1001plus

Birth of a Career

2012-01-26T21:24:00.002-06:00

Film: Roger & Me
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I have something of a love/hate relationship with Michael Moore. When he first started, I was a big fan, which means you can expect that I’m going to end up reviewing this film favorably, since it is his first. However, as his career progressed, it became evident that as a documentarian, Moore was often less than honest, and sometimes edited events to suit his narrative rather than for truth. Eventually, I started to look at Moore as a liberal version of Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly: an ideologue with little to really add to the conversation.

But, boy! was he different when he first started. Roger & Me is clever, pointed, and sardonic as well as uncompromising. Moore goes straight for the throat and scores, and spends the rest of the film essentially jumping up and down on a damp patch where a dead horse once lay. So, while the film may well be overkill for the point that Moore is trying to make, the dark, bitter humor carries it through to the end.

Roger & Me is the story of Moore’s attempt to bring General Motors Chairman Roger Smith to Flint, Michigan for a day to meet with the people. Why? Because Smith closed the auto plants in Flint, putting 30,000 people out of work and devastating the town. Moore addresses this immediately in the film, suggesting that the plant closings were not to rescue a dying company but to build new plants in Mexico where workers would perform the same tasks at a fraction of the pay. Essentially, then, this film is one of the first media looks at the problem of outsourcing and loss of American manufacturing.

To tell the story, Moore splices in several attempts to meet with Smith in the GM headquarters in Detroit, as well as attempts to blindside the man at various other spots around the country. Moore spends some time speaking to other wealthy people in the Flint area, and to a person, they seem completely out of touch with the reality of the lives of the former GM workers. We see a local sheriff who is forced to evict dozens of families per day around the area interspersed with scenes of Smith discussing the meaning of Christmas at a yearly GM event. We see a woman forced to sell rabbits for meat told she could no longer supplement her income in this way due to health laws while the wealthy play polo. It’s powerful stuff.

And herein lies the problem. I’m aware that Moore played with reality on a number of his films, moving particular events in time so that they would conform to the narrative he wanted to present rather than the truth of the event he purported to be depicting. It forces me to wonder if he hasn’t done the same thing here. When he sneaks into a GM shareholders’ meeting, for instance, and attempts to ask a question only to have Smith immediately shut the meeting down, I’m forced to consider the possibility that this isn’t really what happened. Perhaps Smith really did answer his question. Perhaps Moore’s question and the response we are shown happened half an hour apart. I can’t know, and therein lies the problem here. Like a cop accused of evidence tampering, the future bad behavior taints everything that came before it. It throws everything into question.

The first rule for a documentarian should be that the truth is inviolate and something with which one should never tamper. Of course, that’s an ideal; even the first documentary (Nanook of the North, for those playing along at home) bent the truth and planned particular shots in certain ways for a specific effect. But that is significantly different from forcibly altering a chain of events. I’m left to wonder if Moore actually had enough of an impact to force Smith to shut down a shareholders’ meeting or if that’s more or less a trick of editing and an example of Moore’s hubris. The aforementioned eviction cut in with Smith's Christmas speech almost certainly didn't happen simultaneously, but we're certainly led to believe the two events are simultaneous.

All of this leaves me in a quandary.

The truth is that I like this movie a lot. The narrative that Moore gives us is beautifully edited to present this particular story. We see a wealthy class of people completely out of touch with the reality that most of their fellow citizens deal with on a given day. We see a company so devoid of humanity that it happily destroys a major city to save some money. We see a man so unwilling to communicate with anyone questioning him that he has the filmmaker forcibly removed from his building at all times.

It’s effective. It’s infuriating and funny and dark and brutal, but mostly it carries with it a sort of gallows humor that plays extremely well throughout. I just wish I could trust it, because the movie I loved the first time I saw it a few decades ago no longer has the assurance of complete truth that it once did.

Why to watch Roger & Me: Moore’s signature style in its earliest incarnation.
Why not to watch: Knowing his editing “tricks” in subsequent films, it can be difficult to trust.

No Ticket, No Money

2012-01-25T15:05:00.003-06:00

Film: Le Million (The Million)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I’ve been trying to watch something from the earliest years at least once a week, a goal that I sometimes succeed at and sometimes simply do not. Films like Le Million (The Million) are the reason that I sometimes do not watch one of these early films and also the reason why I’m really happy to have most of the first 100 films done.

Anyway, Le Million is the story of Michel Bouflette (Rene Lefevre), a poor artist who is in debt to just about everyone he knows. Just as his creditors come to call on him and demand payment, his friend Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert) shows up and tells him that one of them has just won one million florins in a lottery. Just before they determine who has the winning ticket, Michel offers a 50/50 split regardless, which Prosper declines. As it turns out, Michel has the ticket.

Unfortunately, the ticket is in his old coat, which is in the apartment of Beatrice (Annabella), his fiancé. What he doesn’t know is that Beatrice has given the coat away to a thief named Granpere Tulipe (Paul Ollivier). Naturally, the coat doesn’t stay with him, either. So what follows is a grand chase for the coat around Paris. The police are after Tulipe and think that Michel actually is Tulipe. Michel and Beatrice want the jacket back. Prosper wants Michel out of the way so that he can claim the ticket as his own. And, as the saying goes, hilarity ensues.

Except that it sort of doesn’t. The biggest problem with this film is the opening several minutes after the credits. We discover these characters whose story we will soon learn about in the middle of a celebration. We’re told that they are celebrating something wonderful that has happened and that everything has turned out perfectly. So there’s not a bit of tension in this story—we know from the beginning that whatever problems we are going to encounter on the way to the finish are going to come out fine in the end. Michel in jail? We know he won’t stay there. The jacket stolen? We know it will come back.

Okay, it could easily be argued that with musical comedy we know going in that it’s all going to come out right in the end anyway. But a good musical comedy will keep that tension ratcheted up and put us in a position in which we don’t know how we’ll get to a happy ending. Or it will play with the ending and give us the happy ending we didn’t know was there. Lots of possibilities even though we expect the happy ending. Here, not so much.

Additionally, the entire plot and the success of our characters depends entirely on luck, and in several cases, the sort of luck that would make a Charles Dickens character blush. Michel is difficult to root for not because he is poor, but because he is successful in everything he does purely by chance rather than skill, determination, or any other positive quality. Better lucky than good, I suppose, but this film takes that to a ridiculous extreme.

I suppose that the songs are decent, but they’re not really anything that special. I found it interesting that many times the songs were not being sung by the characters in the context of the film, but appear more or less as a given character’s thoughts or conscience. That, at the very least, was an interesting difference from what I expected.

As it turns out, though, there’s not a lot here to recommend. The film is guilty in a large respect of equating personal value with bank account. Michel is a bum until the moment he has a winning lottery ticket, where upon he becomes a man greatly respected and to be taken seriously. The fact that this is disturbingly true to life doesn’t change the fact that this opinion seems to be fully endorsed and encouraged by this film.

And finally, for a musical comedy, it’s remarkably unfunny. I barely cracked a smile.

On a positive note, it’s only about 81 minutes long, so at least the pain is fairly brief. I was surprised at one point to check the time and discover that I had only about 10 minutes of the film left. So I guess that’s a good thing. At least I tell myself that that’s a good thing.

Why to watch Le Million : A very early look at musical comedy.
Why not to watch: There’s no tension and it’s not very good. Mostly, it’s not very good.

No, Lucy, You Can't Do the Show!

2012-01-23T16:58:00.002-06:00

Film: Dance, Girl, Dance
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

A great deal of my life for the past few years has dealt with the fact that my older daughter is extremely involved in the ballet. Gail dances a dozen or so hours every week, and I spend a good deal of my time sitting on a couch outside of her rehearsals and classes. So when a film has a ballet component (The Red Shoes, Black Swan), I take more of an interest. And seeing as how I bought a copy of Dance, Girl, Dance a couple of years ago, knowing that it would come up on this list eventually, well, here we are.

The sell on this film is the director, Dorothy Arzner. Arzner was the only mainstream female director in Hollywood’s Golden Age, a feat in and of itself. When you add to that the twin damning facts (at least of that day) that Arzner was also an ardent feminist and a lesbian, well, her sitting in a director’s chair is all the more amazing. In short, Arzner is a blow for women, albeit one that didn’t have a huge impact until much later. Women directors are still pretty scarce in the industry, but at least these days no one looks cross-eyed when they discover a woman in charge of a picture.

Anyway, Dance, Girl, Dance follows two dancers in particular. The first, all-American named Judy O’Brien (Maureen O’Hara) lives to dance, and wants nothing more than to be attached to a real ballet. One of her dance partners and roommates is “Bubbles,” (Lucille Ball) who is in many ways Judy’s opposite. Where Judy loves dance for itself and is serious about it, Bubbles likes men, money, and everything that goes with them, and sees dancing as a way to get what she wants.

Eventually, thanks to the fact that she has little in the way of shame, Bubbles goes full burlesque, adopts the new stage name of Tiger Lily White, and begins taking over on Broadway with a risqué musical act. She brings Judy in as a stooge; Judy’s job is to perform a ballet number and incite the crowd to both anger at her and greater desire to see Tiger Lily. It’s a thankless job, but the pay is good, and Judy sticks with it.

Of course, because this is essentially a musical from 1940, there have to be men in the picture. And there are two of them. Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward), married but unhappily, has a thing for both girls. He meets both early in the film, ditching Judy to spend time with Bubbles. And then later, he returns into their lives, ditching Bubbles for Judy. Also important in all of this is Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy), who is in charge of an important ballet company. He pursues Judy as well, both from a romantic and dance angle. On several occasions, Judy shoots herself in the foot with him, either from a lack of confidence or a desire to spend more time with Jimmy.

What is interesting here is that we’re given flawed characters. Perhaps only Steve Adams lacks a significant flaw, other than he’s a bit dreamy-eyed throughout. Judy continually deals with the fact that she has no confidence in herself. Witnessing a rehearsal of a ballet company, she simply walks away, deciding that she doesn’t have the talent to make it. In fact, at this point she almost gives up dance entirely. Bubbles doesn’t lack in confidence, but she does seem to lack a bit of humanity. She helps her friends out on the sly at one point, but otherwise acts entirely in her own self-interest and damn the cost. She’s quite obviously a gold digger, and more importantly for the narrative of this film, she’s ridiculously competitive with anything else wearing a skirt. Her job offer of stooge to Judy is part because she feels sorry for Judy, but mostly because it allows her to constantly ridicule a dancer who is, ultimately, a better dancer than she is. And then there’s Jimmy, who wants only a good time and someone else to pay for it.

For that, this movie is pretty interesting. Unfortunately, that’s also the only reason this film is pretty interesting. It has the pedigree of a film that should be giving its audience something real, or significant, or different. And it doesn’t. Ultimately, this film is no different than anything else that came out of the musical films of the era. It’s pretty much the same damn thing despite the possibility for something more. Ultimately, the women in the film can’t amount to anything without a guy there for them. And that’s just sort of depressing from a lesbian feminist, regardless of the era. The speech at the end doesn’t really make up for it, especially when it’s followed by an on-stage catfight.

Why to watch Dance, Girl, Dance: A feminist vision from before World War II.
Why not to watch: Despite its feminist background, it’s not much different from other films of the period.

Not Much of a Honeymoon

2012-01-22T23:20:00.002-06:00

Film: Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun)
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television.

It feels like it’s been awhile since I’ve found a film that is new to me that I’ve really been captivated by. Oh, there have been a couple in the past week or so that I’ve liked, and I certainly remember Der Himmel uber Berlin very fondly, but that one feels like it was months ago instead of just a couple of weeks. I’m not sure what it is. I don’t know if I’ve been choosing poorly or if I’m somehow starting to burn out a little bit trying to punch through 25 movies or so every month, plus films for podcasting. Burnout is possible, of course, and sometimes it does feel a bit like this is work. But I don’t think it’s that. I think my pushing myself to find more obscure films is paying a particular dividend—many of these films are obscure for a reason.

I suppose if I really needed to recharge myself, I’d pick one of the multiple dozens of films on the list that I’ve already seen and watch it again, something mindless and entertaining and fun. I wouldn’t, in that situation, select a dense German film that I’d never seen before. I picked up a copy of Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun) when my local library started trying to slough off their stock of films on VHS. When you can fill up a bag for a dollar, it’s hard to resist, even if it’s a film you plan to watch only once.

I had some hopes for Die Ehe der Maria Braun, but those hopes found it a too difficult task to generate any real interest in me. It isn’t that the story isn’t any good or that the film is poorly made; on the contrary, the film is very well made (although it does smack a bit of Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 style in places), and the story is an interesting one, up to a point. The problem is that it very much feels like I’ve been here before, like this is a film that belongs as the third film in a Lifetime marathon of films about troubled women.

Let me break it down for you. In the waning days of World War II, Maria (Hanna Schygulla) marries Hermann Braun (Klaus Lowitsch) before he goes back to the front. After the war, Hermann doesn’t return home, and Maria walks around carrying a sign with his picture on the back, hoping for anyone who might have seen him and who might have news. Eventually, she begins to believe that Hermann is dead, and she takes a job in a bar. It is here that she meets Bill (George Eagles, credited as George Byrd). Despite the language barrier and their racial differences (Bill is black), the two become something of a couple, and soon Maria is pregnant. This is all okay with Maria when she is told that Hermann is definitively dead. But of course he’s not.

Hermann comes home, finds Bill and Maria in flagrante, and all hell breaks loose. Hoping to stop the fighting, Maria clubs Bill over the head, accidentally killing him. At the military tribunal, Hermann takes the rap for her and goes to prison. She attempts to build a life for herself and for him in the hopes of his eventual release. She takes a job with a French company, working under Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny). She soon becomes his mistress and becomes wealthy enough to buy a house. She tells Hermann everything, saying that when he is released, their life together will truly begin.

But of course it won’t be that simple (After all, no Lifetime movie could resist further complications). Oswald finds out about Hermann and goes to him. He tells Hermann that if he will abandon Maria, he will make the pair of them wealthy. Hermann agrees and emigrates to Canada upon his release. However, he still sends a flower to Maria every month to remind her that he still loves her. And then, when Oswald finally dies, Maria finds out about this arrangement at the reading of the will. How she reacts to this essentially defines the movie, so I won’t spoil it.

And that’s it. We enter the world of a woman who really only had a single day with her husband, and the rest of her life was spent essentially waiting for that marriage to restart. It’s not a terrible idea for a film; it’s just really, really boring. That’s not something I say about a film too often, but it fits here. I didn’t care about the lives of any of these people. Maria is enough of an ingénue to be attractive, but not compelling enough for me to care that much about what happens to her. She seems more than willing to jump from bed to bed as it suits her, which makes her devotion to her husband almost ludicrous. In a more compelling character, I’d be willing to look at this as a sort of fascinating conflict, or a hypocrisy made interesting by the character. But not here. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about what happened to her.

And so it goes. Another day, another movie, and I’m still waiting to be wowed by something.

Why to watch Die Ehe der Maria Braun: A realistic depiction of a true survivor.
Why not to watch: It’s really hard to care.

Noir Avec la Comedie

2012-01-21T23:49:00.003-06:00

Film: Tirez Sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

Film noir is an American film style, perhaps the only truly American film style in existence. This isn’t to say that Americans filmmakers don’t create innovative, interesting films in different genres, but film noir is a decidedly Yankee creation. It’s also the only accidently genre of film ever created—it wasn’t until after noirs fell out of fashion that they were determined to be their own thing. The French discovered film noir (hence the French name of the genre), so it comes as no surprise that some French directors might try to duplicate this style of film. Francois Truffaut’s Tirez Sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) is one of the finer examples of a non-American noir in existence.

We start with Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour), a honky-tonk piano player in a dive bar run by Plyne (Serge Davri). Charlie is a pretty good player—good enough to be on the bar’s sign at least. We soon discover thanks to Plyne that one of the servers, Lena (Marie Dubois) has a bit of a crush on him. Also, almost immediately, everything goes to hell. A man named Chico (Albert Remy) rushes into the bar and begs Charlie for protection. It turns out that Chico is his older brother and Charlie is actually Edouard Saroyan, a noted concert pianist who is now hitting the ivories in the dive bar for some unknown reason.

And so Lena and Charlie/Eduoard (Edouard from here on out just for convenience) pick up a couple of new “friends” in the persons of Momo (Claude Mansard) and Ernest (Daniel Boulanger), the two thugs who were chasing Chico in the first place. The outwit the pair on the night in question, but are sort of kidnapped the next day. Some quick thinking by Lena gets them away from the duo and she leads Edouard back to her place where we discover that she has known his identity all along.

It’s here that we get a long flashback that tells us really what is going on with Edouard and why he plays the piano where he does. Edouard was married once, but as soon as he started having some success as a pianist, his marriage started to fall apart. His wife, Therese (Nicole Berger) and he grow apart, and it seems there is nothing he can do. And we learn that his success actually came from Therese giving herself in the Biblical sense to Edouard’s impresario, Lars (Claude Heymann), and thus she resents all of the success because of what it cost her. She confesses, he leaves, but returns immediately. It’s still too late—she has flung herself from their apartment. And thus, Edouard becomes Charlie and gives up his success as a sort of penance.

This takes us through the first half of the film. From here, we have a number of plots to be resolved. Edouard has to deal with his new-found romance with Lena; Clarisse (Michele Mercier), the prostitute across the hall; Momo and Ernest, Chico; and Fido (Richard Kanayan) his kid brother who lives with him. It’s quite a bit of plot to charge through in what amounts to about half an hour, and it’s compounded by the fact that Fido gets kidnapped and Plyne and Edouard get into a scuffle that ends with Plyne dead.

A great deal of the film takes place inside Edouard’s head, a sort of stream-of consciousness narration. Much of this deals not only with his past, but with what is going on around him as the film progresses. His first walk with Lena, for instance, is filled with his own self-doubt and a sort of constant mental anguish about his own desire for her and to not appear to forward with her. He is very much like a young boy in these moments, while in others, he speaks like a man almost at the end of his life, given over to despair and a little self-loathing.

This is a supremely strange film in many ways. While the overall tone of the film is bleak and despairing, as befits film noir, quite a bit of what happens is done strictly for comic effect. One of the two kidnappers, for instance, boasts to Fido about his scarf, saying something to the effect of “If I’m lying, may my mother keel over.” We’re quickly given a shot of an old woman suddenly stricken and dying. It’s obviously comedic and silly, and ultimately feels a bit out of place, as does much of the rest of the humor.

