Ride the High Country

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY is one of the best movies I've seen all year. I'm having trouble figuring out where to begin writing about it.

Let's start with the location. California's Inyo National Forest is one of the most beautiful places in the world, particularly in the fall, when the aspen groves turn luminous yellow. This is the high country for which the film is named, and director Sam Peckinpah and DP Lucien Ballard shoot it so vividly, so marvelously, that I could
practically smell the sagebrush and feel the bite in the air.

Next, we'll roll into the story. The brief summary, "Old friends ride into the mountains to bring back a shipment of gold, but greed threatens to tear them apart," sounds so TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE that it led me to pass this film by. But there's so much more to this film than that summary, so much more unexpected grace and brutality, so much more humor and truth, that a summary does it scant justice. This is a film about who we are and who we want to be; it's the stuff of great drama, and it's realized greatly.

That realization can't happen without performances to give it life, and Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea anchor this movie by giving us men who've been heroes and scoundrels and who may have one or more switches still inside them. Their lives play out in a world that's moving on, and these men need to learn to move on with it, if they can. Mariette Hartley and Ron Starr represent the new generation, people with lots of mistakes still to make, and it's a pleasure to watch their characters get their feet under them.

This is a beautiful, exciting film. I didn't know what was going to happen next, but I came to care about these people and invest in their choices. I made time to see RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, and it was time well spent.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH. I can't decide whether I even liked it.

HEDWIG is, in the words of co-writer, producer, director, and star John Cameron Mitchell, a "post-punk, neo-glam opera." It's about the eponymous Hedwig, who tours the country with her band, The Angry Inch. They play in the most depressing venues imaginable, behind salad bars and near checkout machines in a nationwide seafood chain that seems about two rungs down from Red Lobster. And they appear to be stalking one Tommy Gnosis, whom Hedwig accuses of stealing her best stuff. Over the course of the film, Hedwig tells her life story and, between this and the performances, there are plenty of opportunities for musical numbers.

But here's the problem: Hedwig's life story is boring, while the numbers are fabulous. Whenever someone in this movie was talking, I was bored out of my mind. Whenever someone was singing, however, I was utterly in the moment. Now that I think about it, in fact, I think that the film HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH is superfluous. The soundtrack tells us everything we might want to know about these characters, and it does it more succinctly and compellingly than the picture.

After viewing HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, I don't think I'd recommend it to my friends. But I would drag them to see the band in concert.

The Phantom of the Opera

Snitz Edwards had a great couple of years there in '24 and '25. First, his name was Snitz, which is just plain awesome no matter what year it is. Second, '24 was the year he played Fagin to Fairbanks' Twist in THE THIEF OF BAGDAD and '25 was the year he got the comic relief duties in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. This guy had one hell of a great agent.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA needed Snitz's touch; otherwise, it'd be too dire, too bleak to make for a very good time at the movies. Its damsel, Christine Daae, welcomes the murdering phantom when he's propelling her career, but spurns him for some fop as soon as soon as she gets a look at poor Phant's ugly mug. The Phantom is a psychotic stalker for whom we're supposed to feel some pity, but it's hard to feel pity for a psychotic stalker. About the only guy other than Snitz for whom we can even root is a French secret policeman, but how does one work up much gusto for the secret police?

What THE PHANTOM does have going for it is some great costume, set, and (especially) makeup work, and a deliciously slow tease and reveal of the Phantom himself. But I couldn't hook into it because I didn't care about the fate of either Daae or her foppish boyfriend. They should've given Snitz a bigger part.