Jessica Chastain (Oscar Contender) shines in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"

Jessica Chastain’s portrayal of the notorious American television evangelist and gospel singer Tammy Faye is at the moment the favorite contender in the battle of the biopics which is dominating the Best Actress category at this year’s Oscars race. Chastain will go up against Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos), Kristen Stewart (Spencer) and Penelope Cruz (Madres Paralelas). Chastain had her eye on Tammy’s story since 2012 when she bought the rights to a documentary made in 2000 by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. Unlike Jerry Falwell, who had a selective view of those eligible for a block of heavenly real estate, Tammy Faye Bakker was convinced that all would be welcomed into the afterlife. As a result, she openly defended gay rights and advocated support for AIDS sufferers when her church was stigmatising them. 

In "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," Vincent D’Onofrio plays Jerry Falwell as a gruff power broker who considers gay people to be evil, and we see, through him, how the new Christianity will market itself, competing with secular America on its own corrupt terms. Tammy Faye, by contrast, is chirpy and volatile, but by offering God’s embrace to people with AIDS, she shows what true Christianity is: love versus what some Christian sects around her are turning (into hate towards the misfits).

"Fall From Grace" TV film, 1990: Kevin Spacey as Jim Bakker, and Bernadette Peters as Tammy Faye Bakker.

Tammy’s abundant cosmetic armoury–wigs, false eyelashes, tattooed eye and lip liner–is showier over the years, as if she’s afraid she might disappear without it. Chastain herself does the opposite and disappears into it – yet it’s not a performance made up of prosthetics and mannerisms. Chastain catches the fear beneath the pretence, along with Tammy’s urgent desire to maintain her vision of herself as a good person despite the hypocrisy that underpins her existence. Although Chastain was at first a bit suspicious of devoutly religious people, she learned a valuable lesson through Tammy Faye's character. 

Jessica Chastain: “In some sense, Tammy Faye's openness is something we all have. We all have this earnestness inside of us, but it’s taken out of us by the cruelness police. There is so much celebration of that cynicism nowadays. Random acts of love are sometimes seen as weakness, and, in reality, I see that as courageous and brave and beautiful. We are trained to make fun of that, so I had to get over that, and it made me so much happier. As I was studying her, I found her to be a very sensual person in all aspects. I saw that in how she hugged strangers or how she tasted food. Tammy grew up in a community that was Pentecostal, and there were so many restrictions. Tammy talks in her book about how could God not love something that makes you feel beautiful, that makes you feel loved and makes you feel joy. For her, God and faith didn’t equal deprivation.” Source: www.smh.com.au

The most boring person in the world has been revealed by University of Essex research—and it is a religious data entry worker, who likes watching TV, and lives in a small town. The paper, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (March 8, 2022) also discovered the dullest hobbies were seen to be religion, watching TV, bird watching and smoking. Boring people were also perceived to live in small cities and towns. Led by the Department of Psychology’s Dr Wijnand Van Tilburg, the research revealed that stereotypically boring people are generally avoided due to preconceptions. Van Tilburg explained: “The irony is studying boredom is actually very interesting and has many real-life impacts. Perceptions can change but people may not take time to speak to those with ‘boring’ jobs and hobbies, instead choosing to avoid them. They don’t get a chance to prove people wrong and break these negative stereotypes. It was interesting to me to see the study showed that boring people were not seen as very competent.” Dr Van Tilburg added: “The truth of the matter is people like bankers and accountants are highly capable and have power in society—perhaps we should try not to upset them and stereotype them as boring!” According the study, the top five most boring jobs are: Data Analysis, Accounting, Tax/Insurance, Banking, and Cleaning tasks. The top five most exciting jobs considered are: Performing Arts, Science, Journalism, Health/Medicine, and Teaching. —“Boring People: Stereotype Characteristics, Interpersonal Attributions, and Social Reactions” by Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg, 8 March 2022, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Source: www.essex.ac.uk