And so Tirez Sur la Pianiste is a film of multiple parts and multiple intents that never quite gels. It’s interesting for what it is, in part interesting because it is Truffaut early in his career when he was still figuring things out. It’s worth a watch for that reason if no other, but it’s a difficult film to recommend on its own merits.

Why to watch Tirez Sur le Pianiste: The French have an affinity for film noir, and this film is proof.
Why not to watch: It never really decides what sort of film it is.

I Have No Words

2012-01-20T23:43:00.003-06:00

Film: Heaven and Earth Magic
Format: Internet video on laptop.

It’s not often that I find myself so completely flummoxed by a film that I have nothing to say, but such is the case with Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, alternatively titled No. 12. When I say that I can make no sense of this film, it seems like I’m just being lazy. I understand that. To give you an idea of what I mean, though, I’m going to use Smith’s own words to define his film. I found this on Wikipedia. I know Wikipedia is not always reliable, but damn me if this description doesn’t at least somewhat cover what I watched.

According to Smith, this film’s story is this: “The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Muller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.” Got that? Yeah, me neither.

When I was a kid, I was a huge Monty Python fan. I still am, really. I love Python stuff. I have all of the shows on DVD and own most of the films. I remember watching the show every Sunday night on public television (WTTW, channel 11, Chicago). Every Sunday, it was Python at 10:00 followed by Dave Allen at Large, which I claimed to like despite the fact that much of it was too adult for me to really understand. Anyway, when I’d watch Python, my mother would comment on how stupid she thought the Terry Gilliam cartoons were. I secretly loved the cartoons—they were some of my favorite things from the show.

I promise this isn’t a tangent. Heaven and Earth Magic is essentially a 66-minute-long Gilliam cartoon. Actually, Gilliam’s animations on Python come after Smith’s film, which means that Gilliam may well have gotten inspired by Smith’s work. What we have here are cut-out photographs that sometimes animate. Most of the animation is simplistic, often two-step animation. Little cut-out photographic people walk in herky-jerky motions across the screen. They give each other fish. A cow appears and is hit with a mallet, turning into a map of the various cuts. The woman of Smith’s alleged plot merges with her dental chair.

Yeah, it’s pretty damn avant garde. This impression is in no way changed by the bizarre soundtrack, which is essentially sound effects rather than any sort of music. Parts of the soundtrack might well be considered music—that is if you call a ceaselessly ringing bell accompanied by the sound of several clocks and a steam whistle to be music.

Seriously, this is one messed up film. I have no idea what any of it means. Even if we take Smith’s description of his own work at face value, I still have no idea what any of it means.

Look, I’ll make this really simple. I like Terry Gilliam’s animations. I think they are often funny. But when they go full-on avant garde with intentionally obscure meanings and last for more than an hour, I have enough of them quickly. By 20 minutes in , I was very much ready for this thing to be done. At the 40 minute mark, I was wondering how much more I could take.

Ultimately, avant garde cinema just makes my head hurt. I don’t gain anything in my life or in terms of valid meaning for my existence when I watch a skeleton and a machine essentially play jai alai with a cooing baby that turns into a watermelon. It is beyond me to see how I could have been enriched by such an experience, even on the best of days. Heaven and Earth Magic is not a challenging film; it is a punishing one.

I’m not going to pretend to make up a meaning here, folks. I have not a clue what any of this is about or is supposed to mean. I’m certain there is meaning here; I just seem incapable of fathoming what it is. And I have a genuine desire to soak my head in Epsom salts. Further, I’d suggest that you could show me a clip from this film from virtually any point in its running time, and I wouldn’t know which part it came from.

In the final analysis, I’m just glad it’s done.

Why to watch Heaven and Earth Magic: It will put skid marks on your brain.
Why not to watch: Because at 66 minutes, it’s 33 times too long.

You Can't Choose Your Family

2012-01-19T23:57:00.001-06:00

Film: Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass DVD player.

Family is one of those words that’s difficult to define. Who you consider a part of your family differs from person to person. Generally speaking, we don’t get to choose the members of our family. We’re stuck with them, like it or not. Everyone has those people in their families who they wish they didn’t need to claim, but that’s not the way it works. Family is family, regardless of how you classify it.

Bergman’s Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander) is a film about family and all that that word entails. It’s also a film by Ingmar Bergman, which means you can expect existential pain and suffering a lot of it expressed oddly in Bergman’s style. Lots of austerity. Lots of self-inflicted emotional trauma. Oh, Ingmar.

The film concerns the Ekdahl family, particularly the two eponymous children, Fanny (Pernilla Alwin) and Alexander (Bertil Guve). They live in a large, loving family happily ensconced in the upper middle class of turn-of-the-century Sweden. Their parents Oscar (Allan Edwall) and Emilie (Ewa Froling) run a playhouse and enjoy a sort of magical existence. They have kooky uncles, a nursemaid devoted to them, and a grandmother who adores them.

And then, tragically, their father dies. Seeking comfort, Emilie relies on the local bishop (Jan Malmsjo) for spiritual guidance and comfort. At least at first. Eventually, the bishop asks Emilie to marry him and she agrees. One of his conditions of the marriage is that she will leave her entire life behind—and so will the children. No clothing, books, trinkets, jewelry from their old life. And no contact with their old family. Essentially, the children are to be plucked out of their old lives and dropped wholesale into the world of the austere and harsh religious man. That they see visions of their dead father is not surprising. That others see him as well is perhaps a bit more.

The bishop seems to spend most of his punishments and his harshest behavior for Alexander, who is as defiant as most young children. His greatest sin is the telling of lies, each of which comes with a punishment—generally a bare-assed whipping witnessed by the rest of the household and evidently enjoyed by the bishop’s mother. Emilie sees what she has wrought with her children, that in selecting her family, she has perhaps chosen too quickly, too much in earnest, and thus poorly. Pregnant but not caring, she asks him for a divorce and he refuses, telling her that should she leave, he will take her children and raise them as his own, depriving her of them. Such a nice, upstanding, holy man, that bishop.

All of this takes us to the third act, and Emilie’s decisions regarding the welfare of Fanny and Alexander. It’s not something to spoil, so I won’t.

For all of the pain and misery that Bergman gives us in this film, it is very much a meditation on the power and value of family. The Ekdahl clan is one that, for lack of a better way to put it, is what a true family should be. They get angry with each other, frustrated with each other, and are constantly dealing with the foibles of one family member or another. And yet, at every turn and every problem, there is always the sort of unconditional love that creates a true family.

Bergman, of course, made his career creating the kind of movies that made Woody Allen concerned about his position in an uncaring universe. For all of the pain and suffering, all of the existential crises, and all of the people doomed by their own decisions he filmed in his career, he ended his career in the cinema with a movie that is, ultimately, incredibly uplifting.

(Yes, I’m well aware that Bergman made other films after Fanny och Alexander. However, this film is the final full-length feature of his career that was released in theaters. While not particularly his swan song, it was his last go-around with the venue that had been his mistress for so long. So no complaints.)

Fanny och Alexander is, like life, filled with both joy and pain, happiness and sadness, triumph and tragedy. I’ve not gone too far in Bergman’s filmography, but it would not surprise me if no other film of his felt as genuinely human, accessible, and natural as this one.

Why to watch Fanny och Alexander: A meditation on family, both good and bad.
Why not to watch: It’s long and pretty Bergman-y, even if it’s not quite as depressing as you might think.

Mad Dog

2012-01-18T17:51:00.002-06:00

Film: Badlands
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There has always been a certain level of fascination around serial killers for a certain type of person. In the U.S., there is a particular unique brand of such killers that populate the wide open spaces of the West. These killers seem to thrive in the emptiness where they can be alone except for when some unlucky soul comes across them. Such is the story of Badlands.

Kit (Martin Sheen), a garbage man, takes an immediate liking to Holly (Sissy Spacek) when he sees her. The fact that there is 10 years separating them and that Holly is a mere 15 doesn’t seem to dissuade him at all. When he loses his job, he takes up as a ranch hand, and he and Holly see each other in secret, mostly because Holly’s father (Warren Oates) doesn’t approve of Kit. This may be his daughter’s age, the age difference, or the fact that Kit looks a bit like a greaser and a bit like James Dean. When he discovers their times together, he punishes Holly by shooting her dog.

The two resolve to be together anyway. Kit attempts the pacifist path first, telling Holly’s father that he plans to be with her. But Kit is run off again, and the two decide to leave town. While he is collecting Holly’s things, her father enters, and there is a bit of a showdown. It’s one-sided, though, because Kit is armed, and he doesn’t hold back, shooting her father several times. He records a message that he and Holly have decided to kill themselves, collects Holly’s things, and sets the house on fire.

And suddenly, the film enters a sort of lull. The pair run off into the untamed woods of South Dakota and build a sort of treehouse for themselves, living together without any intrusion from the outside. At least, that is, until there suddenly is intrusion from the outside. Kit is forced to kill again, and the pair hit the road again, slowly working their way out of South Dakota by heading west. Kit kills again a few times, sometimes for no reason other than to do it, and Holly simply goes along for the ride, never participating in the killing, but also never preventing it or even saying anything to slow Kit down.

Of course, a ride like this one eventually has to end, and this one does, too. And the police and state troopers find what we have slowly come to learn over the course of the film—there is a sense of magnetism in Kit. He is a conscienceless killer, but is almost likeable in a way. Through all of this, Holly becomes more and more distant, retreating into her own sparse mental world, about as unpopulated as the west the pair drive through.

Despite this, Holly’s musings are fascinating. Rather than focusing on the killings and the death, she instead focuses on her own feelings and her own reactions to everything that is going on around her. At one point, near the time when the two part, she has retreated inside herself completely, ignoring everything Kit does. She tells us that rather than talk, she spells out entire sentences on the roof of her mouth with her tongue so that the sentences will never be heard by anyone. Comments like this one have a strange, subtle beauty to them. There is a sense of poetry as well as a sense of loss in them that seems to fit the expansive wastes of the setting.

What’s interesting to me here is that director Terrence Malick seems not to care overly much about the violence that is happening in his own film. The various killings of Kit Carruthers are treated with no more ceremony or slow-motion footage or glorified camera angles than any other event in the film. Potential victims left alive are treated no different from those who Kit guns down in cold blood and for no reason. There is, within the confines of this film, essentially no moral difference between killing and not killing. In fact, Holly’s reactions to all of the violence around her, even the murder of her own father, is a sort of vague, passive indifference. Both characters appear to exist in a world of solipsism, where the death of another is important only in how it might affect the self.

Malick’s photography is as sparse as the landscape and as devoid of emotion as Holly’s narrations. It’s effective throughout. There is a sense of simply events happening on the screen with no implied moral judgment one way or another. The events unfold, each filmed with the same distance as the last, and we are given no cues as to how we should react. In effect, Malick lets us decide for ourselves.

Badlands is an almost contemplative film despite its lurid subject matter. It avoids attempting to shock the audience with the violence of similar films (Straw Dogs from the same era comes to mind. So too does Natural Born Killers of some years later). Rather than focusing on the violence, the film instead focuses on Holly and to a lesser extent Kit and simply shows us their lives together.

An astonishing, difficult, and worthwhile film.

Why to watch Badlands: Malick before he got as Malick-y.
Why not to watch: Because you need the movies to make your moral judgments for you.

What is it with Bertolucci?

2012-01-16T21:31:00.001-06:00

Film: Prima Della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution)
Format: Internet video on laptop

Considering the parade of films I have watched in the past two years, it takes quite a bit more than it used to to really squick me, but Bertolucci’s Prima Della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution) managed to in its first half hour or so. The reason will become evident as I get into the actual narrative here. What’s interesting is that the main reason for this, while central to the plot, could have easily been changed to be far less creepy and still have almost the exact same purpose in service to the narrative.

Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) is in many ways the classic example of youth in revolt. Blessed with a bourgeoisie upbringing, he is filled with passion and energy, and the teachings of his professor, Cesare (Morando Morandini), a communist. At home, Fabrizio spends time with his friend Agostino (Allen Midgette), who shocks Fabrizio with his sudden death. Agostino drowns, and there are some indications that it may be a suicide. Conflicted and filled with an energy that has no focus or direction, Fabrizio falls into the arms of Gina (Adriana Asti) and begins a passionate affair.

And here’s where the squicking comes in—Gina is Fabrizio’s aunt. She’s about 10 years older than he is and plenty attractive, and in many ways it would be natural for him to be attracted to her. In this case, though, the attraction is mutual, and they begin mashing on each other at Agostino’s funeral and continue for quite a bit of the rest of the film. I’m not a prude and I try not to keep my views provincial, but every time these two ended up in a clinch, I found myself wanting to look away.

This is not the first time that I have encountered creepy sex in a Bertolucci film. I am instantly reminded of the butter and pig vomit scenes in Last Tango in Paris as well as the sex with the epileptic prostitute and the pederasty sequence in Novocento. Of all of these, I can see the point of some of what happened in Novocento, but I’m forced into the belief that Bertolucci might have been something of a pervert. In the case of this film, the function that Gina serves is as more or less an outlet for Fabrizio’s undirected, general frustration. I don’t, honestly, see any real difference that would have been made by having Gina be a friend of the family, akin to something more like The Graduate.

The real point of the film comes in the third act when Fabrizio, Cesare, and Gina go to visit Gina’s friend Puck (Cecrope Barilli). Puck lives on a parcel of undeveloped land that he is about to lose, unable to maintain his hold on it into the future. That, more than anything, is what Fabrizio is dealing with. He cannot, and will not live in Italy’s fascist past, and it appears that the future is both bleak and completely unknown. For him, neither past nor future hold anything worth saving or working toward. There is only now, and now is also insufficient in fulfilling him.

Prima Della Rivoluzione was filmed in black-and-white, which is evocative of several different possibilities. One possibility is that Fabrizio, still young, sees his world in these same black-and-white tones. Another is that the world for many of our characters truly does exist in this colorless world. There’s really no reason to choose between these two possibilities, of course. Bertolucci may have meant both, or neither, or something else entirely. It’s noteworthy, though, that the one small piece of the film that is in color is essentially a short pseudo-fantasy that Fabrizio arranges for Gina’s benefit. Here, and only here, something completely outside the normal world, do colors exist for us.

With a film like this, I am unable to prevent myself from projecting the characters forward, beyond the scope of the film itself. In this film, my thinking concerns family gatherings in the future and just how awkward some of those meetings well be. “Hey, Aunt Gina, remember that time a couple of years ago when you and I had all of that incestuous sex?” In fact, near the end of the film, Gina leaves and Fabrizio goes back to Clelia (Cristina Pariset), his fiancé introduced very briefly at the beginning of the film. And while he accepts this, it is soon evident that his mind is still on Gina.

It’s evident throughout the film that Bertolucci spent a lot of time watching Godard, as this film is very similar in style to Breathless. We see similar jump cuts, similar camera movements. In fact the two films look very much like the could have come from the same director. This isn’t too surprising, considering Bertolucci’s age of 22 at the time of filming this. Like the work of many a young filmmaker, this comes across in many ways as a combination of homage, tribute, and outright theft of a favored mentor. This isn’t a criticism, but a statement of fact.

But really, Gina’s identity, her eventual betrayal, and the destruction of their relationship could have had 95% of the same effect had she simply been the girl across the street, although it does make for a fascinating reaction from Gina at Fabrizio’s wedding.

Why to watch Prima Della Rivoluzione: It’s a natural, Italian counterpoint to the French New Wave.
Why not to watch: Because for Bertolucci, good sex is disturbing sex.

What Ever Happened to Paul Muni?

2012-01-15T23:05:00.003-06:00

Films: I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; The Life of Emile Zola
Format: DVDs from personal collection on big ol' television.

How come no one seems to remember Paul Muni? For a time, he was one of the most lauded actors in the world. He was apparently born to play the lead in biopics, and a quick skim over his profile on IMDB shows that this seems to be where he made his bread and butter. Muni appears in several films on the Big List, and I’ve spent the better part of a day with the man.

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang has the lurid title of a film of a few decades in the future. It tells the somewhat true story of an escaped convict who broke away from a chain gang crew and lived as a fugitive. Certainly there are a number of whitewashed aspects of this story from the original, but this version served to expose the chain gang system and create a desire for prison reform.

Our hero is James Allen (Muni), freshly returned from World War I. He’s given his old job in a factory, but it’s not anything he’s interested in any more. Instead, after working with the Army Corps of Engineers, he has a desire to build things. Sadly, there’s no work to be had, and Allen eventually ends up on the road, living hand-to-mouth.

At one stop, another down on his luck drifter convinces Allen to go with him to a local greasy spoon to bum a couple of hamburgers off the owner. The owner, after a little pleading, agrees. But this is more than just a quick attempt at a bite to eat. Our drifter pulls a gun and forces Allen to steal the money. Killed by the police in an ensuing shootout, the drifter leaves Allen to take the rap, and take it he does—ten years of hard labor. It’s not too long before Allen desires to go on the lam, and with the assistance of another prisoner named Bomber (Edward Ellis), he makes a break for it.

Eventually, he lands in Chicago and gets a job on a construction crew. His hard work and good ideas see him rise in the ranks. As he does, he becomes more and more attractive to Marie (Glenda Farrell), his landlady. She discovers his chain gang past and holds it over him, forcing him into a marriage that is perfectly beneficial for her. She spends more than he makes and runs around with other men while she keeps him on a tight leash. This gets even more confining when he meets Helen (Helen Vinson), with whom he falls in love.

Eventually caught, Allen is told that if he returns to the unnamed state of his escape, he’ll be given a pardon after 90 days. But it’s all smoke and mirrors—he’s put back into the chain gang and left, his pardon unfulfilled and the case closed. And so he escapes again, and goes on the road, living in shadows and in fear.

This film is naturally melodramatic, and it plays for pathos rather than tragedy. James Allen is not so much tragic as pitiable. His only crime, (other than escaping from the chain gang), was to give up a stable but boring job. Everyone, it seems, is complicit in the miscarriage of justice that causes him to be condemned to a life on the gang despite the overwhelming evidence in his favor. This, more than anything, is the reason for my accusation of wart removal in this film.

And yet, it’s a pretty good film. Muni is quite effective throughout the film. He suffers well, at the very least. The rest of the cast in general (with the exception of Ellis as Bomber) is subject to fits of extreme overacting and over piety. Regardless of this, the injustice done to Allen strikes a chord, as do the constant and consistent cover-ups of the brutality of the chain gang system in the South. For what it’s worth, the film set the standard and tone for chain gang films to come like The Defiant Ones and Cool Hand Luke. And regardless of the melodrama, the actual story is pretty effecting.

