrayal. Some who normally champion any cut rate schlock-shocker so long as its got subtitles turned around and suggest that they actually have never liked him. And, in the classiest display of critical insight since film critics made easy copy out of Sophia Coppola's nose in Godfather III, several bloggers and horror site hosts have taken the opportunity to suggest that star and directorial off-spring Asia Argento is ugly.

Let's talk specifics about the flick. A follow-up to your earlier Susperia (one of the previously mentioned genre classics) and Inferno (a moronic mess that even Argento glosses over in this flick), Mother of Tears involves the release of the third of a trio of witches – the Mother of Tears – in Rome. The MoT is, as several characters inform the viewer, the most beautiful and cruel of the three witches. I don't know about relative cruelty levels, but the beauty thing isn't hard to cinch: the first mother took beauty tips from Norman Bates's mom and the second turned out to be a Grim Reaperish figure just slightly less scary, or believable, than an off-the-rack Target Halloween outfit.

The MoT's evil is contagious and a sort of plague of moral malaise spreads through the Europe. Random citizens are committing violent acts while others calmly go about their day, only vaguely interested in the mounting body count and social disintegration.

Ultimately it is up to Sarah (played by Asia Argento), a staffer working in the art restoration department of a museum in Rome, to defeat this makhashaifah. Sarah, it turns out, is descended from a long line of "good witches." Wicca, like the Force, has binary good/bad aspects. Sarah, the last of her kind, must find the lair of the MoT and destroy her before she can usher in a Second Age of Witches, which would probably be pretty awesome if you were an evil witch but would must assuredly suck for everybody else.

Curiously, for all its dependence on supernatural elements, this is the most narratively cohesive of all Argento's works. Though it belongs in same fairy tale/quest story category as your 1985 flick Phenomenon (the other genre classic I was thinking of earlier), it's logic is considerably less willy-nilly. Sure, there's some inexplicable magic shenanigans afoot – as one might well have with witches running about – but for the most part the story is linear and comprehensible. Compare the random acts of violence committed in MoT, which are explicable in light of the Mother's viral malevolence, with the random attack by the meat wagon dude in Inferno who, for no reason, chops up one of the film's characters. The latter is vintage Argento, the former represents a newfound respect for something we call "sense."

Even Argento's famed obsession with color-coding his scenes seems less slapdash here. Previously, he was overdoing the lighting, as if he was afraid his audience was to dim to get it. He's still color-coding everything – which is cool if that's his bag; he's the director. But now he does the same thing through costuming, set design, and prop selection. Instead of feeling like an invasive add-on, the visual schemes seem of a piece with the film. For example, instead of just washing the catacombs of the Mother's lair in red light, he lets blood, red clay mud, and brick colored tunics do much of work. It doesn't feel so desperately stylish, like an amateur's idea of advanced techniques.

Even the supernatural touches feel multivalent and woven into the story. The much-maligned monkey familiar of the Mother of Tears is a good example. Riffing off the Renaissance art he surrounded Sarah with (not to mention the "see no evil/hear no evil/speak no evil" idols that usher in the MoT's reign of terror) he makes the familiar a monkey: a common symbol in of human irrationality, sin, and the Satanic impulse to impersonate beings of greater stature in Renaissance painting. It also let's Argento send the MoT around, via familiar, while keeping her off-stage as long as possible. Finally, it's a nice little wink and nod to the other great female quest story he's done: Phenomenon.

Even the jump-scares show how a commitment to detail. Though folks have pretty much dismissed the flick's one jump-scare as cheap throwaway gag and a sign of Argento's dwindling prowess, careful viewers can see that the screaming demon figure that scares the poop out of Sarah in her dream is, in fact, the killer sneaking into the house. The whole point of the scene was to demonstrate, through a premonition, that Sarah's witchpoo powers were manifesting in increasingly powerful ways.

These dismissals are, to a degree, Argento's own fault. For years, he was lazy about the logic and rigor of his flicks. He made mysteries that couldn't really be solved by considering the evidence. He never bothered to connect dots or explain anything – or, more honestly, make things that could be explained. He trained his fans to not think to hard about his films. Now that he's making links and connections, what are fans supposed to do?

Besides, there are some real bad choices in there. The character of the spirit mother that acts as Sarah's ghostly Obi-Wan is given so little to do that she becomes more annoying than dramatic. The centuries-old tunic that the Mother of Tears wears looks like it was made with a Bedazzler and the members of the global coven look like extras from an Adam Ant Halloween special.

Still, compared to some of the crap Argento has let stand in your older films, those are strictly small potatoes.

In the final analysis, Mother of Tears is better than many of the films he's made. And while it falls short of Susperia, it isn't even the worst of this particular trilogy: that would be Inferno.