Ice in her Veins: Ozark, Deep Water

In Ozark, Marty Byrde started laundering money for a drug cartel innocently enough. It was kind of fun and exhilarating, and it was good money. And he wasn’t involved in the nasty side of the business, but just doing the math on his computer… until the cartel killed his partner and threatened to kill him if he didn’t come up with the money his partner had skimmed. That made him desperate, not unlike Walter White, but the arc of his story is a continual attempt to get out of the business. Marty Byrde does plenty of bad things, but he feels bad about these. But Wendy Byrde has ice in her veins. Sometimes Wendy talks herself into thinking that she has high ideals. It’s just that she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get that good thing she wants. Wendy’s behavior shows that she believes that the end justifies the means. That is to say, actions themselves aren’t right or wrong, it is only the effects or consequences of those actions that are good or bad. 

At the start of Ozark Season 4, Wendy Byrde wants her family to become the most powerful family in the Midwest. She acknowledges that things can get kind of messy. “But think of all the good we could do,” she protests. In her view, those actions aren’t really bad if they bring about something good. Will Wendy finally come to see that adopting evil means to do good is self-defeating? Will Jonah be forced to compromise his rather idealist views and “grow up” as his mother tells him he needs to do? Will Marty finally get extricated from the cartel? It’s not easy to come up with criteria for right and wrong that can be generalized for all circumstances. That’s why stories like Ozark that display the complexity and ambiguity are fascinating. How it ends will say a lot about the moral vision its producers have. Source: medium.com

Laura Linney says she isn't sure if she views her Ozark character, Wendy Byrde, as a villain. Wendy’s position as a lobbyist and her political strategies have saved her family at times, but undercutting Marty has threatened their operations, as well as their family’s dynamic. She also bears responsibility for her brother’s death, and the first half of season 4 saw Wendy become more coldblooded in her actions, to the extent that an antagonist like Omar Navarro was able to see a piece of himself reflected in her. In an interview with GQ, Linney revealed that she does not see Wendy as a villain. "I don’t know if she’s the villain. She certainly does not behave well (laughs) It is not a character who you aspire to be, I hope. I don’t know if she’s the villain because she’s not trying to hurt her family. She’s trying to save her family. I think if she were actively, intentionally trying to derail her family then she would be a real villain. Normally, the villain is the person who goes after the protagonist, tries to thwart the protagonist. That’s not who she is. I don’t know quite what she is but she’s not that." Source: screenrant.com

Adrian Lyne popularized cinematic eroticism in the 1980s. Lyne would go on to challenge audiences with dark visions (“Jacob’s Ladder”), burning questions of trust (“Indecent Proposal”), and the power of jealousy (“Unfaithful”), creating quite an impressive oeuvre. And then he walked away for two decades, distancing himself from moviemaking. Lyne is suddenly back with “Deep Water,” and he’s attempting to revive his aesthetic for a different era, returning to the ways of lustfulness and suspicion, taking inspiration from a 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith (the adaptation is written by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson). Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas share terrific chemistry, giving the helmer something to work with. The couple lives together but doesn’t sleep together often, struggling to communicate as Vic pulls away from the world, tending to his snail farm in the basement. Vic is a tech wizard who became a millionaire by producing a software employed by the US military. Melinda is restless, and “Deep Water” explores such energy, ogling her time seeking new, younger lovers while Vic remains observant, agreeing to an open relationship without clearly defining the parameters of such an arrangement. 