One of Muni’s triumph as an actor, though, comes in The Life of Emile Zola, a film, like Chain Gang for which he was nominated for an Oscar. In this film, we see initially a few snapshots of the early days of Zola (Muni), living in a cold flat in Paris with artist Paul Cezanne (Vladimir Sokoloff). The two suffer for their art, when suddenly Zola is given a job at a book publisher. He goes, but suffers again, this time because he begins to publish articles that call into question a number of facets of French life and society. Dismissed from his job, he returns to poverty, this time dragging along his wife Alexandrine (Gloria Holden).

During this time, however, he meets Nana (Erin O’Brien-Moore), a prostitute. She tells him her story, which he publishes as the book Nana. The book becomes an instant hit, and suddenly everything Zola touches turns to gold. He is lauded throughout Paris and the world by everyone by Cezanne, who tells him that he has grown fat with his success.

At the same time, the French military discovers a traitor in its ranks passing information to the enemy. Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut) is accused and immediately found guilty, stripped of rank, and sent to Devil’s Island. Meanwhile, the real traitor, Major Walsin-Esterhazy (Robert Barrat) is uncovered, but his crime is covered up to maintain the Army’s dignity over the Dreyfus affair. Eventually, Zola gets wind of this and, pricked by the conscience that Cezanne has left him, calls into question the entire affair, accusing the military and even the highest levels of government of conspiracy to keep an innocent man in prison and allow a guilty man to walk free.

Here’s the thing—much like Chain Gang, The Life of Emile Zola is melodramatic to the extreme. Historical events are compressed at the end for a more bittersweet and poignant ending so that the melodramatic feel can remain throughout. Because of this, the movie telegraphs many of its moves, particularly in the last dozen minutes or so. And yet it still works really effectively. This is still a film that has the power to move and to create a great deal of sympathy for the figure of Dreyfus as well as for Zola’s sudden return to firebrand status. The most telling moment is Zola's speech at the end of his own trial. Despite everything working against it--the age and melodramatic stance--it remains one of the great courtroom speeches in film history.

Additionally, the film does tend in many ways to follow the actual history of the events. In some ways, the real story is far more drawn out and difficult, so it would seem that many of the events were compressed for ease of storytelling as well as for melodramatic purposes. But no matter. The film manages to work very well as a courtroom drama, as the story of a man called to action once again, as the story of the man’s life, and, by the end, a story of vindication and triumph.

What’s particularly interesting is the lack of mention of Dreyfus’s ancestry. One of the main charges against the military tribunal that convicted him was very real and evidently legitimate accusations of anti-Semitism. This is completely glossed over in the film, more than likely because of the rising trend of anti-Semitic feelings throughout Europe in the late 1930s. There are mere hints here—Dreyfus is accused and condemned by his military superiors based strictly on his name, a slight nod to the reality of the reason he was convicted in the first place.

What’s also interesting here is the depth of the conspiracy. In many ways, there are echoes today in news coverage and political ideologues that resonate from this film. The Life of Emile Zola manages to expose the subtle workings of human nature and our ability to suddenly grasp onto exactly the wrong idea because our feelings have been stirred up by those paid to do exactly that. If for nothing else, the film is worth watching today because it reveals—as do many other, similar films—our failings as a people to truly understand the depths to which those in power will sink if such power is threatened.

Why to watch I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang: It single-handedly caused a call for prison reform.
Why not to watch: Melodrama phasers are set to kill, not stun.

Why to watch The Life of Emile Zola: Melodrama that works almost in spite of itself.
Why not to watch: Yet another kick to the hoolies for the French military, as if they needed another one.

Your Cheatin' Heart

2012-01-14T23:34:00.002-06:00

Film: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Oh, Woody Allen! Is there any subject your various neuroses won’t cover? Crimes and Misdemeanors is a film with essentially two stories that are mostly tangential, with a couple of characters that intersect here and there. Except for the very end, there is a relatively minor character who appears in both stories sort of as a link between the two, although he’s not really a major player in either one.

The first, and sort of main plot, features an ophthalmologist named Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau). Rosenthal is a hell of a doctor and has a string of honors behind his name. He has a wife (Claire Bloom) and a daughter (Stephanie Roth Haberle) and a deep, dark secret. The secret is that he also has been having an affair with a flight attendant named Dolores Paley (Angelica Huston) for the last two years, and things are starting to get difficult. Dolores wants him, and wants him out of his marriage. She’s threatening to go to his wife, and she’s also threatening to out him on his financial improprieties.

In the other story, a documentary filmmaker named Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) exists in a loveless marriage to Wendy (Joanna Gleason). Wendy’s brother Lester (Alan Alda) is a big shot television producer who makes sitcoms for the masses. He also makes Cliff exceedingly jealous. There is a documentary film being made on Lester, and Cliff is tapped to direct it. Also working on the film is Halley Reed (Mia Farrow). Cliff forms an instant attraction to her, and is nonplussed to discover that Lester has a thing for her as well.

The two stories collide in the person of Ben (Sam Waterston), who is the brother of Lester and Wendy and a patient of Dr. Rosenthal. Ben, a rabbi, is rather rapidly losing his eyesight and will probably be completely blind in a couple of months.

In essence, the two stories also meet in this connection over infidelity. In Judah’s case, the infidelity is real and has been going on for some time. In Cliff’s case, the infidelity is desired and mostly in his mind. He feels this connection and it’s evident that there is a little bit of a connection from Halley as well, but it’s primarily from him. Judah, on the other hand, wants out and is trapped in this double life by the evidently increasing neurotic behavior and desperation of Dolores.

Things come to a head in Judah’s story when he confides in his gangster brother, Jack (Jerry Orbach). Jack suggests that perhaps Dolores can be convinced, strong armed, or simply eliminated, and eventually, Judah breaks down and agrees. When the deed is done, he finds it necessary to go to her apartment and retrieve some incriminating evidence, and is confronted with the body, which sends him into a serious existential crisis.

For Cliff, things come to a head differently, but in an oddly similar fashion. In addition to the piece on Lester, he’s been working on another biopic about a philosopher who espouses a basic idea of what love is and what it means for us. As he continues to work on it, the philosopher kills himself by jumping out a window, essentially invalidating his philosophy, his life, and Cliff’s dream project.

Crimes and Misdemeanors is interesting because it has all of the makings of a black comedy, but in general, there’s not a lot of comedy here. There are moments of it certainly, but too much of the film spends its time around Judah and Cliff in their own private dark midnights of the soul for the film to truly be comedic. This is not specifically a problem—it’s merely an observation on the way the film plays and the reality of the content.

There are a few moments that are difficult to watch, not because of violence or even really content, but simply because of the reality of the situation. Again, this is not a criticism of the film, but a mere observation.

I love the cast. It contains a number of actors who instantly place me in New York. Allen himself is primary among these, of course, but so too are Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterston, both of whom I love seeing on screen. I also love Angelica Huston in most of her roles, and here she is suitably crazy and passionate all at the same time. Were he not already famous, this would be a break-out role for Alan Alda. Alda, it seems, had to work hard to overcome the Hawkeye Pierce role, and he does it here. Lester is a smarmy bastard, and Alda plays him as if from memory of seeing too many wealthy, egomaniacal producers wander through his life. He’s picked bits and pieces from many, I would guess, and created an amalgam that is mildly pitiable and easy to dislike.

Despite the lack of comedic content here, I enjoyed this film pretty well. The theme is an interesting one, as is the resolution at the end. At its heart, the film asks the question of whether or not a man can truly live happily with the memory and guilt of his past sins. For one of our two leading schmucks, the answer is affirmative, while the other seems to disagree with every fiber of his being. I’ll leave who is who out here—no need to spoil—but if you know the work of Woody Allen, you know the answer to this already.

Why to watch Crimes and Misdemeanors: Woody Allen exploring the ideas of infidelity with Mia Farrow. If you think about that for a second, it’s almost too meta to handle.
Why not to watch: Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterston aren’t used nearly enough.

Refugees

2012-01-12T19:39:00.002-06:00

Film: Kundun
Format: DVD from Schmaling Memorial Library through interlibrary loan on kick-ass DVD player.

Some films I find difficult for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they are difficult because they are poorly made or badly plotted. In the case of Kundun, the reason for its difficulty for me is much more nuanced and complex. This film is expertly made and gorgeously filmed. The problem I find here is one of focus and direction rather than skill or quality or even subject matter. There are simply things going on here passed off as historical truth that I cannot get my mind around.

Kundun is essentially the history of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th (and current) Dalai Lama, secular and spiritual leader of Tibet, who has ruled in exile for more than a half century. Such a history is naturally of considerable interest. But, and this is where I will probably take heat from others, this history is enmeshed with spiritual, religious, and otherworldly portents and signs of significance.

“Of course,” you say. “This is, after all, the story of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. It is only natural that there a spiritual side to this story.”

And with that I agree. I don’t have a problem with the idea that the film would naturally explore the spiritual side of Tibet and of Tenzin Gyatso. Where the problem comes in for me is that this film is less an exploration of the history of his finding, teaching, coronation, and flight from Tibet in front of the People’s Army of China and more a strict beatification of the man himself. Watch this movie and take it at face value, and you have no option but to simply believe that the man is divine.

I don’t want to take away from the more technical aspects of the film, which are as good as they get. The cinematography here is absolutely sublime. Additionally, the color and pageantry and spectacle of the various ceremonies and aspects of Tibetan life. Additionally, Scorsese was able to bring out professional-level performances from a non-professional cast, a number of whom are actually related to the Dalai Lama. On a technical level, this film is as good as it gets.

But again, I am continually drawn back to the idea that to accept this film and story as it is told, I must accept most of the tenets of Gelug Buddhism, which I frankly do not. I do not accept that Tenzin Gyatso is the reborn spirit of the previous 13 Dalai Lamas. I do not believe in the signs and portents that are given here, or that the Dalai Lama has the ability to foresee the future, as he is seen doing multiple times in the course of this film. I simply do not believe this, and thus I do not believe in the veracity of the film put before me.

Let me put it another way. A few months ago, I watched the entirety of the three-season television show Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s evident that a great deal of that show was borrowed from the life of the current Dalai Lama. The determination of his identity by choosing items from his past life, the spiritual connections, even the name Gyatso appears in the show as one of the Avatar’s teachers. And for Avatar, I buy it. I buy it because it is inherently a fantasy, something that does not purport itself to be a reflection of the real world in any way. It is a fantasy world complete with (essentially) magic and spirits and an entire, populated spirit world.

Not so for Kundun, which purports to be a part of the real world, mystic signs and portents, supernatural powers, rebirth, and all.

And so I find myself relatively conflicted on this film. On the one hand, it is an expertly made film by one of the greatest working filmmakers today. It is a difficult film to dislike because of the care and skill with which it has been made. On the other hand, the premise is something I find ludicrous on its face. I do not ascribe magical powers or divinity to any man, no matter how impressive.

This is not a knock against the Dalai Lama himself. He seems by all accounts to be an impressive and decent human being, a man who has sacrificed much for his beliefs, and who is willing to do anything for the betterment of his people. I respect that and admire that. But it still doesn’t make him a mystical figure, and there’s simply no getting around that.

I will say, though, that I did appreciate that at least the spirituality here is something other than what is traditionally hammered at us. The fact that at the very least I could get away from the strict Western view of religion—particularly as practiced by many of the most rabid supporters—was a welcome relief.

Why to watch Kundun: A tale of modern spirituality that differs greatly from most Western stories attributing everything to Christian teaching.
Why not to watch: As usual, spirituality offers no explanations other than itself.

An Ordinary Average Guy

2012-01-11T23:27:00.001-06:00

Film: The Crowd
Format: VHS from Downers Grove Public Library through WorldCat on big ol’ television.

Films often are about the people we want to be or wish we were. Frequently it seems to me that films are about a sort of wish fulfillment. The people in films are beautiful, and their characters live the sort of lives we dreamed we would as children. They have meaningful and important dream jobs, carry with them the fate of the world often enough, and exist in a world of either opulence or of at least quiet luxury. “Poor kids” in a lot of John Hughes films still live in big houses and have their own cars—they just aren’t the nicest houses and the cars aren’t new. That’s how you can tell they are poor in the film world.

This is why Italian neo-realism was such a shock. It’s also what makes King Vidor’s The Crowd such a noteworthy film for its time. It certainly starts out like the film we expect, with the main character overcoming terrible odds and adversity to become the great success he always knew in his heart he deserved to be. And yet it doesn’t really play out like that when we come right down to it. Instead, it is a sort of precursor to a film like It’s a Wonderful Life in tone if not in plot.

John (James Murray) is born on the 4th of July and has no reason to disbelieve his father when he is told that he is destined for great things. Despite the loss of his father at a young age, John is convinced that he is something and someone special and needs only a slim opportunity to make the best of everything. At 21 he moves to New York and starts on the bottom rung of a large company, one man in a sea of faceless office workers and identical desks. But he still has hope and ambition.

He eventually meets the equally ubiquitously named Mary (Eleanor Boardman) and the two are soon married. John isn’t much of a hit with the in-laws, particularly with his low-rent job and high-rent speech about his rosy future. A couple of kids follow, as do bills, marital strife, bickering, and a terrible tragedy that nearly crushes the couple under its weight. John eventually sinks into a terrible depression, quits a series of jobs, and becomes essentially a nothing, not capable of doing much of anything. Naturally for the time the film ends on an uplift, but throughout, the film depicts the slow spiral of John from his idealistic youth to the reality of the world around him.

And that, more or less, is the entire point of the film. John and Mary are not exceptional in any way. Oh, John can juggle a bit and play the ukulele, and Mary can sew a dress, but in the grand scheme of the world, there’s nothing about them that is particularly noteworthy or special. All of this makes John’s die-hard belief in himself and his own abilities that much more tragic and painful to see play out on the screen. In fact, the only real thing that John has going for him is this unwavering belief in himself that slowly erodes as the film wears on.

It’s an interesting theme for a film, particularly for 1928. Interesting in that John’s woes of unemployment and long lines of people seeking work seem to presage the stock market collapse of the following year. But also interesting in the sense that John is not by any stretch a movie hero. He’s a bum, He’s a man who spends much of his time dreaming about something better but who is evidently unable to work up the courage or the effort to do much of anything about it. Because of this, he is a tragic figure, lost, and lost because of his own shortcomings and faults.

Also critical here (and why the film was named as it was) is the faceless and impersonal nature of the crowded city itself. John can do nothing to separate himself from that crowd and can do nothing to rise above it. His complete lack of any exceptional quality turns him into just another faceless drone at his job and just another face in the crowd in the rest of his life. Ultimately, like most of us in the world, John’s fate is to be just a man struggling with his own existence rather than mastering the fates as he had always believed himself capable.

The Crowd suffers from precisely what most other silent dramas do. It is very melodramatic in terms of the acting style, and this is frequently off-putting. Additionally, there’s a reason that most films contain truly heroic characters. It’s easier to get behind and root for someone who is in some way exceptional than it is to cheer and hope for a many who seems at each turn to be unable to help himself at all.

Despite this, The Crowd is very effective at showing the life of this simple, average man an in showing how simple it is for that life to quickly become a tragedy.

Why to watch The Crowd: It’s tailor-made for the 99%.
Why not to watch: It’s still laden with melodramatic overacting, like most silent films.

O Brother, Why Stay Thou?

2012-01-10T23:50:00.003-06:00

Film: Des Hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

The plot of Des Hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men) is relatively simple as plots go. However, the way these plots are put into action is strangely compelling. In fact this is another film like Black Narcissus that on the surface appears to be about a dull subject that will likely be told in a dull manner. It is, after all, a film about monks. For someone like me, with a religious background but no real current religious convictions or motivations, that is a hard sell.

Briefly, a group of Trappists live in Algeria. The monastery has evidently been in the location of this small village for some time and the monks are an accepted, even welcome part of the community despite its overwhelming Muslim population. The monks tend to the sick, work in their garden, and otherwise see to the daily running of the monastery. However, a group of fundamentalist Muslims has entered the area, and people are beginning to die at their hands. And thus, the question the film appears to ask is “What is the value of a life of sacrifice.

What makes this film so interesting for me at least is that the monks appear to choose their fate. It is, perhaps, inevitable that they will at some point have a serious run-in with the extremists. They have multiple chances to flee the area. But they do not. That they stay is not what is noteworthy here. What is is their reasons for staying. Throughout, several of the brothers are film in their decision to stay at the Algerian monastery, while others come to this decision over time. For all, the reason is essentially that this is where they belong.

The film naturally has a strong amount of spiritual content, and it could not exist any other way. But this content is not jammed down the throat of the viewer. Instead, it is a quiet spirituality, a real world belief and conviction that is all the more powerful for its essential lack of theatricality. They simply believe in the value not of their lives, but of living as they always have, immune to the fear the terrorists want to engender. Their choice is one of peace and love over fear and hate. They stay because the people need them and they stay because this monastery is home.

It would not e difficult for Of Gods and Men to become a polemic against Islam, but the film does not make that particular choice. Instead, both the brothers inside the walls and the people outside the walls live in a sort of spiritual and religious harmony, The two groups have a deep and abiding respect for each other and for each others’ traditions. There is a simple beauty and poignancy in such mutual respect, and it is this mutual respect more than anything that motivates the brothers into staying. Thus, the Muslim extremists are treated as exactly that within the context of the film—extremists who do not represent the majority or even the sizable minority view of the people in the area.

What is evident here is a spiritual strength, and this sort of conviction in the face of everything is admirable. There is no earthly reason for the men to stay at their monastery, and so they stay for no earthly reason but for a divine one. That is smart and powerful filmmaking.

Ultimately, there is a quiet and moving strength here.

Why to watch Des Hommes et des Dieux: Another film that shows the power and value of a spiritual worldview.
Why not to watch: The real-world story behind the film.

The Orestean Trilogy?

2012-01-09T21:29:00.002-06:00

Film: O Thiassos (Travelling Players)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I’ve never really objected to long films. Some of my favorite film experiences from the past couple of years have been films of extreme length--The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Decalogue to name just a couple. What I don’t understand, though, is the evident idea that a film is somehow given more power and more weight and more importance simply because of its length. That is certainly the case with Theo Angelopoulos’s O Thiassos (Travelling Players).

