Exorcist II: The Heretic

Seemingly the deliberate stylistic inverse of its William Friedkin directed predecessor, John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic is built around dream states and somnambulic suggestion rather than documentary-style staging and methodical plotting. Immediately, faults are apparent in this sequel: there are enormous, unannounced leaps in both distance and behavioural intent; the film repeatedly thwarting any audience member who expects successive scenes to have connective tissue between them. This is especially troublesome given that Heretic takes great strides away from William Peter Blatty's concept of Jesuit priests as a last line of defence against satanic possession. Heretic, in fact, deliberately turns its nose up at Catholic interpretations of theology. The American branch of this church is portrayed here as a corrupt and moneyed institution that toils beneath gauche effigies of their departed prophet. The appointment of Richard Burton's Father Lamont to investigate the first film's exorcism even plays like a pointed act of obfuscation, given how obviously oafish he is.  

The Cardinal who issues Lamont's orders is also happy to damn the sainted sacrifice of Max von Sydow's Father Merrin (Jason Miller's Dr Damien Karras isn't even mentioned) if it suits the church's current political objectives. Chosen for his familiarity with Merrin's more abstract teachings, Burton's sozzled-looking Lamont is, as it turns out, a pale imitation of the men who killed themselves saving Linda Blair's Regan. The prologue exorcism that he attempts to conduct ends with the afflicted woman burning to death while this priest dithers uselessly, unable to steel himself in the face of the babbling unknown. In Boorman's film these priests are often just men, cursed with indecisions and desires that contradict the vows they have made with their God. Celibacy is clearly the biggest sticking point for Lamont: the priest and Louise Fletcher's Dr Tuskin flirt awkwardly to no clear outcome, while the entire finale revolves around Lamont's literal desire to physically inhabit a young woman's body. Over and over again we are assured of this priest's uselessness, that Merrin's extraordinary power came from his strengths as a person rather than his allegiance to any particular sect. 

Finding himself at odds with his superiors, Lamont - actually attempting to conduct a proper investigation rather than reverting to whichever judgement is politically expedient - journeys around the world, retracing Merrin's steps. He finds himself in a mountain-top church in Ethiopia. To even set foot in this house of prayer, revellers must climb up a tall, vertical passage that has been carved into the rock. The path is well worn but treacherous, an act of supplication that must be performed before worshippers can speak to their God. Although Christian, this church couldn't be more different from the ostentatious power displays that Heretic aligns with Lamont's gilded faith. It's secretive and remote, chipped into the Earth itself. Unlike Catholicism, which is unduly obsessed with depicting Christ in his death throes, this Ethiopian orthodoxy seeks to represent the human man who brought mankind the word of God. So rather than a blue-eyed, bone white figure writhing on a cross, the images of Jesus here portray his sun-like brilliance in terms of someone who actually lived in this region. The frayed relief that flickers - breathes - when a breeze passes through this space has olive skin and massive brown eyes. Not so much a westernised Christ then, but Jesus as a Palestinian Jew. 

Although never explicitly clarified, Boorman's intent here seems to be illustrative and strangely, in the context of the feats performed in The Exorcist, equitable. Holiness, and the attempt to communicate with higher powers predates the founding of the Roman Catholic church by millennia. Why then should they have the only solution to the foul and ageless beasts who crawl from the pit? The war for humanity's soul rages on a cosmic timeline, frustrations and their solutions should therefore by mapped in ways that defy any specific epoch. Heretic isn't always precisely (or even clearly) communicating these ideas; the film repeatedly besmirches its central conceit of mankind as a constantly evolving vessel of (potential) divinity with strange, pseudo-scientific explanations. The Synchronizer gadget that allows third-parties to tune into the thoughts of Regan and, by extension, the squatting demon Pazuzu, isn't much more complicated, in practice, than the Washington-based Ouija board that first attracted this horror. Both mediums facilitate a kind of group hypnosis, one that makes their users open to the power of suggestion. In Boorman's film though, the application of these devices is either leaden or outright baffling, asking audiences to believe that repetitive chanting of the word 'deeper' (rather than, say, a detailed description of the expected scene) can conjure up a fourth-dimensional space so potent that it can trap unwary trespassers.  