The feature initially examines the growing tension between the pair, as Melinda is more than happy to parade around her latest acquisition, Joel (Brendan Miller), at a party, raising concern from Vic’s friends, including Mary (Devyn A. Tyler) and Grant (Lil Rel Howery), who question the man’s stony reaction to such casual cruelty. Lyne’s genius here is to play with the very function and charge of the innuendo, the allusion, the hint – that staple of the erotic film, here repurposed as the central mechanism of a thriller. When Vic meets Joel, he makes a joke about the disappearance of Melinda’s previous lover, which introduces uneasy tension to the picture, giving Lyne opportunity to study these characters from different angles, finding Vic and Melinda navigating complicated feelings of love and resentment, playing dangerous psychological games. “Deep Water” is an interesting reunion with the helmer’s old interests in the ways of corruption, impotence, and bitterness, with lustfulness overriding all logic when it comes to a partnership involving two distorted individuals. It’s been a long time since a movie like this was produced. Source: blu-ray.com

Floyd Mutrux's "Aloha Bobby and Rose" (1975), Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1960)

In 1971, Floyd Mutrux made his directorial debut with the critically-acclaimed docudrama Dusty and Sweets McGee. Despite the film’s rave reviews, Warner Bros. pulled the picture from release after only one week after Time magazine questioned its graphic depiction of drug addiction. That same year, Mutrux wrote and produced The Christian Licorice Store, and found screenwriting work on Monte Hellman’s classic Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) starring Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson and Laurie Bird. During this period, Variety predicted that the five greatest directors to emerge from the so-called “New Hollywood” era would be Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Floyd Mutrux, Martin Scorsese, and Terrence Malick. In 1975, Mutrux wrote and directed Aloha, Bobby and Rose for Columbia Pictures. Filmed for a mere $60,000, Mutrux’s lovers on the road worked as a sort of homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Mutrux then helmed the seminal rock-and-roll film American Hot Wax (1978), which has since become a cult hit—despite its prolonged absence on the DVD market—earning Mutrux accolades and rave reviews. For his work on the film, Village Voice dubbed him the year’s Best Director in 1978.

As LA Weekly film writer Chuck Stephens observed, Mutrux was a “white-light guy in the white-heat moment of New Hollywood. His films were funny, freaky, dangerous as rock-and-roll, and portended a potential combination of Mean Streets edginess and Badlands beauty.” However, due to a string of films which have been shelved, rewritten by others, or continue to languish in development hell, Mutrux remains a virtual unknown. After directing the mainstream comedy The Hollywood Knights (1980), Mutrux took a lengthy hiatus from filmmaking. It’s interesting to note that Mutrux has sold over ten screenplays in Hollywood, but most of them have not yet been produced. He conceived and co-wrote Brian De Palma’s hit film The Untouchables (1987), but did not receive any screen credit. In 1990, Mutrux served as executive producer on Warren Beatty’s film Dick Tracy. In 1994, Mutrux returned to the director’s chair for the comedy There Goes My Baby, a semi-nostalgic film set in 1964, starring Dermot Mulroney and Kelli Williams. While the film was well-received, it fell victim to an untimely bankruptcy at Orion Pictures and received a limited release. Some of Floyd Mutrux's favorite films are: From Here to Eternity (1953), Giant (1956), Shoot the Piano Player (1960)—based on David Goodis' novel—, Breathless (1960), Jules et Jim (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Chinatown (1974), and Pulp Fiction (1994).

-Andrew Rausch: Variety magazine once predicted that the five greatest directors to emerge from the seventies would be Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and Floyd Mutrux. But after filming The Hollywood Knights, you took a fourteen-year hiatus from filmmaking. What happened?

-Floyd Mutrux: Look, I have a lot of regrets. I made a lot of choices that were not smart. I went on to work on a lot of projects that never got made, and wound up feeling sorry for myself. In that period in the late seventies, early eighties, I just sort of dropped out. The pictures I cared about weren’t getting made. I just disappeared from the scene. Then I wrote a lot of scripts. Some executives I knew from the studios got fired, and the pictures I’d written got shelved. Sometimes I feel like the movie business betrayed me, but that’s kind of a whiny attitude. Basically, I don’t give a fuck because the movie business betrayed itself. It makes a lot of shit now. It’s almost unwatchable. There are no longer any movies you really want to go see. Name your ten best pictures of the last five years, and they don’t compare to the best of the Golden Age, the fifties, the sixties, or the seventies. —Fifty Filmmakers: Conversations with Directors (2008) by Andrew Rausch