There are three stories at work here, which may account for a little of the length. On the surface, we have the tale of a group of (as the English title suggests) travelling players, a theater troupe wandering around Greece attempting to perform an erotic drama about a woman named Golfo. Frequently, we see the opening scene of the play only to have it interrupted by some event.

Second, O Thiassos is a sort of history of Greece from before World War II, through the war, and into the post-war period of civil strife with the communists, and into the years of Anglo-American intervention. The film does not tell this history in a straight narrative. In fact, it frequently jumps back and forth and sometimes happily mashes two time periods together in the same shot. For instance, we may see German troops standing guard at an installation while a truck drives by, telling people to vote for the man who put down the communist rebels in the late 1940s.

Third, and perhaps most significantly in terms of film narrative and art, O Thiassos serves as a modern retelling of the Orestean cycle of classic Greek plays. Our major characters bear the same names as their classic counterparts, and in good retelling fashion appear to be completely unaware that they are the namesakes of a series of tragedies.

It would seem like that should be more than enough to fill a film of nearly four hours in length. In reality, though, it’s not nearly enough. This film is packed with long takes, frequently with the aftermath of what has just happened appearing on screen for half a minute before moving on. Allegedly, the entire film is made with a mere 80 shots, and based on the length of some scenes involving a static camera, I wouldn’t doubt the veracity of that claim. All of this serves to further slow down a film that is by all accounts dreadfully slow in pace. What this means is that, for instance, when the inevitable rape/interrogation scene happens (because you just knew there was going to be one), we see it at length.

Additionally, the film is very confusing. Part of this may well be the language barrier and the fact that while watching, I am forced to spend at least a part of the time reading the bottom of the screen. However, there are long sequences without speech of any kind, so there’s evidently some natural confusion in the narrative itself. I point to the blending of time periods as being the biggest culprit in this. In fact, I was confused for the first half hour or so of the film, thinking I had perhaps misread something. We see World War II-era German soldiers and hear about the Communist Party in 1949. It wasn’t until this happened a second time that I started to realize what was going on. In a way, it seems sort of unfair to create a film of this length and at this pace that requires a second viewing to truly understand. There are a couple of moments of fourth wall breaking during which a character will approach the camera and speak at length about their past and what has happened. These soliloquies do help, but they don’t quite go far enough.

And really, I don’t think I’ll give it a second viewing. O Thiassos is not a bad film by any stretch, but it is a film that requires a significant commitment to watch. As it is, I have watched it over the course of about a week, half an hour here, a little bit there, until a final marathon at the end to finish it up. That I call how I finished the film a marathon is not merely a pun on the film taking place in Greece. My final push was perhaps two-and-a-half hours give or take. It’s a length of time that wouldn’t phase me for most films, and I’ve watched much longer without a break and without complaint. But it felt like a marathon here, because the film simply never wanted to end.

I’m not sure where cuts should or could be made. It’s sort of in general overweight and bloated. Ultimately, I think I might rather read the Orestean plays again rather than sit through an overlong modernization a second time.

Why to watch O Thiassos: It gives a reason for the benefits of a classical education.
Why not to watch: It’s the length of two movies with the content of one.

Das ist Immer Nach So

2012-01-08T22:08:00.002-06:00

Film: Der Himmel Uber Berlin (Wings of Desire)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Religiously, as I have said once or twice before in the context of this blog, I consider myself an agnostic who, at the very least, has essentially decided that Humanity’s attempts at connecting with the infinite are misguided at best. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I still find particular expressions of religious thought and belief to be very moving and powerful. This is essentially what I expected with my first Wim Wenders film, Der Himmel Uber Berlin (Wings of Desire). What I got was a lot more.

This is a film of staggering power and truly moving beauty. Having said that, it would surprise me not at all if many people find this film difficult or almost unwatchable. I think it requires a particular mindset to truly become immersed in what this film is. The story is most unusual both in what it is and how it is told.

A pair of angels named Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are charged with wandering Berlin and preserve and remember what they see. In essence, they are a sort of impartial recording of the people in and passing through Berlin, not judging or punishing or rewarding, but merely observing. We learn as the film continues that the pair have been here since before there was a Berlin, when it was nothing but grassland. They have been here through the city’s founding, through wars and progress, always observing.

This, observing and listening to the thoughts of the masses of Berlin, makes up a great deal of the film. A few things become evident as we follow the angels—Damiel primarily but not exclusively. We learn that the angels are frequently moved to moments of exultation, for instance. It becomes evident that children are able to see the angels. And the angels evidently have their favorites. Cassiel, for instance, seems to spend a lot of time following an old poet named Homer (Curt Bois), comforting him when he can. Damiel soon becomes enamored of a French trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommartin). Additionally, Peter Falk as himself is in Berlin to work on a film. Damiel spends a great deal of time on the film set observing, and perhaps remembering, since the film concerns World War II.

It’s interesting that Falk, while credited as “Der Filmstar” is really playing himself; he makes mention of his time spent as Columbo, for instance. And so, in a sort of meta moment, it’s not really Peter Falk as himself, but Peter Falk playing Peter Falk, and the difference is all the difference. The distinction is important, because within the context of the film, we discover critically important information about Falk.

The vast majority of the film is shot in gorgeous black-and-white, which represents the point of view of the angels. In the rare moments in which neither Damiel nor Cassiel are present, the film is in color. The distinction is important. Why do the angels see in black-and-white? Because the angels are unable to experience the world, and this is where the real dramatic tension of the film comes from. The angels do not truly understand what it means to experience…anything. They do not truly want or fear or suffer or experience joy. This is true except that there is truly one desire—the desire to experience.

It manifests itself primarily in Damiel, who wants to feel and touch and eat and have pain and know what hot and cold really mean. It becomes an obsession for him when he meets the trapeze artist, and slowly, over the course of the film, the desire becomes something that is inevitable for him. It takes us the first two acts of the film to get there, but eventually, Damiel decides to truly exist and experience the world. And more than this, he intends to find his trapeze artist and cure both her loneliness and his own.

I said it at the start of this, but I will say it again—this is a film of surpassing beauty. It very easily could have become a film of darkness and depression, a film of terrible unspoken desire. Instead, it is a film that revels in existence, a film that expresses nothing so much as the pure joy of being. It is uplifting, and not merely in an emotional sense, but in a spiritual one. It is a movie that, with the right mindset going in, can fill its audience with the pure joy of a weekend morning spent overlong in bed, of a hot bath after a long day, of that first long pull of caffeine before a long day starts. It is films like this that make me come back to magical realism as a genre, because it is films like this one that sometimes make me believe in anything beyond the world we live in. If such spirituality can exist in film, then perhaps there truly is a human spirit after all.

Needless to say, I loved this film. I don’t know if you do or will, but I heartily recommend you give it a try.

Why to watch Der Himmel Uber Berlin: Because even the least spiritual of us is still a spiritual being.
Why not to watch: You don't believe the previous sentence.

Fear, Loathing, and a Pint of Bitters

2012-01-08T00:01:00.003-06:00

Film: Withnail and I
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

The traditional coming of age story happens when someone hits puberty, because that is the time that most of us go through a period of “growing up.” But what happens in cases of arrested development? What happens when we pass through puberty and emerge still a child, still supremely selfish, still mired in our own wants and desires, crippled by addictions and feelings that everyone else gets the things that we want? What happens is Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I.

Our unnamed narrator (“Marwood” according to a telegram, and played by Paul McGann) lives in a dilapidated London flat with his friend Withnail (pronounced “Withnull” and played by Richard Grant). The apartment is reminiscent of the house on Paper Street that eventually houses Tyler Durden in Fight Club. There is garbage everywhere and the kitchen has become an area requiring a hazmat suit to enter. The narrator is perpetually disturbed, constantly irritated, and frequently paranoid. A struggling actor, he and Withnail live from government check to government check, drugging themselves, drinking, looking for theater auditions, and slowly freezing to death because they can’t afford heat.

Withnail, though comes from money, and he decides that he will hit up his flamboyantly gay uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) for the opportunity to use his country cottage. And so the two young men head off for a weekend or so in the country, which turns out to be significantly different than they had hoped. In fact, they end up in essentially the same situation—no heat, no food, and now surrounded by country folk who are evidently not too pleased or willing to help a couple of dandies from the big city. Compound this with the arrival of Monty, who is convinced that the narrator is gay, and you end up with quite a weekend.

What shines through in this film more than anything else is that the overriding mental state of Withnail is one of selfishness and jealousy. Grant plays the part as if Withnail had had a privileged life until very recently. Withnail is rude and demanding, and stops at nothing to get what he wants. He breaks promises continually, lies to get his way, forces the blame for his mistakes and bad behavior onto other shoulders, and generally acts like a spoiled little child who wants a cookie.

How to explain Withnail? Imagine the Bill Murray character from Ghostbusters. Multiply his assholish behavior by ten, add booze, and remove most of the charm. Throw in a disproportionate sense of entitlement. Now you’ve got a start.

For as much as the film seems to focus on the narrator, his various paranoias and problems, and the intense relationships he has, a great deal of the focus is naturally on Withnail. In many ways, Withnail is the central character of the film despite the fact that he never really changes. Withnail is something like a mathematical constant. He is unwaveying in his desire to please himself at any cost. Because of this, because he is a pure constant in the film and serves as a terrific counterpointing to the narrator’s story.

So what we ultimately have here is a coming of age story for someone who should have come of ages years before. And while Withnail dominates much of the narrative, it is evident quickly that this is truly the narrator’s story. While he goes on auditions and has frequent contact with his agent, Withnail complains about auditions he doesn’t get and drinks anything he can find, including lighter fluid at one point. Withnail is consumed by jealousy, by arrogance, and by frustration that he can’t get everything he wants and that no one will recognize his particular genius. And thus he is in many ways like a typical kid going through puberty. He just never left.

This is an interesting film. McGann’s performance is frenetic and filled with paranoia and consuming fear. Grant, on the other hand, appears not to care about anything in the world, causing scenes and getting sloppily drunk at all hours of the day. This too is a fantastic performance.

I like the performances very much in general. I also love the scenery that served as a backdrop for the film. This film is unpleasant, but is so by design.

Why to watch Withnail and I: A very different coming of age story.
Why not to watch: Because you can smell the booze through the screen.

Prison Break

2012-01-06T22:46:00.003-06:00

Film: Un Condamne a Mort S’est Echappe ou le Vent Souffle ou il Veut (A Man Escaped)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

It’s not immediately apparent in Robert Bresson’s Un Condamne a Mort S’est Echappe ou le Vent Souffle ou il Veut (A Man Escaped, literally something like The Condemned has Escaped, or The Wind Blows Where it Will) what the hell is going on. It takes a few minutes to fully understand the situation we are in. We see a man in a car. He’s handcuffed, and he regularly seems to be thinking about trying the door handle. Eventually, he does try the handle and gets away, but is immediately recaptured. Strangely, for a film that appears to be in French based on the titles and the director, the dialogue we hear is in German. Soon, the car arrives at its destination, the man is beaten, and he is thrown into a cell.

We soon discover that the man in question is named Fontaine (Francois Leterrier, who bears a disturbing similarity to D.J. Qualls) and that he has been captured by the Nazis for being a member of the French Resistance. He spends some time in a cell on the second floor of the building, and has some contact with a few men in the courtyard below. He’s able to send a little mail to the outside world, and the men in the courtyard get him a safety pin, which he uses to undo his handcuffs. Fontaine’s only thought is of escape, and the handcuffs are the first step. As it turns out, though, the step is moot; he is eventually moved to the top floor and his handcuffs are taken away anyway.

We learn other things as well. Executions are conducted at the prison regularly, which we learn by the spurts of machinegun fire. Fontaine learns to communicate with other prisoners by tapping on the walls of his cell, something he tries immediately upon being brought to his new cell. He also learns that the door of his new cell is made from weak wood, and with a spoon he keeps from a meal, he starts to loosen the boards to work on his possible escape.

A Man Escaped (I’m sticking with the English title so I don’t have to type the eternal French one again) is a strange combination of bleak despair and continued, eternal hope. While certainly there have been more terrible prisons in cinematic and human history, the prison in which Fontaine spends his days is a vast nothing. While not specifically filled with torture or horror, it is one of the bleakest places in cinematic history. We watch him in this place filled with nothingness painstakingly scraping along the boards of his door, never losing hope. At the very least, he never loses focus. He is aware at all times that he may be discovered in his attempt to escape, and will be punished or killed for trying. And yet he continues, compelled to attempt to get away from the terrible place. It adds to the overall feel of genuine evil of the place that Fontaine spends the entire film in the same shirt, stained with his own blood from the beating at the start of the film.

As much as this film is about the indomitable will of Fontaine and his desire for freedom, it is also very much about trust and the nature of trust. Always on the verge of being caught should a guard find him working on his door, he is forced to depend on his neighbors to assist him in maintaining his quiet work and keeping it secret from his captors. Eventually, he is able to pull out three boards from his door and walk around outside his cell, then get back inside and repaire the look of the door without detection. However, he had never thought beyond that moment of getting out of the cell, and finds himself unsure of where to go next. And so he must trust his other prisoners. Eventually, his ability to trust is put to the true test, when he is given a cellmate who was a member of the German Army.

Fontaine’s relationships with several of the other prisoners are central to the story he goes through and the story being told. Next to him on the top floor is a man named Blanchet (Maurice Beerblock), who attempts to get Fontaine to stop his attempts at escape so that there will be no reprisals against the other inmates. Fontaine attempts to get him to care again. Across the hall is Orsini (Jacques Ertaud), who is also trying to escape. The two men form a sort of bond of mutual suffering, and help each other when they can. Finally, and most importantly, is Francois Jost (Charles le Clainche, who has a rather astounding pompadour), a member of the German Army. Trust, nearly impossible to come by, becomes essential for even Fontaine’s hope of survival.

All of this is relevant to what the film is about, but none of this speaks to the reason the film is important or worth watching. After all, it would be relatively easy to make a bad film about a guy trying to escape from a Nazi prison, and the film that Bresson has made is gripping from open to close. Much of this is because of Bresson’s style. We are frequently in close proximity with Fontaine, frequently seeing only his hands and arms as he works. Watching him dig at his door, unroll wire from his bed frame, and tear sheets and clothing into strips to make rope sounds like it would be terribly dull, but the reality of Fontaine’s situation lends a fascination to these proceedings. This is made all the more real when Fontaine is given a death sentence for his complicity in a planned Resistance bombing.

A Man Escaped is a fascinating study in solitude, trust, and the desire for freedom. I haven’t seen all of Bresson by far, but I’m not sure I’ll find one better than this.

Why to watch Un Condamne a Mort S’est Echappe ou le Vent Souffle ou il Veut: Intense prison drama.
Why not to watch: It's hard to get past the whole D.J. Qualls thing.

Waffle House

2012-01-04T19:17:00.003-06:00

Film: Rosetta
Format: Internet video on laptop.

All children rebel against their parents in one way or another. It’s a part of growing up, I suppose. I rebelled in my own way, as did my siblings, as did my wife. I’m starting to see that here and there with my older daughter, and I’m sure of the knowledge that it will get worse. In the minds of those rebelling, there’s always a reason for doing so. And sometimes, those on the outside looking might well agree with that reason.

Rosetta is a film from the middle of the careers of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who are evidently the Belgian equivalent of the Coens. It focuses on the life of Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), a young woman who wants only to escape the life that she has. She lives with her mother (Anne Yernaux) in a trailer in almost complete poverty. Her mother, an alcoholic who has sex with the other trailer park residents in exchange for booze, is abusive and terrible. All Rosetta wants is to get away from this life any possible way she can.

Her first choice is by finding a job and saving up enough money to get away. But the film opens with her being let go from her factory job because her trial period is over. She sells clothing for extra money, and asks everyone she encounters if they have work for her. She’s so desperate that her reaction when thwarted from the simple goal of employment is violence. Her reaction upon losing the factory job is excessively violent (to the point where she couldn’t conceivably keep the job anyway). She fights physically and verbally with her mother, typically over the drinking and sex. She asks a guy named Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione) at a waffle stand for a job, and when he eventually follows her home, her first inclination is to knock him off his scooter.

As it turns out, he was coming to offer her a job, and despite her violent reaction to his arrival, she gets it. And as with her previous job, Rosetta essentially becomes the job. For her, the job is life because without it, she is left with nothing. There is no room in her life for anything but the job, earning any money she can, and the strange stomach pains she suffers from (never fully explained—possibly an ulcer). Despite Riquet’s obvious interest in her, she has no time for him. She is obsessive about money to the point of leaving lines in the local river to hook fish and doing laundry by hand in a plastic tub.

And that’s essentially the film here. Rosetta is brutal in the world it depicts and brutal in its depiction of that world. Most of the camera work is handheld and from mid-close and closer, providing an uncomfortable intimacy with this story. We aren’t able as the audience to get away from Rosetta, and in fact are rarely more than an arm’s length away from her. Her world becomes the only world we are able to experience in the film. This has the twin purposes of making the story simultaneously compelling and repellent.

In many ways, this is the entire point of the film. The Dardennes have built something here that is almost completely unique. They have created a character in Rosetta with whom it is impossible to have anything but the greatest sympathy, but who it is virtually impossible to like as a person. Rosetta is a product of her terrible, repressive environment and every minute of her life is a struggle to reach the next minute. This leaves her virtually no room for her own humanity or anything like kindness, pleasure, or simple enjoyment. She becomes not a person, but a thing that exists. Rosetta is unlikeable because of her environment and also fascinating because of it. She is predatory and feral, an animal always fearful of being caged or hurt, because everything she has encountered has done one or both of those. This also explains her “violence first” attitude toward everything that isn’t what she immediately needs. At one point, when Riquet falls into the river, she hesitates before saving him. After all, if he drowns, a spot will open up at the waffle stand. This makes her betrayal of him not merely terrible, but inevitable.

Rosetta’s inability to connect with anyone on a human level would be funny if it were not so painful. Invited in to Riquet’s home at one point, her lack of human feeling and connection becomes brutally evident. Riquet is clearly trying to impress her, but she is unable to notice, pay him a compliment, or, at one point, loosen up enough to dance with him. The need to escape her life is so dominant, that she can’t let it alone for a moment.

