the couch potato: infernal affairs, the departed, 5 against the house, the line-up.

this week i finally got around to seeing the hong kong thriller 'infernal affairs' (directed by johnny to) which film buffs know as the source for martin scorsese's 'the departed'. both films follow the parallel stories of an undercover cop infiltrating the mob and a mob mole in the police department. some people who don't like the scorsese film have held up the original as a perfect example of lean modern thrillers and insist that scorsese shouldn't have added so much junk to his film. personally, i think both films are flawed and in spite of those flaws, both films are pretty entertaining. 'infernal affairs', at just a little over 90 minutes, is certainly tighter, but that doesn't necessarily make it better. it feels compacted and a bit rushed, which detracts from any serious impact it might have on a viewer. oddly, scorsese's film, at slightly over 2 and a 1/2 hours similarly feels a bit rushed. considering how much more there is of jack nicholson's mob boss than there needs to be (nicholson is terrible in the film), one wishes that his screen time had been given over to other characters. the original film does not feature a plot line where the two main characters end up sharing the same woman. which is too bad actually, because while i understand that some people felt it was a bit contrived, i found it one of the more oddly interesting things in the scorsese film. what better way to push the 'doppleganger' aspect of the story than that? 'infernal affairs' has a somewhat tighter conclusion. 'the departed' turns the show-down between damon and dicaprio into an unintentionally funny blood-bath, but johnny to's original lowers the body count and stages part of the confrontation perfectly. the only thing 'infernal affairs' gets wrong is how it depicts the death of tony leung as the undercover cop. even when i saw scorsese's film a second time and knew what was about to happen, i still recoiled when dicaprio got shot. in to's film this aspect of the conclusion is somewhat muted and less effective, though as i said, to compensates here by wrapping the sequence up much more effectively than scorsese does. no awful symbolic rat running across a railing for johnny to! and unlike 'the departed', 'infernal affairs' does not feature a scene where the female police psychiatrist tells the undercover cop "your vulnerability is really freaking me out here" just before hopping into the sack with him. i missed that, because i am firmly convinced that no woman has ever said anything like those words to a man as prelude to sex in the history of the human race and i really wanted to hear what they sounded like in chinese. dammit.

thanks to netflix, i saved myself some cash and saw two of the five films in the recent columbia pictures film noir classics package: 'five against the house' and 'the line-up'. the first of these is a surprisingly well-regarded heist thriller from 1955 directed by some fellow named phil karlsen. boy, all i can say about 'five...' is that some people will give props to anything if it's part of a genre they love and directed by some obscure douchebag whose brilliance they want to make a case for. the story concerns four college students, one of whom gets the "wacky" idea to rob a casino for laughs. dontcha know that another of their number is an unstable korean war veteran who decides that it's a great idea and should be seen through, with him getting all the cash? the resulting film is even more ridiculous than it sounds, believe it or not. keep in mind that by 1955 we'd already had superlative work like 'the asphalt jungle' and 'rififi' in this particular genre, with jean-pierre melville's wonderful 'bob le flambeur' also released in '55. but even if those great films didn't exist, 'five against the house' would still be a piece of shit. if there's one thing that annoys me it's auteurists who insist that mediocre directors like karlsen are unjustly neglected when it's fairly obvious to anybody who sits through crap like 'five against the house' that there's a legitimate reason why karlsen isn't better known: he and his films stink. actually, i'm not being completely serious there. 'five against the house' is competently directed, but not any more so than loads of mediocre product released by hollywood during the 50s. but there is a phil karlsen cult out there. what do these people see? is it just the thrill of being in some ultra-exclusive club? why elevate mere competence in this way? though i will say that brian keith gives a good performance in the film as the unbalanced vet and kim novak looks as jaw-droppingly gorgeous in it as ever. yowch. that woman could wear the fuck out of a tight dress.

the other film from the columbia noir collection is a little bit better. 'the line-up' was directed by don siegel in 1958 and though it's a decidedly mixed bag, i sort of enjoyed the film. for one thing, it's pretty well-directed by siegel, another favorite of auteurist nerds. i have some respect for siegel (he made the original 'invasion of the body snatchers') but he's inarguably uneven. again, nerds seem to think that once they say a director's work is good, that means it's all good, period. but siegel made a lot of hacky, undistinguished films during his long career and 'the line-up' just barely escapes earning the "hacky and undistinguished" label. what saves it is a terrific performance from eli wallach as a psychopathic hitman, the interesting relationship his character has with a genteel mentor played by robert keith, and direction that is occasionally (during a couple of the murders and most of the film's climax) quite good. the plot of the film is a mess though. it involves a drug smuggling ring that employs the most excruciatingly stupid method for getting their product into the country one could imagine. funnily, 'five against the house' and 'the line-up' both have the same screenwriter credited: a fellow named stirling silliphant, who went on to win an academy award in 1967 for 'in the heat of the night', unless i'm mistaken. this is yet another validation of my theory that the academy awards are utterly meaningless. or proof that this silliphant guy took writing lessons after churning out these two pieces of shit. by the way: 'the line-up' has a commentary track. i normally love listening to those, even if it's for a mediocre movie but this one features annoying blow-hard crime author james ellroy. ellroy managed to utter exactly one sentence in his trademark pseudo-hipster-jive lingo before i turned the commentary off. man, that guy is a fucking tool.