Aloha, Bobby and Rose: There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Floyd Mutrux, and that’s a shame, because he directed two of the great American movies of the 1970s (no small accomplishment, that). One was the infectiously energetic (and, these days, impossible to find) early-rock snapshot American Hot Wax; the other is this foggy 1975 delight, in which Paul Le Mat and Diane Hull high-tail it out of Hollywood when a date-night prank turns deadly. But Mutrux handily transcends the cliches of the “lovers on the run” movie, thanks to the oddball sadness of his characters and the wild unpredictability of his storytelling. Aloha Bobby and Rose is a primo portrait of 1970’s existential aimlessness disguised as a drive-in movie and is audaciously shot by William Fraker, one of the truly gifted cinematographers of the era. Aloha takes us back to the low-rent L.A. setting to show us how a smidgen of fatality propells the story through its star-crossed lover scenario. Bobby is an unambitious auto mechanic who drives a souped-up ’67 Camaro. When his co-worker Moxey shows enough initiative to apply to transmission school, Bobby derides such blatant careerism. Who wants to wake up that early? 

Bobby is played by Paul LeMat, fresh of his tough guy role as John Milner in American Graffiti. Diane Hull plays Rose, a single mother whose life seems so stifled her boozy mom encourages her to kick loose and go out with Bobby when he delivers her car from the garage. While on their date a dumb prank spirals out of control (leading to one of the cinema’s freakiest car crashes) and the two set off for Mexico in an attempt to escape the law. The 1970’s were the last time that popular films would be so casually fatalistic. Much like DeNiro’s character in Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), Bobby is a character that seems less likely to survive the film the more we get to know him. Apparently nearly broke throughout the entire film, Bobby seems to have no visible support, dreams or prospects. He’s more passive than self-destructive but his insouciance seems so profound you can’t imagine the future having a place for this guy. The “Aloha” of the title is a reference to a passing thought about running off to Hawaii, a dream Bobby and Rose seem to choose because of its very improbability.

Diane Hull makes her under-written role appear truly poetic and vivid. But the real star of this film is cinematographer William Fraker. The former President of the American Society of Cinematographers, Fraker shot some of the iconic films of the sixties and seventies, including ROSEMARY’S BABY and BULLITT. In ALOHA he seems to have been given a free hand to shoot some of his boldest work, as Fraker delivers a pictorial essay of L.A. at night. As Bobby and Rose escape towards the Mexican border they end up briefly riding with another couple, Buford and Donna Sue. Played by Tim McIntire (who had a mesmerizing turn playing rock and roll pioneer Alan Freed in Mutrux’s following film AMERICAN HOT WAX) and Leigh French (of the San Francisco comedy group The Committee), this duo pretends to epitomize the American Dream to Bobby and Rose. Buford wears a cowboy hat, owns a Cadillac and with his old lady Donna Sue, seems to just drive around and raise hell wherever he goes. Rose barely tries to play along, quietly distressed at Bobby’s boyish admiration for this insufferable blowhard.

But there’s no future in being this guy’s lackey and with no real place to run Bobby and Rose have no choice but to turn around the Mexican border and meet their fate. At 88 minutes, ALOHA plays like an American take on BREATHLESS, succeeding at what American films do best: taking a pulpy and recognizable genre and revving it up with an individualistic personal vision. Now, almost 50 years later, ALOHA BOBBY AND ROSE’s period stylizations have mellowed beautifully, turning what might have been a tossed-off youth film into a dreamy, blissed-out and tragic reverie. Source: flavorwire.com