As with many films of this sort, Rosetta is difficult to watch and difficult to enjoy, but powerful and moving regardless. Our title character lives in a world in which she really has no wants because her needs are so pressing and deep-seated that she cannot get beyond them. On a podcast a few months ago, fellow blogger James Blake Ewing commented that the story of a character unable to change is a tragedy. Rosetta is one such character, and her story is a tragedy—not because she doesn’t change but because she wants nothing but change and can’t achieve it.

This is a difficult film to watch both because of its subject matter and because of the extreme intimacy of the camera, but it’s a worthy watch nonetheless.

Why to watch Rosetta: It’s what Fish Tank should have been.
Why not to watch: The camera offers no distance between audience and an unpleasant subject.

Slaving Away

2012-01-02T22:33:00.002-06:00

Film: Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Baliff)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

It’s a tough world, and we can’t always protect our children from bad things. Movies often include bad things happening to children as a part of the narrative. That makes sense, because it’s a part of life—of any life. I expect that as a matter of course, but as a father myself, it can sometimes be tough to watch little kids placed not in peril, but in terrible circumstances beyond their control. It is an awful thing to see a child destroyed mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. And this is what the first act of Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Baliff) is all about.

Our story concerns a brother and sister pair. Zushio (played as a boy by Masahiko Kato and as an adult by Yashiaki Hanayagi) and Anju (Keiko Enami as a little girl and Kyoko Kagawa in her late teens) are the children of a governor who, because he refused to pay taxes in preference to feeding his servants, is stripped of his title and exiled from his province.

His wife and the two kids follow along after spending six years with her brother. On the way, they hear a rumor that there are bandits and slavers along the route. They spend a night with an old priestess who turns out to be such a slaver. The mother is sold off in slavery to a distant place while the kids are sold as a pair and forced to work under the not-very-tender guidance of the titular character, Sansho (Eitaro Shindo). We learn quickly that Sansho is a cruel man, far more heartless than he needs to be, even for a literal slavedriver. The children are forced to work immediately, and learn their first night that the penalty for attempting to escape is being branded on the forehead. But they also learn a little mercy in the son of Sansho, Taro (Akitake Kono), who gives the children fake names and what little comfort he can. And thus the first act ends.

In the second act, 10 years have passed and the children have grown. Anju has retained her pure and innocent nature, and is kind when she can be. Zushio has given up on his father’s philosophy of kindness and mercy, and has more or less embraced the cruelty inherent in his own existence as a slave. While Anju remembers their past and dreams of reuniting with their parents, Zushio believes it is better to keep his head down, do anything he is told no matter how repugnant, and stay on Sansho’s good side. Anju’s hope is rekindled when a new slave begins singing a song that includes both of their names, a song that could only have been written by their mother.

Finally given a real opportunity to escape, Anju sacrifices herself both figuratively and literally for the betterment of Zushio, who finds himself not only freed, but quickly risen to a position of power. And this is where the third act plays out.

Ultimately, this film is about both the hope and resolve in the person of Anju as well as the redemption of Zushio, a redemption that begins in the second act. The pair are asked to cart a dying slave out to the wilderness to let her die. Zushio decides to escape, and Anju sacrifices herself. Freed temporarily with the chance to run away, Zushio takes the slave woman with him rather than leave her to die. In many ways, her fate is unimportant. By tying her to his own escape and freedom, he has begun remembering the lessons of his father.

That, more than anything is the story that Mizoguchi wants to tell here, and tell it he does. The film is plainly made and the story plainly told with very little frill and nothing unnecessary. It is a case of a film being all the better for being shot in beautifully vibrant black-and-white. Beautifully defined trees, their leaves standing out against a foggy backdrop, faces twisted in cruelty and emotional distress, the placid lake where Anju meets her end…these are not scenes that would be measurably enhanced by being in color. Mizoguchi is also a master of framing, with people perfectly situated between both natural and artificial frames throughout the film, drawing attention to precisely where he wants it. Like many other Japanese directors I have experienced, Mizoguchi’s work is a textbook example of basic filmmaking techniques.

But, of course, it is the story that makes all of the difference here. The film may well be worth watching as a film student for its brilliant cinematography and camera work, but it’s the story that makes the watching worthwhile.

There is a cyclical nature to the film that is both in keeping with a philosophy that embraces rebirth and very satisfying to the viewer. Zushio starts as the son of a noble, becomes a slave, and ends in a position of power. Taro, unable to deal with his father’s cruelty, protects the children as best he can and leaves. Ultimately, when Zushio flees, it is to a monastery where Taro is now in charge. People continually come back and meet again; only the size of the circle they make on the trip is different.

Sansho Dayu is a worthy film for the student, but equally worthwhile for someone who wants a movie that will provoke a little thought. If it suffers from anything, it suffers from the same illness that many Japanese period pieces do—there is a touch of the Kabuki here, and there’s a good deal of overacting. It doesn’t trouble me, but it will others.

Why to watch Sansho Dayu: A combination of tragedy and human virtue.
Why not to watch: Kabuki-style overacting.

John Garfield

2012-01-01T23:28:00.003-06:00

Films: The Postman Always Rings Twice; Force of Evil
Format: DVD from Fountaindale Library through interlibrary loan on kick-ass portable DVD player (Postman); VHS from Genoa Public Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television (Force).

I love film noir. I know that the purist says that noir is a style and not a genre, but I don’t really care. I consider it to essentially be its own genre of film. Noirs have their own feel, their own pace, their own specific pattern that makes the irresistible to me. A mediocre noir is better than a lot of other films, and a great noir will make me happy for days. So it’s a genuine pleasure to find a couple that measure up.

I’d heard of The Postman Always Rings Twice mostly because I remember when it was remade. I haven’t seen that remake, but I remember a lot of buzz around it because of how steamy it was supposed to be. And the name is pretty memorable. The name, for me, creates a lot of possible mental pictures, a sense of foreboding and possible dread, of a crime committed and remaining unpunished. Interestingly enough, the title is actually a real stretch, and fits only because of a speech at the end of the film. Having seen the original, I can probably think of a half a dozen better titles. What initially got me interested turned out to be really the weakest link of the film.

Anyway, we have a drifter named Frank Chambers (John Garfield), who shows up at a roadside diner thanks to a ride from the man who happens to be the local district attorney (Leon Ames). As it turns out, the diner is looking for help, signified by the sign “Man wanted” out front, a sign that is a nice bit of foreshadowing. The diner is run by Nick (Cecil Kellaway), a plump, jovial guy who likes a bit of a drink now and then. What Frank didn’t see coming is that nice guy Nick has a bombshell of a wife in Cora (Lana Turner).

Naturally enough, Frank and Cora fall for each other and fall hard. They plan on running away together, but, in typical femme fatale fashion, Cora has second thoughts. She doesn’t want to be a nobody, drifting from place to place. She wants the eatery. She wants to turn it into something real, and she wants Frank with her. To do that, they need to get rid of Nick. So they hatch a plan.

And it goes south. The plan is to electrocute Nick in the bathtub and have the both of them with an alibi, but a cat fouls up the works by stepping on an open wire and frying the electricity first. Nick is injured, but Frank convinces Cora that if he dies, they’re sunk, so his life is saved. Plan two goes into effect—the pair plan to get Nick sloppy drunk and then fake a car accident. This time, it works. Unfortunately, the D.A. was onto them the whole time, and books them both for murder, then convinces Frank to swear out a complaint against Cora since he was badly injured in the wreck.

Enter the lawyer, Arthur Keats (Hume Cronyn). Smarmy and crooked, but smart enough to stay ahead of the law, he manages to get the pair off, but also leaves them in the unfortunate position of being prime targets for blackmail. Add in the fact that Frank gets itchy feet and an itchy zipper, and now the two are shackled together and unable to trust each other or anyone else, leading to the inevitable film noir climax.

Bluntly, this film is great. Really, really great. The performances are magnificent throughout, with not a single one missing a single beat. Kellaway plays Nick as a man satisfied with his own decisions, and not quite caring enough if anyone else agrees with what he does. Cora is cold and deceitful except for those moments when she is inflamed with desire. And Frank is a little too clever and a little too lazy for his own good. It is Garfield who truly carries the film despite Turner’s top billing. But much could also be said for the nuanced and evil performance of Hume Cronyn as the just-crooked-enough lawyer.

What I really like about this film, though, is the way the characters work. Often in a film noir, the main characters are career criminals, people who are looking for one last score or one big heist to see them through. Here, the characters are merely people caught up by their circumstances. None of them, certainly not Frank or Cora, are blameless or truly good people. But, at the same time, none of them are truly evil or terrible. They’re merely affected and afflicted by their own whims, and unable to act against their own desires.

This is a smart film, and one that I’m happy to have seen. This is one I will want to watch again.

By pure coincidence, the other film noir I got through interlibrary loan last week also happens to star John Garfield. And in this one, his character couldn’t be more different. In this film, he plays Joe Morse, a crooked lawyer working for the syndicates. He and his boss, Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts) have hatched an interesting scheme. Throughout their city, people play the numbers, which is illegal. Their plan is to convince the city to make the numbers a legal lottery.

At the same time, they’ve rigged things to destroy the independent, criminal “banks” that run the numbers. How? Well, as it turns out, on the 4th of July, everyone plays “776” as a sort of patriotic good luck charm. So Morse and Tucker have arranged for the number to hit, which will bankrupt all of the banks. Unfortunately for Morse, his brother Leo (Thomas Gomez) runs a small bank, and will be destroyed when he is bankrupted.

The two of them have a difficult relationship. Leo sacrificed everything for his younger brother, and Joe hasn’t done much for Leo to benefit. And so in a bid to make amends, Joe arranges for Leo to be in charge of the new bank that will take over when Ben Tucker moves in and controls all of the numbers action in the city. He does this by pleading, coercion, and by forcing the police to raid his brother’s bank. He also makes time with Leo’s former secretary, Doris (Beatrice Pearson) and avoids advances from Ben Tucker’s exotic wife Edna (Marie Windsor).

As I said earlier, Garfield’s character couldn’t be more different in this film. Where in Postman he fought against his baser urges unsuccessfully, in this film, he jumps into his vices with both feet, trumpeting that he is a bad man not subject to fits of morality or conscience. His voiceover narration, in fact, makes it plain that we wants to win over Doris not by pretending to be an innocent adrift in a vicious world, but as a willing shark snapping at smaller prey. And he does this with a predatory joy that is truly wonderful to watch.

Of course, since this if film noir, everything goes to hell in a handbasket by the end. The guilty, and some of the innocent, are punished by the time the final scene plays out. That’s expected—that’s the entire point of a film noir, after all. Seeing the bad guys get their comeuppance, even those we have come to like or sympathize with—is where the catharsis in these films comes in. Crime, in film noir, never pays, regardless of the reason or the intent.

It is very much to my detriment that I had not really heard of John Garfield before tonight. I’ll put this plainly—the man could act. Two reasons have kept him from being rightfully regarded as one of the true giants of the days of classic Hollywood. First, his career was significantly affected by HUAC despite his not being a communist. Second, tragically, he died at 39.

As it turns out, these are Garfield’s only two films on The List. But this is a guy who I will seek out from this point forward. You should do the same. You won’t be disappointed.

Why to watch The Postman Always Rings Twice: It may be the purest noir ever made.
Why not to watch: That title is quite a stretch.

Why to watch Force of Evil: John Garfield is the man.
Why not to watch: It’s too short.

End of Year Two

2011-12-31T20:07:00.003-06:00

So I've decided against a final film review or two for the year.

I put up 290 reviews from the list this year, which tops last year's total by 18, or 1.5 films per month. Not bad. I also broke the halfway point and have pushed further past. Since I'm assuming another dozen films will be added in 2012, it's good to be ahead of the game. I currently stand at 562 films reviewed, 527 to go.

It's been a noteworthy year. I joined the Large Association of Movie Blogs late last year, and that has ticked up my traffic a bit. What's really helped in terms of traffic, though, is podcasting. I caught the bug with a spot on the LAMBcast in July and have been hooked since. You can find me regularly once per month on the Movie of the Month LAMBcasts.

But that's only a small part of the podcasting story, of course. I've been welcomed by Nick Jobe of Random Ramblings of a Demented Doorknob to be a part of The Demented Podcast. It's been fun. Hectic sometimes, especially when some guests give me grief about my movie picks (Kai). But fun. I'm looking forward to the next season, which starts for me in about a week, and for you listeners in about two. Also coming very soon is my debut on Nick's vlog, which will start soon and can be found on his site.

So what's ahead? More films, of course. I've managed to get through most of the really long stuff, but there are still a bunch of films that are, bluntly, a bitch to find. I've got some work ahead of me on that front. My goal, stated now, is 25 films from the list per month, which will put me at 300 on the year.

It's been fun so far, and it's still fun. I think that's a good sign.

Better things ahead, faithful reader. Here's to the year that was and the year that will be.

The Sparrow and the Rose

2011-12-30T23:48:00.002-06:00

Film: La Vie en Rose
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Sometimes, an actor’s performance is greater than the movie. A recent example is Tom Hardy in the film Bronson. That film is pretty much a 90-minute waste of time, a compilation of violent scenes, frontal male nudity and profanity. But Tom Hardy’s performance is so good and so memorable that despite the relative failure of the film, it is mesmerizing to watch. Such is the case with Marion Cotillard’s performance in La Vie en Rose. This is actually saying quite a bit, because the film is pretty good.

It’s worth mentioning here that every film geek I know and most film bloggers I know have a massive crush on Marion Cotillard. I suspect this is more from her role in Inception, but I also suspect that the more adventurous of them fell for her here. This is the very definition of a star-making performance.

The problem with any biopic is that the only way to make a good biopic is to make a film of a life filled with tragedy, and the life of Edith Piaf (Cotillard) had enough tragedy for multiple biopics. Abandoned by her parents, forced to live in a brothel as a child, dragged along in a circus, then forced to perform on the street, Piaf’s early life was struggle and poverty and hunger. Her first real mentor, Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu) was killed in a gang shooting, and many blamed Piaf for introducing him to the criminal element.

And then comes success, affairs, drugs, and the eventual dissolution caused by the same. As the film flashes back in time and forward to the point of her death, she has aged a full lifetime. Dead a few months before her 48th birthday, she looks nearly twice her age.

Piaf’s tragedy is that everything she touched was destroyed. The love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins) gives her joy and infuses her singing, but he is killed in a plane crash, destroying her world, even moreso because he was flying to see her at her request. No happiness for her lasts long, and always ends as tragically as possible. As such things go, both her temporary happiness and her continual tragedy infuse her singing with greater passion.

If I have a major complaint about this film, and I do, it’s that the non-linear style of the film is very difficult to follow. I don’t mind non-linear stories. I had no trouble following Memento, for instance. But there was something about this film that made this narrative style far less effective than a straight narration would have been. The constant flash-forwards to the decrepit, broken version of Piaf didn’t so much create a greater sense of tragedy, but a sense of inevitability. In other words, seeing her life progress from tragedy to tragedy would have made a certain sense. Skipping from tragedy to tragedy served only to muddle the story.

Still, it’s impossible to dislike this film entirely, and I did not dislike it. There’s simply too much here that is good. Some scenes, like Piaf’s true breakout performance, are truly brilliant. Instead of having us listen to her sing (which honestly wouldn’t have been too terrible), we instead see her perform and see the reaction of the crowd while music plays over the scene. It is surprisingly beautiful.

But really, as I’ve said earlier, the reason to watch this film starts and ends with the performance of Marion Cotillard. She plays Piaf in her early career as a kid out of her depth, self-conscious and shy, eyes huge and filled with both a quiet terror and desire. She plays Piaf in her heyday is out of control, desiring the acclaim of everyone and afflicted with a terrible need to perform and entertain. And she plays Piaf at the end of her life as something completely broken but compelled to ignore her own physical, mental, and emotional debilitation.

More than anything, there is throughout the evidence of passion. First, there is the passion of Cotillard for the role of Edith Piaf. Second, and just as important, are the twin passions of Piaf—her pursuit of her art and her own personal destruction. It helps tremendously to have Piaf herself performing the soundtrack. While I have no doubt that Cotillard can sing, very few people can sing like Edith Piaf did. I can’t admit to being a huge fan of Edith Piaf, but I recognize her particular genius and her incredible talent. The film would not be the same without her performances carrying the performances on the screen.

This is a film to see. It’s not a film to love, but it’s unquestionably a film to watch.

Why to watch La Vie en Rose: Marion Cotillard.
Why not to watch: What Edith Piaf turns into.

Unreviewable

2011-12-29T23:03:00.003-06:00

Film: Eraserhead
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

So I’ve finally watched Eraserhead.

I’m not going to try to sum this film up or even explain it. David Lynch has gone on record as saying that all of the interpretations from critics and film viewers are wrong anyway. While that makes it tempting to try to find an explanation (and thus be the one person who actually understands the ferrets running around in Lynch’s head), I’m not nearly that smart or that brave. I’ll come right out and say it—I don’t get it. I have no damn idea what this film is about or supposed to be about or what its underlying meaning is. It is, essentially, a nightmare vision of a bleak and horrible world experienced by people buried in their own existential horror and paranoia. Oh, well, I guess that I did try to assign it a meaning after all.

Regardless, I’m not sure that Eraserhead can actually be reviewed as a film. Instead, I’d love to sit down with an art critic and have them review it, because I think that’s how it needs to be viewed. This is not a movie, despite the fact that there is some sort of narrative going on here. There is, at least, a progression of events even if I don’t understand what most of those events are or mean. The film essentially becomes its own environment, the industrial landscape, the bleak apartment of Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), the world that seems devoid of life aside from the people who shuffle through it. The constant white noise is a big part of this—the noise of the machinery in this nightmare city is inescapable, and thus becomes a part of that environment that the film creates.

And it is a nightmare. The people in this film are all horribly broken, or perhaps put together wrong from the beginning. Henry’s girlfriend/wife Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) has frequent unexplainable fits. Her mother (Jeanne Bates) is both accusatory to Henry and attempts to (I think) seduce him at one point. The (and yes, this is the name of the character listed) Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Roberts) appears to be the only person who isn’t physically malformed in some way, but she seems to exhibit a kind of spiritual or emotional deformity.

So let’s talk about some of the weird shit here, and no, I don’t mean “the entire fucking movie.” First, we have The Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near in her only film role). She is one of the most disturbing visions in the film, with her bizarrely distended cheeks. At times, her cheeks look like the obvious prosthetics they are. At other times, the lumpy, cottage cheese-y facial structures are so disturbing that it doesn’t matter that they are obviously fake. Like virtually everything else in this film, she is nightmarish because of that physical deformity, and because it seems so at odds with the song she sings. But then again, she spends some of her time squishing things noisily, and then looking up for acceptance.