More importantly than all of that, Asia Argento is still awesome. Admittedly, she's a bit miscast here. She needs roles that aren't to white bread, but the argument that she's somehow lost the ability to command the screen or has lost her looks strike me as bizarre.

Asia Argento was never beautiful in any conventional way. She looks like that chick nobody remembers inviting to the party, the one the boys want to hang out with, but who has no use for all other the chicks in the room. She looks and moves like a boyfriend stealer – but worse, the kind of girl who steals a woman's man and leaves the poor alteh moid wondering what in world this scruffy, uncouth, outsider, tramp has that she doesn't.

Well. What to do? Should Argento go back to making half-assed reworkings of the same handful of flicks his fan base likes?

Personally, I think he should do non-horror. He should adapt Lucarelli's "De Luca" trilogy or do Carlotto's The Goodbye Kiss. Fast moving crime stuff. He'd get to use his strengths but it would help him shed the luggage of his own mediocre mid- to late- period stuff and help him scrape off the fans who insist that he exist as a museum piece.

Movies: What's opera, D. Argento?

The standout image of Argento's Opera is a particularly nasty torture prop that is, perhaps, the most metaphorically freighted bit of slasher tech since Mark Lewis's camera in Peeping Tom. The image is so powerfully stark, S & M chic, and meta that it appears on nearly every poster and box cover for the flick. If you can't make it out in the image above, the brutally low-fi device works thusly: A piece of masking tape, on which the baddie places several needles, is placed under the eye; the result is that an attempt to close the eye results in the needles jabbing the upper eyelid. As the baddie informs his victim, any effort to close your eyes will result in shredding your eyelid.

Ouch.

(Actually, as shown, I'm pretty sure the device wouldn't work. Fitting it to the bottom eyelid would make the needles spread away from the eye. Fitting it right above the cheekbone makes the needles point toward the eye. This, admittedly, would suck, but it wouldn't jab your eyelids. Plant it on the cheekbone and you could blink without ever coming into contact with the needles. Still, in cinematic torture device design, as in gift giving, it is the thought that counts.)

Lest I be accused of making po-mo viewer-response hay out of this, Argento himself admits that this nastiness was inspired by his relationship to his audiences. Argento claims the idea came fairly late in the process of developing the flick. He was working on the film, knew there would be some over the top scenes, and thought that audience members would want to close their eyes at several points in the film. He imagined placing these needle-eye thingies on audience members to keep them looking. Sadly, the law prevented Argento from actually deploying this cinematic innovation and he was forced to settle for using the concept in a purely fictional context. How one suffers for one's art!

This seems to me to be a very European conceit about violently transgressive flicks and the audience for them. For reasons unclear to me, some Euro directors like to think of their films as endurance tests. Metaphorically, Argento wants to torture his audience. I'm reminded of French director Gaspar Noé, who has claimed that he's made films intended to be "universally despised." Noé, in his pandering art house pseudo-provocation Irréversible, actually included frequencies in the soundtrack meant to induce nausea in the audience. The conceit is that the Euro filmmakers are throwing these art bombs into the thick of bourgeois audiences. These thick head cattle-people will, of course, bellow out their rage at having their sensibilities offended. And the artist then takes this bellowing as proof that he's transcended the Victorian values that, somehow, are believed to still dominate society. The films are a test: if you can't take it, you must be some middle-class philistine who "just doesn't get it." Ultimately, this is, of course, a self-serving delusion. The audiences for these flicks want both the extreme horror and the sense that they've somehow transgressed. Like the directors who make them, the audiences for these films are self-selected viewers who want invest these brutal self-flagellations with a sense of intellectual and moral superiority. They've discovered sensations and meanings beyond the mental confines of the rubes that watch mainstream films. Like a whore hired to smack about her john a bit, these directors offer a sense of violation that is, in fact, simply part of transaction between to mutually serving parties. The people supposedly targeted by these flicks won't watch them. Some folks, I reckon, just won't pay to be abused.

The irony is that I too take the needle to the eye trap as a metaphor for Argento's relationship to the audience. Only, for me, I see it as a curiously apt metaphor for why I keep returning to Argento's flicks when he's been so damningly mediocre so many times. As regular readers know, I feel that Argento flirts dangerously with the not-so-coveted title of "Most Overrated Horror Director." Though there are many folks out there with a far greater knowledge of his work than I, what I've seen is wildly uneven in quality. His love of creating visual effects and his almost stubborn refusal to yield anything to cohesive narrative puts Argento into this place where he's either got to wow you with stylish filmmaking or you immediately notice that the whole flick is a shambling mess. By my reckoning, Argento is operating at a 50% wow-rate.