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless is a film driven by a series of paradoxes which appear to present mainstream film elements yet subvert them throughout. Godard’s use of key imagery and character traits from the Hollywood film noir genre to create an internal dissonance by visually, such as the lighting of Michel, representing the inverted Hollywood film noir protagonist, using jarring cuts to disorient the viewer. The character of Michel is a direct reference to the archetypal Hollywood film noir male protagonist: he is dressed in a fedora and suit; smokes constantly; provides narration; he sees himself as a seducer of women,  engages in “tough guy” banter; he knows his femme fatale counterpart, Patricia, on the street as she tries to sell him newspapers. While Michel exhibits these traits which initially seem to categorise him as a mainstream Hollywood character, Godard challenges this characterisation through mise-en-scène and negating his protagonist’s overtly masculine dialogue by making him vulnerable visually and in his discourse with the quintessential femme fatale. 

During the scene in which Michel speaks with Patricia as she tries to sell newspapers, the power assigned to the Hollywood film noir male protagonist is given to the woman; even before Michel engages in conversation with Patricia, he has already been disempowered because of how the conversation is begun: Godard chose to have Michel look for Patricia in multiple places until finally finding her, rather than have the female chase after the male’s attention. This dynamic continues throughout and is made increasingly prominent as Michel and Patricia’s conversation progresses. Although the conversation has begun with Michel mocking Patricia, the formation of the misogynistic male archetype is subverted when Godard has Michel talk about his feelings, a subject about which Patricia has no interest in speaking. In having Michel harass Patricia with incessant declarations of love, which continue throughout the film, and speak about his sadness, Michel loses his film noir male protagonist categorisation. 

This paradox of the sensitive gangster created for the viewer is extremely difficult to reconcile and insists in the duration of the bedroom scene as in the rest of the film; soon after Michel acts as the antithesis of the mainstream Hollywood criminal, Godard again disrupts the audience’s attempt to label Michel as either being film noir or anti-film noir when he finishes the conversation with Michel stating in an authoritative and suddenly masculine tone that he has to find someone who owes him money, reintroducing Michel as the fearsome and forceful man character. Godard further argues against film noir’s governing male protagonist in a verbal, and visual, contradiction through Patricia’s stealing of Michel’s narration. At the ending of the film, as Michel speaks, Patricia begins to narrate for the audience and delivers her internal monologue as the camera follows her and ignores Michel, the first instance in which this occurs in the film. This rejection of the male protagonist, which would not occur in mainstream film noir, further disempowers and dissociates Michel from not only being a gangster, but as a leading character in the film. 

Furthermore, since Godard subjects his other characters to filmic darkness, Michel appears vulnerable in comparison to his counterparts by being more visible; other characters in Breathless are allowed to hide visually through the shadows while Michel is unable to do so, akin to the powerlessness Godard verbally represented through Michel’s conversations with Patricia. The final way in which Michel as a character is robbed of power and dignity is the final scene, in which he dies. When Michel is shot by the police, Godard films Michel running, injured, away from the police while Patricia runs after him. In showing the viewer only Michel in one frame then only Patricia as she runs after him and never together creates a haunting power dynamic; by filming them both separately, Godard defines visually the person who is running away and the person who chases him relentlessly, rather than making it appear as though Patricia and Michel are running together as equals by putting them together in the frame. In making this impactful decision, Godard characterises Patricia as the hunter and Michel as the hunted, wounded animal which cannot comprehend its inability to physically run from death. The visual emasculating of a potential film noir protagonist is further impressed upon the viewer when Godard films Michel lying on the ground on his back overhead with the police and Patricia’s feet encircling him, their bodies thereby being made to seem indomitable by comparison, then finishing the film with Patricia speaking and looking directly into the camera, reclaiming the film from Michel, now forcibly removed by Patricia's betrayal.