And then there’s the baby. Holy shit, the baby. The baby looks like the head of a cow fetus stuck onto a gigantic cocoon. And the thing moves, and breathes, and cries, and makes noise. I have no idea what the hell it is or how Lynch created it. But it’s horrifying.

I should also throw out a nod to Jack Nance’s hair, which really deserves its own line in the credits.

For all of this, and the fact that I finished the film with a whanging headache thanks to the constant white noise, I didn’t hate this film. I can’t say that I enjoyed watching it—I’m not sure it’s possible to actually enjoy watching Eraserhead, but I didn’t recoil from it or turn away. I had been nervous to watch this film mostly based on what I had heard about it. People made of sterner stuff than I have told me that it’s one of the only films that has truly frightened them. But I was not repelled.

I wouldn’t elect to watch Eraserhead again anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to explore it again some time and try to tease out something more from it. Nothing more than that can I say.

Why to watch Eraserhead: It’s a surreal vision.
Why not to watch: That vision is of a nightmare.

Far East Side Story

2011-12-29T00:06:00.001-06:00

Film: Guling Jie Shaonian Sha Ren Shijian (A Brighter Summer Day)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

When I have time off work, as I do right now, it makes sense for me to seek out some of the really long, subtitled films that I still need to watch. And thus I spent four hours getting through (and yes, I mean it that way) Guling Jie Shaonian Sha Ren Shijian (A Brighter Summer Day). Watch me sum this film up in one sentence (thanks, Nick’s vlog): This film is West Side Story set in Taiwan and with less singing.

No, really.

In the early 60s, a massive influx of Mainland Chinese to Taiwan created a country that had something of an identity crisis. Specifically, a lot of the youth felt lost and displaced, and so a number of them formed or joined gangs for a sense of community and identity as well as personal protection. This film deals with a couple of these gangs; we may as well call them the Sharks and the Jets for all it really matters. They don’t like each other. They squabble.

Then one of them starts dating a girl who lives in the other neighborhood. He gets pushed around a lot. Things get serious. He pushes one of the other guys in front of a truck and continues to date the girl he likes. Eventually (and yes, this is a spoiler. I’m saving you four hours of your life here) he realizes that she will never change and will always sort of be the female equivalent of a player. So he stabs her and she dies and he goes to prison.

Oh, and there’s a lot of singing. A couple of the kids translate American pop records phonetically and sing them. One of them has an ear-piercingly high voice and tends to sing the women’s parts on many of the songs.

Yes, really. That’s pretty much it.

I know this sounds like I’m giving this film short shrift, and I really am. But, in my defense, this was a tough watch. The version I could find (internet video is always my last choice, but is sometimes the only choice) was relatively grainy, making many of the principle cast difficult to distinguish. Additionally, many of the subtitles could not be read—it’s that white text on a white background problem all over again. So, for large chunks of the film, I had to intuit what was happening as best I could.

Furthermore, most of the characters went by their nicknames, which meant that I was dealing with characters named Airplane, Underpants, Shit, Prick, Tiger, Cat, Honey, Deuce, and Sly.

Edward Yang’s style is to tell the story impersonally, which works as well as it could given the circumstances. The film is almost completely devoid of close-ups, opting instead for mid- and long shots. This gives us a sense of the characters in their environment without allowing for too much emotional involvement with them. It’s actually pretty effective for what it’s trying to do. Or, at least it would be effective if I gave a flying rat’s butt about anything going on here.

Evidently, this was based on a true story. The murder in question was the first juvenile crime of real seriousness in the new regime, which meant a lot of press and a lot of scrutiny. In the real world, the perpetrator was given the death penalty, but eventually released from prison. We can assume that the same thing happened in this film, too. I guess.

Well, they can’t all be home runs, can they?

Why to watch Guling Jie Shaonian Sha Ren Shijian: You like little boys with high singing voices.
Why not to watch: You can think of anything else to do with four hours of your time.

Stripped Gears

2011-12-27T23:47:00.002-06:00

Film: Hugo
Format: The Glen Theater.

Martin Scorsese loves movies. I don’t mean that he’s into them as a director and thus has a deep respect for them. I mean that Martin Scorsese is a movie geek as much or more than anyone who keeps a movie blog. If Scorsese were not a director of film, he’d be a critic, or a teacher, or a faceless blogger dutifully worshipping at the altar of cinema like so many of the rest of us. It’s one of the reasons that Scorsese movies tend to be well reviewed; he knows what movie geeks want to see, and makes references to things that movie geeks will get.

So Hugo comes as no surprise. While some maybe prone to calling this a love letter to film, it is not; it is, in fact, an explicit missive to film. It is passionate and romantic, and at least tries to be dangerous. And it succeeds at times. And the rest of the time, it is little more than a pretty picture book without a ton of substance. It’s a fluffy pastry of a film, delicious going down, but ultimately not that filling, and prone to giving the person who ingests it a touch of indigestion.

Anyway, we have a young boy named Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), who lives inside the walls at the train station in Paris (the station that is now the Musee D’Orsay, if memory serves). Hugo’s father (Jude Law) was a clockmaker killed in a fire. His uncle tended the clocks at the train station and took Hugo on when the father died, and then essentially abandoned the boy. So Hugo lives on, tending the clocks and scavenging food, ever watchful of the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), who loves nothing more than turning orphans in to the police.

Hugo has a secret. He is the possessor of an automaton that he is trying to fix. To do so, he steals parts from a toymaker located inside the train station. The toymaker (Ben Kingsley) catches Hugo one day, and takes the boy’s notebook. He has a strange and terrible reaction to the intricate drawings in the book, and threatens to burn it, causing a great deal of strife to Hugo. We are also introduced to the toymaker’s goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who is disturbingly precocious. She takes an immediate shine to Hugo, because there is great mystery around the boy, and she is attracted to this.

From here, the film is essentially a series of Dickensian coincidences. Isabelle’s godfather is connected to Hugo and to the automaton, and to virtually everyone else in the city of Paris by the end of the movie. And there is joy and redemption had by all by the time the curtain closes.

It’s a pretty film. I won’t fault it there. It is a truly extraordinary thing to look at on the screen. Many times, the shots look like paintings, and Scorsese is an old enough hand now that moving his camera perfectly is a matter of due course and a lot of planning. The close-up shots are radiant and beautiful, and used perfectly. I can find no fault here.

Sadly, I can find fault elsewhere. Let’s start with the running time. Hugo clocks in at a touch over two hours, but it feels like 150 minutes. This is in no small part because of the ending, which goes on and on. The film appears to end multiple times, with each ending simply summing up and resolving on of the major plot points one at a time.

However, all of this can be forgiven. So too can the fairly wooden performances. This will catch me hell from those more prone to buying the hype. But that can also be forgiven. What can’t is the fact that for a film that has all of the earmarks of a story swimming in magic and childlike wonder and magical realism,Hugo never strays far from bare, coincidence-laden reality. There are moments of magical realism here and there—the floating images from the toymaker’s trunk, for instance—but they never really go anywhere. I should have been almost overwhelmed by a sort of steampunk fantasy, but was instead placed in a world that was intricate, but nonetheless mundane.

Beyond this, there is a sense that Scorsese’s love letter to film is both too obscure and too constant for anyone but the biggest of film nerd to truly find captivating. We’re given glimpses into the world of silent films as the kids pour over a book on early film history. We see a dazzling display of clips from La Voyage Dans la Lune and a dozen others. I recognized Pandora’s Box, The Great Train Robbery, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Intolerance, The General and a few others. But anyone who is a big enough geek to spot these films would also be geek enough to know that the film that is so central to the narrative--La Voyage Dans la Lune predates almost all of these films, but is somehow encountered last in the book the kids read.

I appreciate what Scorsese is doing here. But in that theater today, I was probably the only one who had seen many of those films referenced. And based on the reaction afterwards of my extended family (we took up two rows of seats), not a single person in my group had the intention of seeking those films out, or was aware that many of them (especially La Voyage) could be found online.

Hugo tries hard to be sweet, but is ultimately misguided. So much time is spent on minor characters—a pseudo love story between railroad station regulars Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths—that the main thrust of the story gets bogged down.

Don’t get me wrong; this film will get some love come Oscar time, and people will sing its praises. But many who sing its praises won’t really know why, and many of them will do so for the wrong reasons.

Why to watch Hugo: Because it’s Scorsese.
Why not to watch: For a film that should be warm and inviting, it’s a bit cold and unwelcoming.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

2011-12-26T23:23:00.001-06:00

Film: Lawrence of Arabia
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

Epic films seem to come and go in waves. Every now and then, someone makes a great long film, and suddenly that’s what everyone wants to make. For a few years, all of the great films are three hours long or more, and a lot of the shitty ones are that long, too. At least until someone makes a tightly paced and controlled film of 90 minutes to show that it can still be done. Nobody did epic like David Lean did, though. While not all of his films are eternal in length, most of his great ones are. None is so great or so long as Lawrence of Arabia.

We start at the end of T.E. Lawrence’s life in a motorcycle accident. At his funeral, it appears that opinion on the man is rather mixed. Many consider him a great man and a hero while others are of the opinion that he was little more than a self-aggrandizing show off. The bulk of the film is the most important sequence of Lawrence’s life, which goes to essentially prove both that Lawrence was a great man and a supreme egotist.

Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) is a member of the British military during World War I, stationed in Cairo. Rather than fighting against the Germans, he is stuck essentially nursemaiding some British allies. He is transferred to Arabia to better understand the Arabian problem from the British perspective. The Arabian tribes are battling the Turks, and have only mobility on their side. The Turks have efficient and modern weapons including artillery and aircraft, which makes the life of the Turks difficult.

Lawrence learns of the harshness of the environment, both physical and political, first hand when his initial guide is killed by Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) for drinking from a well that wasn’t his. The Arabs are at this point in history a splintered people, a collection of tribes who have at best uneasy alliances with each other, and at worst practice open war. Tribesman kills tribesman for water rights, leaving the entire population essentially at the mercy of the Turks.

Lawrence sees this as the biggest problem that the Arabs face. He sets about uniting them as best he can, winning over Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness) and using this influence to unite Sherif Ali with Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn). Lawrence leads men across the most severe and terrible desert so that his men can take the fortress town of Akaba from the land, claiming the guns there as well as the port.

And this, essentially, is the bulk of the film. Lawrence attempts to lead the Arabic people to unity and freedom, simultaneously battling the British interests in the region. His preference is for a free Arabia, a new power in the Middle East acting as a true nation of united people instead of a collection of warring tribes. In many cases, he feels he must bring this about against the will of everyone, including many of the Arab tribes.

There are a number of noteworthy things in this film. On the positive side is the incredible cinematography. This is a film that needs to be watched on a large screen, the larger the better. Much of what Lean wants to accomplish with this film is to show the severity of the landscape, so this is quite a bit of what we see. There are incredible long shots of the desert, often with a single distant rider slowly approaching. It would be easy for these shots to be boring, but they are not. Instead, they are starkly beautiful, even thrilling at times. Lean contrasts these long shots with intense close-ups of his principle actors. There’s a great juxtaposition of images here. The intensity of the interpersonal conflicts matches the intensity of the world in which these characters live.

Where I take issue with the film is in the casting. It’s nearly impossible to get too terribly upset about the actors in this film because they are all excellent, but it seems that the racism of the period has managed to filter into this film as well. Omar Sharif at least is of Arabic descent, but none of the other major Arab characters are. Guinness is pure British and Anthony Quinn is Irish-Mexican. And yet here they are playing Arab tribesmen. I find that difficult to stomach on some level.

While all of the major performances are great, it is O’Toole who makes the film, though. He plays Lawrence with true conviction. He is entirely believable as Lawrence because he believes himself to be Lawrence, and so we believe it, too.

Lawrence of Arabia is not a film to watch lightly. With the fill musical sections included, the film runs close to four hours long, making it a significant undertaking. This is not to discourage anyone from sitting down and taking this film in. It is a brilliant film from start to finish and entirely engaging. If nothing else, it is a brilliant example of a story in which the hero gets everything he desires and nothing at all at the same time. Lawrence is ultimately a tragic figure, but tragic through the faults of others and not his own.

Just make a lot of popcorn for this one, and plan your bathroom breaks carefully. You’ll need them.

Why to watch Lawrence of Arabia: Epic filmmaking at its greatest and most epic.
Why not to watch: I still don’t understand the casting.

A Nod to the 1%

2011-12-25T20:01:00.006-06:00

As I did last year, I'm going to nominate some films that should be on The List but that have been somehow overlooked. While I may well dip into personal favorite territory here, I'm going to try to stick with truly great films--films that are objectively great or important, or worth watching for a significant reason.

I will limit myself to 10 films, or roughly 1% of a given volume. I don't want to get greedy. As I did last year, I kept a running list of films that are strangely absent, and have decided on 10 that I think should make it on somehow. The following films are presented in no order, other than the order in which they came to me.

10 movies that should be added to the 1001 Movies list

1. Inherit the Wind: A great adaptation of what has proven to be an important piece of trial precedent in American history. This is a film that is still extremely relevant, and features great performances by all of the principle players. Run out and see this if you haven't already.

2. Roxanne: No film better proves that romantic comedies can be both truly romantic and truly funny. A stellar performance from Steve Martin helps sell it, and basing the tale on Cyrano de Bergerac seals the deal.

3. Stop Making Sense: The quintessential post-modern concert film. David Byrne in all his weird glory, a special appearance from The Tom Tom Club, and some funky-ass music.

4. Office Space: This film resonates with anyone who has ever worked a thankless, meaningless, mundane job. Or anyone who has worked in food service. Or anyone with a terrible boss. In other words, pretty much anyone older than 18. Oh, and it's drop-dead funny.

5. Kung Fu Hustle: Stephen Chow's best film is also his most accessible, his most entertaining, and his most frenetic. It's like Bugs Bunny snorted Vincent Vega.

6. Any film from the Harry Potter franchise: The Potterphiles can fight and argue about which one is the best, and I'd be happy to suggest Deadly Hallows parts 1 and 2 included as a single film. There are few cultural touchstones in the modern world as important as Harry Potter. That should be enough, but the film series deserves some love on its own merits.

7. The Nightmare Before Christmas: The only knock against this film is determining whether it's a Halloween film or a Christmas film. It's sort of both. It's also charming and fun, and just a touch scary for the little ones.

8. The Fugitive: If there's ever been an argument that television shows could successfully translate to the big screen, it's this rollicking action/suspense film. It's a great role for Harrison Ford and a break-out role for Tommy Lee Jones. Plus, the story is fantastic, and the camaraderie of the U.S. Marshals is surprisingly entertaining.

9. The Warriors: Somewhere between West Side Story and Boyz N the Hood came this nightmare, psychedelic vision of street gang life in New York City. Loosely based on an ancient Greek tale, the story of young criminals trying to get home when the entire city wants them dead is fun, has some great action sequences, and some of the most easily identifiable moments of the last 50 years.

10. Anything from William Castle: Castle was the master of goofy promotions, having moviegoers sign waivers against death from fright, for instance. One of his camp horror classics should be here, because there was no one quite like Castle. I'd go with The House on Haunted Hill, but the original 13 Ghosts or The Tingler would work, too.

And would you believe I've still got half a dozen for next year?

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out!

2011-12-24T23:41:00.005-06:00

Films: It’s a Wonderful Life; A Christmas Story
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television

Y’know what? I’m not going to talk much about the plots of either of these films. I’m just going to talk about how much I love them and why you should love them. If you haven’t seen either of these movies, you should stop reading this and go watch them. Now. I’ll still be here when you’re done.

So, It’s a Wonderful Life is the story of George Bailey (James Stewart) and his small town of Bedford Falls. For the bulk of the film, we discover that George Bailey’s life is all about giving of himself to others and making everyone around him happy while getting nothing that he really wants for himself. And then it all goes to hell because of Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) can barely remember to keep his pants zipped, let alone what he’s done with $8,000. And naturally there is the evil, twisted Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) there to oversee the rapid demise of Bailey.

All in all, this should be a tragic and depressing film except for the intercession of wingless angel Clarence (Henry Travers) who comes to put George right and show him the true meaning and value of his life. The world without George Bailey, or at least the world of Potterville (nee Bedford Falls) is a gray and terrible place. There’s no Harry Bailey (Todd Karns), no houses for the masses of townspeople, George’s wife Mary (Donna Reed) turns into a spinster librarian (which is an unfortunate slam on librarians, dammit). And so we learn that George’s life is actually pretty good, despite the fact that he may end up in jail after all. But, this is a Capra film, so that’s not going to happen.

It’s a sweet movie. It still, 60+ years after its creation, manages to pull all the right strings, and no matter how many times I have seen it (and that number is pretty high), it still works exactly the same way every time. Every single time, I fall for it. It’s sappy and silly, and filled to the brim with saccharine sentimentality, and it never fails to entertain me or make me feel good. In many ways, it’s not really Christmas until I see this film.

What I like very much here, aside from the great performances all around, is that George Bailey is depicted as a real person. Sure, he’s a good guy. He’s the sort of guy we’d all like to know, and the sort of person we tell ourselves that we are, even when we know we’re not. But in the second hour of the film, George shows a real darkness that is necessary to the film. His world, the only world he has had and the world that he has spent his entire life trying to maintain, is suddenly shattered, and the wheels come off quickly and hard.

I like that. It doesn’t mean anything if George’s problems are cute or silly, or don’t have real consequences. He needs this dark midnight of the soul to bring him through to the other side.

And yes, like a sap, I go right along with him every time.

The basic story of It’s a Wonderful Life has been done and redone, imagined and reimagined time and time again, much like A Christmas Carol. There’s no need for this. The original film is still as good a holiday movie as you could ever hope to encounter. James Stewart is a great everyman because he seems so natural in that role. That, more than anything, sells the film. If we can’t relate to George Bailey, if we don’t sympathize with him completely and feel for the problems he is having and truly understand them, we don’t for a second buy into the film.

There are people who don’t like this movie. I feel badly for them. It must be difficult to walk through life emotionally petrified.

A Christmas Story takes place in essentially the same era as It’s a Wonderful Life, but the perspective is entirely different. This time, the film comes from the point of view of Ralphie (Peter Billingsly), who wants nothing more in the world than an official Red Ryder 200-shot carbine action range model air rifle. Unfortunately, standing in his way is his mother, his teacher, and even the Santa Claus at Higbee’s Department Store, all of whom tell him that he’ll shoot his eye out.