Heretic's finest qualities are speculative then, or even metatextual. The wealthy, showbiz adjacent life this young adult Regan enjoys in lower Manhattan could just as easily be that of a Linda Blair fresh off a blockbuster movie. She has a personal assistant-cum-disciple in Kitty Winn's Sharon and her days are filled with the kind of bewildering theatrical performances beloved by teenage drama students. Her presence at Dr Tuskin's sliding door facility even allows Regan the opportunity to dip in and out of charitable work. Although Regan's cosseted existence is thanks to her film star mother, the lack of financial tension could just as easily be ascribed to the Blair's recent, real-world successes. That Boorman's film is, in some part, about using psychotherapy techniques to dredge up memories that this woman has pointedly forgotten also seems to indicate an intertextual conversation between the first two Exorcist instalments. Boorman attempting to exorcise the experience of having seen (or, in the case of Blair, having starred in) the first film by ascribing meaning and detail where none were previously inferred. So, instead of revelling in the base and repulsive cruelty required to so thoroughly debase the body of a child, Boorman, and screenwriter William Goodhart, reimagine their heroine as a being of incredible, other-worldly value. Couched in the language of seventies New Age nonsense, Regan is recontextualised as a nascent prophet so important that the forces of evil have despatched an Old Testament pestilence to extinguish her flame. The boorishly male Lamont then is fit to be nothing more than her burly protector while Sharon, Regan's lovelorn former tutor, is the fallen Apostle who has, unlike Judas, failed to halt the rise of this new messiah. 

FORGED BY A GOD

Alec Moore and Mark Wright's 2013 Excalibur documentary, Behind the Sword in the Stone has been picked up and retitled for an early December broadcast on the PBS America channel.

The Driver

Sometime in the early 1970s jobbing Hollywood screenwriter Walter Hill put the word out that he was a big fan of director John Boorman and the film Point Blank in particular. This effusiveness was rewarded with a copy of Alexander Jacobs' mythical (in writing circles) screenplay. Hill has described the reading experience as revelatory. Jacobs didn't waste a word, rattling out scene directions as bursts of pure information; haiku compared to the flowering prose of his contemporaries.

Jacobs rejected standard screenwriting assembly, doling out detail in a manner that hewed closer to bullet points or pure, impartial data. Hill was impressed. Jacobs had created a document that wasn't simply an anonymous filmmaking blueprint. The writer clearly had a voice, a sensibility that demanded his work be read as a complimentary piece of art rather than a disposable outline. Hill resolved to bring the same terse, vital readability to his own work. The Driver stands as the purest example of those labours.

As filmed, Point Blank follows a spectral criminal fixated on the former allies who acted against him. The film presents its lead character as an emotion writ large, pushing closer and closer to the people who turned him into an undying engine. Hill goes a step further, boiling his characters down to even simpler motivations - their job and an attendant will to succeed. Ryan O'Neal isn't playing a heroic archetype struggling manfully against impossible odds, he is simply The Driver. His character defined by an unshakable belief in his own abilities rather than any romantic, interior ambitions.

Although Driver takes payment for his services there is no evidence that he does anything with the cash. His apartment is barren, the cars he uses are procured on-site and trashed immediately after they have served their function. Driver pointedly doesn't care about the money he accumulates, it's just part of a necessary transaction that brings him closer to an opportunity to excel. His opponent, Bruce Dern's rabid Detective, is similarly bloody-minded, willing to break the law in the hope of trapping his quarry. Their conflict exists in the abstract, rules and regulations are irrelevant to both of them, they are simply two experts testing their limits by colliding with each other.

Transformers: The Last Knight

Michael Bay's problems are rooted in cohesion, specifically he struggles to arrive at a consistent tone or emotional wavelength. With Transformers: The Last Knight the director appears to have manufactured a solution - endless, breathless propulsion. Tossed off concepts and writer's room notes boil in a cauldron of pure, kinetic imagery. Bay is keyed into a ratcheting, agitated movement that extends to every facet of the filmmaking experience, even a constantly changing aspect ratio. The film never sits still, there's none of Christopher Nolan's stately approach to IMAX inserts, Bay's film is rabid, hurtling back and forth between the towering, vertical photography of super projection and letterbox vistas that read left-to-right.

Viewers are warned early and often that The Last Knight has been assembled to express a specific vision. It is not an easily digestible Summer product. Even for a Michael Bay film Last Knight is aggressive and inflexible, chewing up hundreds of millions of dollars so the director can scratch his various itches. Like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword before it, The Last Knight holds up John Boorman's Excalibur as a primal filmmaking text. Ever the obsessive, Bay zeroes in on the details, littering the battlefield with the swords that assailed Gabriel Byrne's Uther Pendragon and replicating Terry English's chromed plate armour on a massive, techno-organic scale.

Although The Last Knight lacks Excalibur's mythic sweep, God-King Optimus Prime notwithstanding, Bay's film does attempt to replicate the elliptical storytelling of Boorman, a model in which image and feeling trump structure and order. Boorman's compression came from a desire to fit a storied King's entire lifetime into 140 minutes of film. Bay's truncation is different, more about removing any peak on the film's carefully calibrated emotional chart that isn't total, screaming noise.