A major paradox to Breathless is its presentation to the audience of what would structurally appear to be a mainstream film noir in that the major features of the film are centralised around a gangster, money, and a femme fatale, while visually, it is a totally unique departure from the genre to the extent that it transcends its categorisation. A radical component of the filming of Breathless is that the camera is at eye-level with its characters for most of the film; rather than physically moving the camera by utilising high or low-angle shots to set the tone of a scene, Godard instead uses jarring and sudden cuts to create motion in the film. In the beginning scene of the film, in which Michel drives the stolen car along a road flanked by trees, and during the nighttime scene towards the end of the film in which Michel and Patricia converse in another stolen car, for instance, the audience is confronted with an unsettling dissonance: while the car continues to move forward, as does the narration or conversation, without interruption, the background as a result of the cuts, stutters and changes abruptly. 

This in itself creates another paradox embedded in this film: the logical nature of physical and verbal forward movement contrasted against an illogical background of the unexpected disruption of an assumed forward moving scenery. Also, the opening of Breathless is “unprecedented,” in that we never learn what route brought Michel Poiccard to the Vieux Port of Marseille, where he surveys the future from the very edge of France. This first shot strikes a match to touch off an oil fire that will race through the film’s incidents and images, indeed through the New Wave altogether. We can feel Godard’s own outlaw freedom in this sequence, carjacking a Hollywood genre and putting it into drive. The film lurches forward as he shifts up with wild shot changes; it charges ahead on bursts of music and sound effects, and on Belmondo’s spontaneous speeches. Breathless is still the definitive manifesto of the New Wave. The movement was well under way when Godard made his entrée. In a much-discussed 1957 inquest, the pop­u­lar weekly L’express had dubbed the ascendant generation “la nouvelle vague.” Claude Chabrol had come out before the triumph of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour at Cannes in spring 1959. But Breathless sealed the movement, defining it as simultaneously nonchalant and sophisticated. In Breathless, Belmondo gave to his character an engaging insouciance that resonated with Godard’s unapologetic way of making his film. 

Jean Seberg, though a well-known ingenue (particularly at Cahiers du cinéma, on whose cover she appeared in February 1958), likewise plays at finding her character—perhaps at finding herself, an American in Paris—as she adopts pose after pose for close-ups that come to make up over 20 percent of the film. Similarly, the editing and music constitute elements as well as signifiers of tone and rhythm, visually and aurally structuring our experience. Godard’s writings have always sounded brash, yet his earliest projects often sang the purity of artistic expression. Poe, Baudelaire and Rimbaud were his models. Godard could write without irony, “What is difficult is to advance into unknown lands, to be aware of the danger, to take risks, to be afraid.” Breathless announces this as its principal theme early on, when Michel Poiccard passes a movie poster advertising Robert Aldrich’s Ten Seconds to Hell: “Live Dangerously Until the End!” 

Godard believed that the powerful writers of the past (Stendhal, for instance, who provided the epigraph for Godard’s scenario) would surely have been auteurs of cinema in the mid-twentieth century. Long before Gilles Deleuze, Godard called on popular genres—the musical, the western, and of course the film noir—to address the philosophical issues of his day. Sartre, after all, had worked in film, as had Malraux, who lent his personal support to get The 400 Blows to Cannes. Merciless and intrepid, Godard took himself to be a loner even within the Cahiers du cinéma clan, tying genuine art to courage and solitude. “The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone? means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them. Nothing could be more classically romantic.” Source: criterion.com

Weird Love Stories: "Strawberry Mansion" (2021), "Aloha, Bobby and Rose" (1975)

Few directors are able to truly grasp dream logic and the surreal flights of fancy that accompany such subject matters. David Lynch’s name comes to mind, given his ability to craft intricate narratives surrounding the imaginary waking world. While the term "Lynchian" is often misconstrued, applied to anything that defies comprehension from a surrealist point of view, this is exactly how Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley’s Strawberry Mansion (2021) can be defined. Combining the delightful and the absurd, Strawberry Mansion is a sweet triumph, an ode to imagination, and a manifesto on the wonders of love. Anabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), is a widow who has not filed her dream taxes in years, as they have been recorded on VHS tapes instead of the mandatory “airsticks.” A maze of conspiracy is revealed: the government surreptitiously places products in people’s dreams, and the taxes imposed are ones that infringe on our innermost desires. Bella is aware of this, and the younger Bella (Grace Glowicki), whose dreams James Preble (Kentucker Audley) is auditing, comes off as mysterious, propelling the dream auditor to fall in love with her. And it is the kind of love that helps shatter the boundaries of reality and dreams, freeing the imagination in the most whimsical of ways, crafting a way for a world where anything is possible.