While this is the throughline of the film, in reality, A Christmas Story is really about being a kid at Christmas, about wanting something so desperately, as only a kid can want something. It’s about mom and dad being mom and dad, about memories and little brothers, and bullies, and getting in trouble. It’s about all of that, and a hell of a lot more.

The Christmas that is at the center of this film is arguably the most magical Hollywood Christmas in history. There’s no real magic, of course, but there is an incredible confluence of events leading up to the holiday that makes it incredibly memorable. It seems that every day brings something new, and for us, the viewers, that something new is almost always hysterical.

The film is aided greatly by a tremendous performance from Darren McGavin as Ralphie’s father. His performance is broadly comic and constantly entertaining. He’s long suffering, angry, and funny as hell. Equally long suffering is Melinda Dillon as the mother, who deals with everything the Old Man does, and still never gets to eat a hot meal.

Y’know what? Enough. A Christmas Story doesn’t need to have a plot, and it doesn’t really have much of one. It doesn’t matter. Who cares? This film is funny. It’s really funny. Every time I watch this film, I think throughout it that each scene is my favorite, only to forget what hasn’t happened yet. Just watching it tonight, I forgot, for instance, that the scene in which Ralphie and his brother Randy visit Santa comes really late in the film, and the fight against school bully Scut Farkas (Zack Ward) actually comes relatively early, or at least not at the end as I always remember it.

I love this film. It makes me happy. If it doesn’t make you happy, I feel bad for you. As with It’s a Wonderful Life, I’m sure there are people who don’t like this film, but I don’t want to spend any time talking to them. That, and I don’t know a single one of them.

So, go out and win yourself a major award. Stick your tongue to a flagpole. Sit on Santa’s lap and ask for a football. Write a theme about a bb gun with a compass in the stock and a thing that tells time. Get Chinese turkey for dinner.

Go watch this film. And enjoy your holidays, folks.

Why to watch It’s a Wonderful Life: It’s the most classic Christmas film imaginable.
Why not to watch: You’re soulless.

Why to watch A Christmas Story: Because it’s the funniest Christmas film imaginable.
Why not to watch: Bob Clark’s career after directing this.

Breakin' the Law

2011-12-23T22:55:00.004-06:00

Film: The Defiant Ones
Format: DVD from Seneca Public Library through interlibrary loan on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Months ago when Scott Knopf of the Frankly My Dear Podcast was Nick’s and my guest on The Demented Podcast, we talked in part about the film Shaft. Scott mentioned a list of films that he considered essential for understanding race in film, and specifically the African American experience in film. One of the films he mentioned was The Defiant Ones, one of Stanley Kramer’s films investigating racial politics before and around the Civil Rights era.

He’s right. With this film, we start to see a progression in the roles that black actors were able to take. In many ways, Sidney Poitier is the black man that middle America could handle at the time. He was part of a prison chain gang, but arrested and convicted unjustly, for a crime that no white man would have been accused of, let alone sentenced for. He reinforces the stereotype while at the same time being the safest version of an African American that many whites would accept.

Regardless, this is a gripping film. Heading back to prison in a chain gang truck, prisoners John “Joker” Jackson (Tony Curtis) and Noah Cullen (Poitier) are chained together, mostly at the behest of the warden, who knows the two hate each other. There is an accident, and the two are sprung free and head off into the backwoods in an attempt to escape. The two encounter a variety of problems, some because they are chained at the wrist and some because of their own racial division, and eventually bond over their difficulties.

It’s an old formula, in many ways started here first. Two guys who hate each other are bound together in some way, either literally or figuratively, and discover that a mutual respect and even friendship has developed. The events of the film, here involving a difficult climb out of a clay pit, a near lynching at the hands of an angry mob, and an eventual betrayal at the hands of someone they meet on the way, serve as a method to create the metaphorical bond between the men by the end of the running time. It’s every buddy cop film ever made, but this time with the buddies as escaped cons.

Films like The Fugitive borrow a lot from this one, too. We see this most in the time we spend with the authorities looking to catch our two escaped cons. In their own way, these two, Theodore Bikel as Sheriff Max Muller and Charles McGraw as Captain Frank Gibbons are experiencing their own buddy film, although the two of them never end up seeing eye to eye on anything. Throw in jazz music loving dog handler Solly (King Donovan), and you have two groups constantly at odds not only with each other, but internally as well. This is what makes the film work.

In addition to the folks already listed, we get a short but meaningful performance from Claude Akins as a man bent on lynching our two fugitives and Lon Chaney Jr. as a man bent on saving them from that lynching. Cara Williams shows up as a lonely woman looking for a little bit more than some companionship when the two fugitives show up on her doorstep, and she plays the role with a real sense of desperation that is perhaps a little unbelievable, but makes up for this in its essential creepiness.

Films like The Defiant Ones are important. These are films that need to be kept alive and talked about and studied. People need to not simply view this film, but really examine it, really look at the relationships that are depicted here and how they are shown. Hollywood, and indeed American society, has advanced in many ways since the late 1950s, but we aren’t all the way to where we need to be. The Defiant Ones, though, is one of the starting points. The Civil Rights Movement still would have happened without this film, but it certainly didn’t hurt for America to see a wrongly accused black man continually treated unfairly by the unthinking and racist folk of the film.

Despite the fact that this was filmed in the late 1950s, there is a distinctive noir feel to the film. I probably wouldn’t classify it specifically as a noir, but it does contain a lot of the same elements. I looked around to see if anyone else has classified the film that way, and evidently, when it comes at least to bloggers, I am alone. But I stand by that judgment. In terms of character, plot, tone, and especially pessimistic worldview, this belongs at least with neo-noirs or pseudo-noirs in some sort of pantheon. There’s a moral ambiguity here that fits in well with films like Double Indemnity.

It’s worth noting that director Stanley Kramer had quite the track record of films like this. In addition to The Defiant Ones he also directed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Judgment at Nuremburg, and Inherit the Wind as well as a film about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Kramer should be better known and more respected than he is.

Why to watch The Defiant Ones: The beginning of race relations in film.
Why not to watch: If you have a “no old movies” hangup, you’ll never watch it anyway.

Apocalypse in 9/8

2011-12-22T23:53:00.003-06:00

Film: The Quiet Earth
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I like apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films. There’s something very human about people suddenly thrust into a world made dangerous by the machines left behind by the dead, struggling to complete the most basic of tasks because everything has broken down. Post-apocalyptic films tend to gravitate toward the idea of humanity struggling with its baser instincts in the struggle for survival. In the worst of times, both the best and the worst in people are brought out.

The Quiet Earth, on the other hand, plays much more like an episode of The Twilight Zone. New Zealand scientist Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) awakens one morning to find that he is the only person left on the planet. In fact, he appears to be virtually the only living thing that isn’t a plant. There are no bodies, no traces of anyone, although there are signs that the people simply vanished—a half-eaten breakfast, a still bubbling coffee pot, and most ominously, a crashed airliner with no carnage in the wreckage, all of the seats found with the seatbelts still locked in place around…nothing.

Zac does exactly what we would expect him to do. He makes a short tape and loops it, broadcasting it on a local radio station. He moves into a large, swanky house. And then he starts to go slightly mad, declaring himself the president of the world, and shortly thereafter, the new God. On the brink of suicide, Zac relents, and attempts to live as normal a life as he can. And eventually, he is rewarded with human contact in the form of Joanne (Alison Routledge), and eventually, Api (Peter Smith).

As the film progresses, we learn at least a theory of what might have happened. Zac had been working on a project to create a global power grid, and it went live the morning of what he calls
“The Event.” It is his belief that the turning on of the grid made a huge shift in the fabric of the universe. Significantly, he, Joanne, and Api were all on the brink of death when The Event occurred, and this may be the reason why they still exist. Significantly, though, it appears that The Event is going to occur again and must be stopped if the three are going to go on living.

The best part of this film is the opening 30-40 minutes. It is here that we encounter Zac and the new world in which he lives. His quick descent into insanity is incredibly compelling. It starts out simply enough, graduates quickly into fantasies in which he plays every role, and ends with him walking around the deserted New Zealand cityscape in a bloodied and torn slip, causing destruction. At one point, he creates a tableaux of cardboard cutouts of world leaders—Hitler, Queen Elizabeth II, Richard Nixon—and addresses them from a balcony, declaring himself the president of the world. This is accompanied by a series of reel-to-reel tape recorders that he uses to cheer for himself on cue. This rapid decline is fascinating, and ends far too soon.

Strangely, it is the arrival of Joanne where the film starts to turn a bit, heading further into its decline with the arrival of Api. I don’t want to give the wrong impression—the film is still very good, and I think the arrival of these other characters is necessary for any sort of resolution here, but the film simply isn’t as good or as entertaining, Alison Routledge’s shapely bare ass notwithstanding.

Another downpoint of the film is the special effects. While a few of them are interesting and are a minor, rudimentary precursor to the hotel scene in Inception, many are simply dull, simple camera tricks and superimpositions that do nothing to help tell the story or sell the fact that the world is ending. A bigger budget here would have been well-spent, and would go a long way. In fact, I don’t feel at all strange in saying that the story is good enough to have warranted that sort of attention.

And it is a good story, albeit a very slow one. More than anything, it is the characters that sell this story. With so few actual people walking around and not much in the way of actual conflict aside from insanity and loneliness for the first hour or so, the characters absolutely must be compelling and interesting for us to continue watching. Fortunately, that is the case here. Bruno Lawrence is stellar throughout. One reason that I may have started to fade in the second half is that Routledge and Peter Smith, while decent in general, don’t have the acting chops to really pull this off as the story requires.

I don’t push for remakes that often, but this film warrants one. It deserves a meatier budget for the small number of effects it needs, and it could use some bigger names to draw in the audience. If the story was held to, I’d go see it in the theater, because the story is worth seeing, and deserves a chance at a wider audience.

I liked this film despite its flaws. Story wins out over the trappings, after all.

Why to watch The Quiet Earth: An oddly compelling view of the apocalypse.
Why not to watch: Even the best of its special effects are pretty…old Doctor Who.

Gordon Gecko was Wrong

2011-12-21T23:47:00.002-06:00

Film: Greed
Format: Internet video on laptop.

The first cut of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed was nine and a half hours long. Roll that around in your head for a minute. If you assume a 15 minute intermission every two hours, you could start watching it just after breakfast and finish just after dinner. I can’t for the life of me understand why someone would make a film that long, and I’ve watched all three of the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings in the same 24 hour period.

Naturally, the released version was considerably shorter, coming in at about 140 minutes. Naturally, von Stroheim had a conniption, claiming that the studio had butchered his heartfelt work needlessly. And so, multiple versions of the film have flitted around, with the 140 minute version being (for some time) the most common and the most maligned. A few years ago, a “restored” version showed up using stills and similar shots to replace some of what was lost. This version clocks in at about four hours.

All of this leaves us, the viewers, with something of a quandary. The four hour version by all rights is greatly superior to the butchered version. But, watching what amounts to an hour and forty minutes of still pictures is not unlike sitting through watching someone’s vacation photography. Suffice it to say that things are much easier on the eyes and the brain when there’s movement on the screen.

Anyway. As the title of the film indicates, the plot here is all about greed in its many and various forms. A guy named McTeague (Gibson Gowland) is apprenticed to a dentist, sorta. He’s apprenticed at least to a guy who claims to be a dentist. And he takes to the work. Eventually, he goes off on his own and sets up a practice in San Francisco. It’s here that he meets Marcus (Jean Hersholt), and the two become friends. This lasts only until Marcus’s cousin Trina (the awesomely named Zasu Pitts) arrives, and the two men fight for her affection.

McTeague comes out on top of that battle, and Marcus is a good sport up until the moment that Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery. At that moment, Marcus decides that he shouldn’t have given up on wanting to marry Trina. But all is not well. Trina, it turns out, is a complete miser, and she refuses to do anything with her money except horde it. McTeague eventually loses his dental practice because of Marcus’s machinations, but still Trina will not allow them to use “her” money to survive, and McTeague is forced into work as a laborer and the two live in poverty.

And then the trouble really starts. McTeague leaves, but eventually decides that he wants that money, and decides to kill his wife and inherit her wealth. This will concern us for quite some time with this film.

This is hardly a new story, of course. It’s a classic tragedy in which everyone has the same tragic flaw—a desperate love of money. The support characters suffer from the same basic problem, too. Throughout, characters make decisions based strictly on wealth and the desire for wealth, often choosing the specifically wrong thing because it offers a chance at cash. There’s nothing wrong with telling a simple story or telling an old story. It’s just that this particular story doesn’t require four hours to tell it, let alone von Stroheim’s original mindboggling 9 ½ hours.

There are some other things here that irritate me beyond the length, much of which could have and should have been cut. For instance, a great deal of the intertitles are written in dialect, which is painful to get through. Trina’s parents, for instance, are Old World German, so we get dialogue like, “…pe vairy goot to her…von’t you?” I don’t see that that enhances the story in any way. It makes me pause and try to interpret, and I don’t want to have to do that. I just want to watch the damn story.

The shame of it is that Greed could well be a fascinating story. There’s a certain level of strange, goggle-eyed fascination that comes with people who have the resources to do anything they’d like but are unable to spend a dime without purpose. Trina at the very least should be someone we want to know more about. The film goes there at times, showing her polishing her money and admiring it, for instance, but the long running time doesn’t offer nearly enough to satisfy, instead dealing with subplots of other people torn apart by the insane desire for cash.

It occurs to me after spending multiple hours watching von Stroheim’s directorial work on the screen that he was very much enamored of the idea of his own artistic vision, and damn the cost. But it also seems that his concern was with his own image as a director, and damn the cost of that even more. Greed gets part of the way there, but seems to be sunk under the weight of its director's enormous ego.

Why to watch Greed: The height of von Stroheim’s skill as a director.
Why not to watch: At less than half its original length, it’s still way too long.

Secrets and Shame

2011-12-20T22:06:00.002-06:00

Film: Atonement
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Atonement is a film of two halves. In the first half, we learn all that we need to learn about the principal characters with a couple of exceptions. In the second half, we get the payoff of everything in the first half, then get a fantasy ending and a real ending. It’s no coincidence that the first half of this film is excellent, dramatic, and great and that the second half has a tendency to drag.

As seems the case with many a film set in Britain, all of the early action takes place on one of those giant estates with five servants for every person living there. We are introduced to Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a precocious 13-year-old who spends a lot of her time writing. In this case, she has written a play to be performed at a party that evening. The parts of the play are to be performed by Lola Quincey (Juno Temple) and her two brothers, but the kids quickly lose interest.

Briony doesn’t push this because she’s too busy eavesdropping on her sister, Cecelia (Keira Knightley), who appears to be all but humping the son of the housekeeper, Robbie (James McAvoy). This is a problem for the precocious Briony, because she has one hell of a crush on the good looking lad, despite the fact that he undoubtedly looks upon her as a little girl. We also see the same scene Briony does from a different perspective, and while there’s some sexual tension between Cecelia and Robbie, they’re far from having a tender moment.

Also appearing is the brother of Cecelia and Briony, Leon (Patrick Kennedy) and Leon’s friend Paul Marshall (the awesomely named Benedict Cumberbatch), heir to a large candy fortune. It’s evident that Paul is something of a horndog and is mildly attracted to Cecelia, but is evidently saving the best of his loving for Lola.

Anyway, as it turns out, there is something between Cecelia and Robbie, and Briony walks in on them consummating their relationship, which convinces Briony that Robbie is a dangerous sex maniac. When Lola is ravaged that night, Briony tells everyone that it was Robbie. Since he is the son of one of the servants, the lie is believed, and Robbie shipped off to prison, which causes a rift in the family. Cecelia leaves. Robbie is let out of prison in exchange for his joining the Army at the start of World War II.

So the rest of the film is essentially what becomes of the lie and what happens with Briony, Cecelia, Robbie, Paul, and Lola in the ensuing half dozen years or so. Naturally, this is necessary for the telling of the story. The problem is that it simply isn’t as interesting as what comes before. Briony is a far more interesting character as a child than she is as a teen (played by Romola Garai) or as an older woman (played by Vanessa Redgrave).

This is not to say that there isn’t plenty of impressive work here. There is. The long take on the beach at Dunkirk, for instance, is a masterpiece of camera movement, timing, and coordination. This is a fantastic sequence because of its complexity and because it seems so completely natural. It’s difficult to make something that complicated and big look that seamless and easy, and this sequence can and will be studied for a long time.

And yet, all that really happens in the scenes in France are that Robbie and his compatriots wander around in retreat, reach Dunkirk, and wait. Robbie goes a bit mental for awhile and we deal with that. Interspersed are scenes of Briony working at a hospital and not doing it very well, almost as if she is trying to pay penance for what she did to Robbie several years before. In fact, it’s not “almost” as if she is doing that—it’s precisely what she is doing. But again, it’s simply not that interesting.

Sure, the conclusion is great. The last 10 minutes or so of the film are pitch perfect. The 50 minutes leading up to that ending, though, simply drag.

Atonement is nonetheless a seminal film for several reasons. It’s a great coming out party for Saoirse Ronan for one thing. It also marks a moment for Keira Knightley to grow up on film, and it’s one of the first films I’ve seen her in that I found appropriate for her. Okay, I liked the first Pirates film, too. But really, she’s a sort of non-entity in my book until this film, which proved that she could handle a role with real dramatic range. And James McAvoy is generally good in most things he touches, and he’s just as strong here.

If only it were more interesting!

Why to watch Atonement: The first half.
Why not to watch: The second half.

Stan 'n' Ollie

2011-12-18T19:24:00.004-06:00

Film: Sons of the Desert
Format: DVD from Fountaindale Library through interlibrary loan on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Most great comedic duos, at least the classic ones, work on the premise that one of the pair is the straight man and the other provides the bulk of the comedy. Dean Martin played the foil for Jerry Lewis, Tommy Smothers was the goofy part of the Smothers Brothers, and Lou Costello got far and away more laughs than did Bud Abbott. Laurel and Hardy worked much the same way, with Hardy as straight man. But Laurel and Hardy worked as well as they did because Hardy’s character was as much of an idiot as Laurel’s.

Sons of the Desert is a pretty straightforward story. Laurel and Hardy are members of a fraternal organization of the film’s title. The group has a convention coming up in Chicago, and both Stan and Ollie (they use their actual names here) take an oath that they will be there. The problem is that neither one wears the pants around home, and Ollie has already committed to taking his wife to the mountains at the same time.