The Last Knight then allows us an insight into how Bay chooses to interpret the screenplays he's assigned. An undercooked example like Bad Boys urged the director to lean heavily on his cast, using them to create skits that conveyed critical plot details in a package that, if not organic, at least had a fair opportunity to be entertaining. The career that has followed that film is indicative of a talent not completely sold on writing as anything other than a blueprint used to string together disparate, fantastical situations.

Armageddon and Pearl Harbor stand as garbled attempts to ground the director's bombastic leanings in human stories about amateurs under stress. Bay fails to draw out any finer details in these situations because he either doesn't believe the moments or simply cannot relate to them. The Last Knight is, at a conceptual level, a committee crafted jump-off designed to dangle threads and hit specific, audience friendly targets. Bay has been handed a piece wringing with a particular kind of arrogance, it's a franchise maker. Bay may be on his fifth Transformers film but the director has never been asked to do anything as vulgar as consider continuity.

Each Transformers film has been an iterative example of what a live action interpretation of the 80s toyline could be. Love interests and even protagonists have come and gone; doomsday scenarios are replayed and reconfigured; the Transformers themselves die and are resurrected over and over again with zero regard for where the previous films left them. The Last Knight places a marker and, barring another entry that dispense with the concepts presented here, asks that further sequels proceed from a point where the Earth is slowly mutating into Unicron, the world-eating machine from Nelson Shin's The Transformers: The Movie, while Optimus Prime battles a malevolent robotic Gaia.

With very little need to spin wheels, Bay delivers a film that moves at two hundred miles an hour. Aiding and abetting this rampage is Sir Anthony Hopkins, the actor brimming with the kind of unfiltered glee he brought to the later, trashier Hannibal Lecter films. In Hopkins Bay has a collaborator genuinely capable of plugging one of the director's most obvious leaks. Hopkins can deliver stilted, stuttering exposition as a lark, turning the kind of heavy lifting usually reserved for a bug-eyed John Turturro into something that actually moves.

The winding, circuitous logic of Hopkins' info dumps are adrenalised by a companion action sequence that sees super-charged sports cars attacking London's landmarks and side-roads. The set-piece focuses on tourist destinations and the old city arteries that connect them. Bay forcing a McLaren 570GT down cramped, atypical alleyways manages to evoke the brief, busy thrill of Claude Lelouch's C'était un rendez-vous if not that piece's sustained, death-defying intensity. The image of gleaming, finely-tuned automobiles struggling along cobbled streets could even be read as the director using the absurdity of the film's unceasing momentum as a literal, self-referential component. Michael Bay has been allotted several finely packaged ideas and they're going down your throat whether you like it or not.

Nicol Williamson

Point Blank

Such close proximity to a read (however abridged) of Richard Stark's originator fiction recasts Point Blank as something of a critique on romanticised villainy. Stark's hero Parker is largely defined by his ruthless lethality, so potent and honed that even the barest contact can prove fatal for a civilian. In contrast Lee Marvin's Walker, although just as brutally determined, hounds his quarry to fearfully seek auto-destruction. Rather than an explicit murderer, Walker is a nagging guilt figure, clouding the minds of his betrayers. He was a better, simpler, man than they. A pleasant surprise then to discover that John Boorman's elliptical fever dream is made greater by source comparison rather than weaker, functioning as a flip-side companion piece to Stark's fantasy figure.

In Point Blank, however capably Walker asserts, there's always a nagging sense that he's an errand boy to a higher, more duplicitous entity. Manning the frame fringe is a grim accomplice, indistinct enough to be mistaken for a figment of Walker's fractured psyche - an effect enhanced by the relentless unreal that pervades the film. Walker, here a beanpole spectre, haunts the underworld. An omen of ill intent, signifying and expediting calamity, but very rarely physically actualising it. Whereas Stark's hero is the lone architect of such downfall, Walker is an unconscious pawn in the thrall of an answer-man, ticking off his gripes. Point Blank is frequently contextualised as a shut-down fantasy. That reading submits that Walker never leaves Alcatraz Island. Instead, dying alone in a cell, he weaves a revenge fiction to ease his passing. This accounts for his indirect impact, and a reluctance to drag his thoughts away from where he fell. Such a framing device also makes sense of Walker's obedience. Who else but death could manipulate such a man? Naturally, come the conclusion, having been made conscious of his role, Walker resists. Rather than seize his prize and disappear into the machine, Walker flees. A victory of individuality.