Considering Strawberry Mansion was made on a scant budget and the filmmakers wear their “go-along-with-your-wildest-visions” badge with pride, the film is a triumph in every sense of the term. Audley and Glowicki play star-crossed lovers divided by the oceans of space, time, and dreams, imbuing their bond with a special brand of whimsical authenticity worth rooting for. Even when the film stretches the limits of imagination, everything is still believable from a dream-logic perspective. There are so many fun connections here: shades of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stranger Than Fiction, The Congress, and even Kusturica's haunting Arizona Dream, where the four insomniac protagonists wander in and out of each others' often-incompatible dream worlds. Rather, the film’s low-budget virtuosity comes off as an end in itself—as a vital example of possibilities untapped, as an act of resistance to reclaim fantasy for independent filmmaking, for imagination that pays no rent to the overlords of intellectual propriety. Sources: rogerebert.com and newyorker.com

Watching 1975's Aloha, Bobby and Rose on long-time awaited Blu-ray (2018), courtesy of Scorpion Releasing, I became convinced that Floyd Mutrux could have been a great American director and that we failed him. There is so much Americana in Aloha, Bobby and Rose that it should be a movie talked about in the same breath as Badlands (1973). This is the movie that Jim McBride's remake of New Weave classic Breathless wanted to be, and I say that as a fan of Jim McBride's Breathless (1983). Mutrux's film is a neo-noirish poem (which dates back to Gun Crazy) that seeks beauty -- and when it can't locate it invents it -- and then unapologetically indulges in it until it reaches a state of delirium. Bobby (Paul Le Mat, who played John Milner in George Lucas' American Graffiti, 1973) and Rose (Diane Hull, who played Ellen Anderson in Elia Kazan's The Arrangement, 1969) are very much in love, but their future seems bleak. He works at a tiny LA gas station while she struggles to be a good mother. While out in the city Bobby and Rose stop at a convenience store to pick up drinks. When Bobby decides to pull a prank, the owner empties his rifle and accidentally kills the young man behind the counter. The lovers panic and instead of waiting for the police to arrive jump in Bobby's '68 Camaro and disappear into the night. 

Mutrux's film offers one of the purest nostalgia trips that one could get without being placed in an actual time machine. The story and journey that the film chronicles are simply astonishing. The director had a modest budget to work with which is why he incorporated a lot of authentic footage and yet this is precisely the reason why the whole thing feels so special now. From the trendy billboards to the busy fast-food joints to the darker corners of old Hollywood, this film oozes an unfiltered '70s atmosphere that is incredibly attractive. Adding to the magic is a brilliant soundtrack with classic tunes by the likes of Elton John ("Tiny Dancer" and "Bennie and the Jets"), Lenny Welch ("Since I Fell for You"), Stevie Wonder ("Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours"), and Little Eva ("Locomotion"). Some of the segments where the music is used are so nicely done and are so effective that they easily could have replaced the trailers that were cut to promote the film. Mutrux made the film with his best friend, William Fraker, who a few years earlier had lensed Bullitt and Rosemary's Baby. It's a secret American classic (The New Yorker's critic Richard Brody called it "a minor masterwork of doomed romanticism") and makes me think the industry somehow did Floyd Mutrux dirty, because if he had a movie like this in him, they needed to have given Mutrux a vote of confidence. Source: blu-ray.com