Fortunately, Opera is in the happy-half of that output. The flick follows a young understudy, prosaically named Betty, who is suddenly thrust into the limelight when the diva of a production of Verdi's Macbeth is injured in an auto accident. The new-found fame comes with a big downside: a murderous stalker with a mysterious connection to the young singer's past. As the stalker's deranged obsession intensifies, he begins bumping off the people close to Betty. In the overly elaborate manner of all filmic serial killers, the stalker like to tie Betty up, apply the previously mentioned eye-needle thingy, and force Betty to watch the deaths of her friends and coworkers. The police prove useless and it is up to Betty and the opera's director – a former horror film director turned stager of operas (a nod to an autobiographical "what if?": Argento almost mounted an opera himself, but the deal fell through) – to uncover and thwart the rampaging psycho. The "mystery" un-unfolds in a typically Argentine manner, which is to say that clues appear and disappear with connection or explanation, nobody does much in the way of actual investigating, and, when enough bodies pile up, the killer reveals all in a ten-second bit of exposition that doesn't make all that much sense.

The make or break in an Argento flick is the look, and Opera has Argento's stylishly overripe fingerprints all over it. The camera swoops, cranes, and twists throughout the flick. Argento punctuates scene with cut shots of characters internal organs – rapidly beating hearts, blood pulsing through veins, and literally thumping brains. Curiously, Argento seems to be under the misconception that the brain, like the heart, beats. Scenes are washed in blues, red, and greens. The sets are lavish. Most of the film takes place in a truly astounding opera house, played by the Parma theater in Italy, and the fashionably appointed and dubiously large apartment of the understudy. (There is, of course, a street shot in which Betty, having survived her first attack, runs through the rain. When in trouble, Argento's women never call the cops or run to a friend's house. They prefer to run through rain-soaked streets until help or more danger finds them.) And the single image of Betty's eye, hungry needles waiting for her to blink, is a mind-haunting image. The soundtrack, while it includes some of the obligatory embarrassing cheese metal, also includes some work from Brian Eno and some interesting scoring by long-time Argento collaborator Claudio Simonetti, former keyboard player for the prog-rock band Goblin. Though not quite as overwhelming as Susperia, Opera is a full offering of Argento's opulently cool filmmaking.

This is a flick for fans of Argento (even fence-sitters like myself), especially his more giallo-centric efforts, to which Opera is an overt throwback. It has all the standard flaws that Argento has, through force of repetition, turned into something like idiosyncratic genre markers. If his lack of narrative logic, disdain for characterization, and soft spot for really bad heavy metal turn you off, you won't find him suddenly reformed here. However, if you dig on his mannered and strangely beautiful approach to horror, Opera's got a lot to like.

Movie: Bonfire of the Inanities.

The flicks of Dario Argento, the legendary Italian horror director, seem to be an all or nothing proposition. His work is either utterly brilliant, such as the justly praised classic Susperia, or they are abysmal, such as the absurd and tedious Stendhal Syndrome. Unfortunately, Inferno, Argento's follow-up to Susperia and the second film in the Three Mothers trilogy, firmly belongs in the latter camp.

Inferno involves a young woman who, after reading a book about the sinister Three Sisters, becomes convinced that one of the creepy witches is trapped in the basement of her New York apartment building (New York being played by sound stage in Italy). This is bad news as, not only are the Three Sisters the very personification of fear and death, but they also make your neighborhood stink. Seriously. Because our curious heroine knows too much, she's quickly dispatched by the forces of eeee-vil. Enter her brother, who has the raw on-screen charisma of a man who has accidentally stumbled onto a movie but has decided to make a go of it. This dramatic null-value will finish his sister's investigation and, ultimately, come face to face with the almost scary witch.

The problems with Inferno are, it seems to me, endemic to Argento's entire body of work. As a director, Argento relies on visual bravado to charge through plots as thin and full of holes as a deli-sliced sliver of Swiss. Sometimes, this strategy works. In Susperia, the lavish sets and beautiful imagery take our mind of the fact that you don't even have to pretend to know what is going on to enjoy the flick. In some instances, Argento even manages to turn his fairly weak narrative sense into a dramatic strength. There's something fairy-tale like about the creaky plotting in Phenomena that adds, rather than detracts, from the film.

Problem is that Argento's visual sense is not always up to the challenge. Compared to sets of Susperia, which are like some Beardsley illustration come to life, the apartment sets of Inferno are mundane and timid. Where expressive lighting drew you deeper into the phantasmagoric world of the former film; in Inferno you're more likely to find yourself wondering why somebody painted all the street lights of New York City red. Unable to lull to viewer with the hypnotic force of his style, Argento leaves us free to puzzle over dead end subplots, details that never add up, and plot twists that are more confusing that shocking.

I've got no beef with putting style before substance. If you can make it work and that's how you want to swing, that's cool. But if that's the plan, you have to carry it off, and that's a lot harder than it sounds. Argento's done it before, but he doesn't do it here. Using the hard-hitting Cast of the 1913 Silent Film Classic The Rose of San Juan Film Rating System, I'm giving Inferno a weak Vivian Rich.