So they create an elaborate ruse. Ollie pretends to be undergoing a nervous collapse, and Stanley hires a doctor (actually a veterinarian) to prescribe a long ocean voyage to Honolulu. Since Ollie’s wife Lottie (Mae Busch) hates the ocean, Stanley agrees to accompany him. Naturally, the two go to the convention instead, where they have a splendid time despite almost being caught at one point. But then the ship they are allegedly on sinks, and suddenly they don’t have a believable reason to not be on the boat, and thus are both going to incur the wrath of their respective wives. And, of course, everything the pair does sinks them further into hot water. It even causes a rift between Lottie Hardy and Betty Laurel (Dorothy Christie), since each is convinced that the other’s husband is at fault.

Like many early comedies, the film is concerned with its plot for only about half of its short (just over an hour) running time. It would have made a pretty dandy short film, matter of fact. The rest of the time is spent on sight gags, slapstick, Laurel muffing difficult words, and Hardy’s exasperation with his dimwitted compatriot. This is not a complaint or a problem. After all, the slapstick is what we pay our admission to see.

And it is funny. I image that in the 1930s, this was funny like few other things are funny. Today, it’s a little more difficult to get an audience to laugh with simple sight gags because we’ve seen all of these sight gags before. It’s important to remember, though, that we’ve seen them because other people have copied them. Watching a guy hit his head on a low beam is a standard comedy trope. Does the fact that it appears in this film multiple times in a row detract from the film? It’s easy to say yes. But many of these gags originated with Stan and Ollie. What we see in a film like Sons of the Desert is not old, hackneyed comedy bits, but those bits in their original, pristine state.

Laurel and Hardy are a comedic pair that has been copied time and time again. After all, what are Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton but these two characters reborn? What are Fred and Barney but a cartoon duplication of the same? The Skipper and Gilligan? Pair an angry fat guy with a dumb skinny (or little) guy, and you’re looking at an homage to these masters, intentionally or otherwise.

So it’s right and fitting that the pair should have at least one film on the countdown, and Sons of the Desert is a fine one. I haven’t seen a vast amount of Laurel and Hardy, so I can’t say that this is the best representative of their body of work, but it certainly isn’t a bad one. If there other films are as consistently funny and clever in their stupidity, there’s a reason that the duo remains as a sort of cultural comedic touchstone.

Sure, it’s not perfect. There are continuity problems throughout, generally involving someone getting soaked in one scene and being perfectly dry the next. So what? There’s plenty of overacting and goofy doubletakes and mugs to the camera. And? It’s funny. If you’re putting a Laurel and Hardy movie in the spinner, you shouldn’t need internal consistency or a driving narrative to keep you watching. It’s funny. You don’t need it to be anything more than that.

Why to watch Sons of the Desert: Because it’s funny. Why else?
Why not to watch: If you don’t like comedic overacting and over-reacting, Laurel and Hardy won’t do it for you.

Mongol Horde

2011-12-16T23:46:00.002-06:00

Film: Potomok Chingis-Khana (Storm Over Asia)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

To me, there is something particularly Soviet about silent film, particularly silent epics like Potomok Chingis-Khana. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s true of all silent epics in my mind, not merely those that are actually Russian. These’s something about the behind-the-times feel of silent films that strike me as being like a lower end version of Hollywood that they feel sort of like Soviet attempts to mimic the West and simultaneously demonize it.

A young Mongolian trapper (Valery Inkijinoff) is entrusted by his father with a rare and valuable silver fox pelt. As the son is going to marker, he is entrusted with the pelt and told specifically not to take less than 500 marks fir it. Sadly, the evil British capitalists cheat him out of his prize. A fight ensues and the young man is forced into the hills where he joins the Soviet partisans. All is well for a bit. A new Lama is discovered and crowned. Oddly, the British Army appears to be occupying Mongolia at this point.

But things change. Our hero is captured by the British, and it is discovered that he is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. This inspires his captors to place him in charge of a puppet government, giving the local populace the semblance of being governed by one of their own (and one with a significant lineage), but in reality still being controlled by a foreign government. And this works well for a little bit until the newly crowned “ruler” decides to rebel, since his heart is with the glorious Soviet revolution.

Okay, so it’s a propaganda film. It’s mildly amusing to me that the bad guys here are the British, who were never anywhere in Mongolia, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the glorious Soviet state was doing to these peasants the very thing they accuse the British of doing. This, of course is not surprising. The art of propaganda is convincing the populace that your enemies are doing precisely the despicable acts that you are currently engaged in yourself. But it is pretty amusing that the Brits got tagged for this. Or maybe not—Hollywood seems to like British guys as the villainous foil quite often.

There’s a lot going on here that doesn’t deal directly with the plot. For instance, there’s a huge build-up to the new Lama, and I suppose it’s funny that after all of the noise and confusion and pomp that the Lama is a little kid. But really, it’s a long way to go for a fairly minor joke. In fact, the entire section with the Lama is simply to force the British to go rustle some cattle and thereby encounter, wound, and capture the hero of the film. It’s far too long of a sequence for its purpose, and the payoff isn’t close to worth it.

My guess is that this is a function of the version I got. The Book lists this as a film just a touch over 90 minutes, while the version I watched is a good half hour more than this; my guess is that this extended middle section is a big part of what was added back in, and it’s not a very good addition. It makes the film drag, and the brutal soundtrack that accompanies much of this is better left unmentioned. It’s essentially the equivalent of giving two dozen kindergarteners some pots, pans, wooden spoons, and a couple of vuvuzelas and letting them go to town.

These two things are my biggest issue with this film. The first seems like a bad decision by someone deciding that adding in any cut footage could only improve the film, and missing the mark on that badly. The second is a decision by whomever created this version of the film, and that was equally a misfire.

The rest of this is pretty interesting, and it’s also beautifully filmed. Pudovkin does some interesting things with the camera and uses some innovative (for the time) camera tricks to heighten the action and in some cases add a surreal edge to it.

All in all, this is a great example of the montage style of filmmaking and a worthy addition to the pantheon of silent classics. But be warned that you’ll want the sound down for part of it due to the cacophonous “music.” And if there’s an option to pick the long version or the short one, go with the short one; you’ll be a lot happier in the end.

As a final note, a big deal is made of the fact that our hero is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. Evidently, this isn't that remarkable of a feat. According to the Smithsonian, one person in every 200 in the modern world is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. So really, they could have gone through with their plan to shoot this guy and just found another one.

Why to watch Potomok Chingis-Khana: Soviet montage style on a Mongol horde scale.
Why not to watch: It’s roughly as historically accurate as the Twilight series.

Revenge Served Basted with Shallots and Chanterelles

2011-12-13T22:07:00.006-06:00

Film: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Sometimes after I watch a film like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, I head over to IMDB and look at the parents’ guide just to see what it says. All I knew going into this one was that it started life with an X rating, which was eventually changed to the functionally equivalent NC-17. Oh, and I guess I knew that Helen Mirren is in it along with Michael Gambon, who is better known these days as the guy who took over for Dumbledore.

Anyway, I’m going to jump right into this one with both feet, and while there are a number of people in this film, I’m going to focus on the four in the title. We have a cook named Richard Borst (Richard Bohringer), who is renowned as a great chef and runs a very fancy restaurant. His partner in the restaurant is the thief, Albert Spica (Gambon), who is an absolute pig of a human being. In many ways, he is the most distasteful character I have ever seen in a film. He is loud, stupid, arrogant, mean, violent, and acts like a spoiled child. He is abusive of everyone around him, his wife Georgina (Mirren) in particular. And then there is the quiet, shy bookseller named Michael (Alan Howard). He eats in the restaurant pretty much every night.

Albert is such a complete bastard that Georgina spends a lot of time away from him, or at least as much as she can get away with. During one of her trips to the bathroom, she encounters Michael, and the two of them immediately begin having an affair. Their affair consists of trysts in the bathroom and in the kitchen with the full knowledge and observation of the kitchen staff. There’s plenty of full frontal here of both actors, and the sex is quick and almost ravenous—ravenous because of the passion and quick because it occurs in moments when Georgina is supposed to be using the bathroom.

Regardless, eventually the couple is found out and Albert goes into a rage. The two lovers are secreted out of the restaurant in an extremely disgusting manner and take up residence in the bookseller’s shop. The rest of the film is all about Albert finding out where they are, enacting his revenge, and then Georgina turning the tables on him. Go go gadget spoiler!

*** HERE’S YOUR MENU ***

So Albert discovers that food is being taken to the pair by the restaurant, particularly by a young boy called Pup (Paul Russell) who washes dishes in the kitchen and sings liturgical music. Albert captures the boy and tortures him, sending him to the hospital, but discovers the location of the lovers because of the address printed on the inside of one of the books the boy borrows. Georgina goes to visit the boy in the hospital, and while this happens, Albert and his goons move in and kill Michael by force feeding him one of his books.

Eventually, Georgina returns and finds the destruction. She convinces the cook to, well, practice his craft on the body of Michael. He does—he cooks the body. The whole body. This is then served to Albert, who is forced to begin eating it. When he does, Georgina shoots him in the head, and the film ends.

*** CHECK PLEASE ***

This is a brutal film. The sex is particularly unsexy regardless of the shapeliness of Helen Mirren’s circa 1989 backside. In any other movie, the sex and nudity would be the centerpiece of the film, but here, it takes a back seat to virtually everything else. The sex is not the extreme behavior here—instead, it is Albert’s behavior that is consistently and constantly shocking because of its extreme vulgarity. A great deal is unexplained, or at least not understood by me. I don’t know why the boy sings constantly, except perhaps as a counterpoint to the vulgarity. I don’t know why there’s a guy in the kitchen who appears to wear nothing but an apron. I don't know why the kitchen is the size of a warehouse with tables spread about it. The stress on vulgarity does explain why a man is coated in dog feces and then urinated on in the first five minutes, and it explains why Albert forces the kitchen boy to watch him rape Georgina. It explains Albert’s dinner conversation and dinner companions (who include Tim Roth), too.

The art direction on this film is worth noting. Each of the parts of the restaurant is of a different predominant color. The exterior is blue, the kitchen is green, the restaurant itself red, and the bathroom is white. Characters have their costumes change all or in part as they move from one place to the next. Georgina gets up from the table wearing a red dress and appears in the bathroom in a white one. Her clothes were evidently made by Gaultier, and they are quite fashionable. Each of the sets is pretty amazing—the film looks very much like a painting.

I have heard that this film is a metaphor for the Thatcher administration. The cook evidently represents the long-suffering loyal British citizenry. The thief is Thatcher herself, conferring her attention and favors on the wealthy without regard to the rest of the country (or the patrons in the restaurant). The wife is Britain herself, raped and abused by the vicious and cruel master. And the lover represents the British liberal elite, romanced by the spirit of the country and eventually crushed by, as Rik from The Young Ones used to say, the “fascist Thatcheristic junta.”

It works as a metaphor. And it has to. The events on the screen are so repugnant that the only way to bear it is by seeing it as a metaphor for something. This is an uncompromising film and difficult to watch, but very much worth seeing, if only for the amazing visual appeal.

Why to watch The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover: It’s art directed out the ass.
Why not to watch: It takes mincing baby steps toward Salo territory.

The Demented Tower

2011-12-12T22:44:00.002-06:00

Film: Die Hard
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Christmas season is well and truly upon us, and when it comes to holiday films, there are plenty that I enjoy. Die Hard is one of them. It’s not really a Christmas film except that it takes place during a Christmas party. It could just as easily take place at any time of the year, but since it’s the end of the year, well, here we are.

Die Hard is a simple film that takes its basic idea to an extreme, and does it about as well as it’s ever been done. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is a New York cop visiting his estranged wife in Los Angeles. His wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), has gone back to her maiden name. She has a fantastic career as a top executive in a Japanese company, which might make the more perceptive and cynical viewer wonder why Mcclane is still working as a cop at all. Regardless, this is a step toward reconciliation between the couple—she has invited him out to her company’s Christmas party.

Once he arrives at the building, we get the meeting between the couple we expect. We are also introduced to company boss Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta) and international sales guy and all-around sleazebag Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner). And then the fun starts. A whole bunch of apparent terrorists show up at the building, hold everyone hostage, kill Takagi, and otherwise raise hell. However, when they show up, McClane is elsewhere, and thus he becomes the fly in the ointment for the bad guys, running around the building creating his own brand of chaos and doing anything he can to keep the hostages alive and screw up the plans of the bad guys.

That’s really it. Lots of explosions, lots of gunfire, a few crazy stunts, and an ending. There are a few other key roles not mentioned at this point—former beat cop-turned-desk jockey Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) shows up and acts as McClane’s advocate for much of the film and is responsible for calling in the cavalry. The bad guys are headed by a guy named Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman in one of his great roles), who is slick, suave, charming, and contemptible. We also encounter a television reporter named Richard Thornburg (William Atherton) who has delusions of grandeur and a very high opinion of himself. But really, this film is all about Bruch Willis kicking ass and not even bothering to take names.

I don’t really know why Die Hard works as well as it does except for the fact that it is, for lack of a better way to put it, completely balls-out at all times. What McClane goes through is extreme, his reaction is extreme, and the explosions are extreme. And it is awesome. There is no other word for it. It’s entirely possible that I call it awesome (I and virtually everyone else I know, mind you) because we were around in 1988 when this film was first released, but there is a reason that Die Hard is considered one of the great action films of…ever.

Bruce Willis is a big part of the reason for this. He takes a massive beating in this film and ends up slicked over with his own blood by the end of the film. He also makes a ton of wisecracks through the film, which is one of the reasons he makes such a great action hero. The other reason this film works as well as it does is thanks to Alan Rickman. Rickman is virtually always entertaining in any role, and Hans Gruber is a meaty role that he really sinks his teeth into. Hans Gruber is one of the great film villains not just because he is a suave bastard but also because just like McClane, he has a bunch of great lines, and Rickman delivers them with decided relish.

All of this adds up to a film that is riotously entertaining. There’s not a frame of this film that isn’t fun to watch. Further, this is a film that is fun on a second, third, (or as it was for me today) tenth or twentieth viewing. If you haven’t seen this, go see it now. And watch at least the first sequel which is crazier, harder to believe, and almost as much fun.

Why to watch Die Hard: Because it kicks ass.
Why not to watch: Eventually, this series dips into PG-13 and starts to suck.

Turkey Trot

2011-12-11T19:31:00.003-06:00

Film: Yol (The Way; The Road)
Format: VHS from Blackhawk College Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

I know very little about the modern state of Turkey. I know that they’ve had in the past an extremely oppressive government. I know this because one of my professors in grad school told me, and I figured that since she is Turkish, she’d have the first-hand experience to back it up. The country’s human rights record is pretty shabby, too. I know it’s a big, predominantly Muslim country that sits in a geographic crossroads. In some ways, Turkey is European, and has joined the EU. However, its location and dominant religion gives it strong ties to the Middle East as well.

That’s about as much background as I had going into Yol (alternately known as The Way and The Road). This is a film with an interesting history; in fact, it may be the story of its creation that causes it to be a part of The List rather than the film itself. Yol is credited to filmmaker Yilmaz Guney, who never actually filmed a frame. Why? Well, he was in prison at the time. He “directed” the shots through his proxy, Serif Goren, who is given equal screen credit. When Guney escaped from prison, he edited the footage in Switzerland.

Naturally, Yol is a prison movie. It appears that in Turkey, prisoners are sometimes given furloughs to go out into the real world again and connect with their families, sort of like a vacation from jail. We spend most of our time with three men in particular. Each of them starts off on furlough together and each goes through a traumatic event before the furlough ends. Essentially, the film appears to suggest that even when not constrained by the walls of the prison, these men are still trapped in a very real way. They are hemmed in by family, culture, society, religion, and hundreds of years of tradition, and no less prisoners because of it.

One man, Mehmet (Halil Ergun), is in prison for his part in a heist gone wrong. During the heist, his brother-in-law was killed by the police. Now, his wife’s family blames him for the death despite the fact that he has maintained that he did not panic and desert his brother-in-law. However, he really did. Hated by his in-laws, Mehmet wants only to reconcile with his wife and children again.

Another man, Seyit (Tarik Akan), has a different problem. His wife has become a prostitute in his absence, bringing shame upon him and the entire family. Reclaimed by the family, Zire (Serif Sezer) has spent eight months literally chained in a barn and living on bread and water. The family waits only for Seyit to mete out justice against her for her shame and for the greater shame brought to the family. “Justice” in this case is an honor killing. Seyit, as might many of us be, is of two minds of this sort of punishment.

We also spend a good deal of time with Omer (Necmettin Cobanoglu), who wishes to rejoin his family in a village on the border. Because it is a border village, the army is attacking it repeatedly due to its people practicing frequent smuggling. Omer is caught in the middle of this, one the one hand trying to escape prison and on the other being trapped by duty and loyalty to his family.

In many ways, none of them dealing with the subject matter, Yol reminds me of Les Enfants du Paradis. It is a competently made and good film, but the story of its creation is far more involved and involving than the film itself. This is not to say that the film is without merit, but that Guney may well have made a greater artistic statement simply by creating any film in his situation than any film could have on its own.

What is constant here is the repression of the regime and of the culture. There is a culture of suppression evident throughout the film and in almost every action taken by each character. In many ways, Yol feels like an Eastern Bloc film. It matches the level of oppression in Czech and Polish films of a decade previous. The personal and social privation, constant vigilance against the state, petty losses of freedom, all of these are reminiscent of films that came from communist countries during the Cold War.

This is an interesting film, but also a frustrating one, and not a film to enter into lightly.

Why to watch Yol: A gripping portrait of a repressive culture.
Why not to watch: So many plots, it can be hard to follow.

Love in the Time of Aliens

2011-12-10T23:42:00.003-06:00

Film: Monsters
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

If I have to pick a genre that I like more than any other, on most days I’d pick science fiction. I really enjoy good science fiction, which to me is defined as science fiction that has a brain. Dumb science fiction isn’t really any better than a dumb story from another genre, but good, smart science fiction tends to ask interesting questions and tends to answer them in interesting ways. I suppose in reality modern science fiction is my favorite; my favorite classic genre is film noir. If I have to narrow down further, though, I really like films that sit at that juncture between science fiction and horror.

This brings us to Monsters, the 2010 release from Gareth Edwards. Like a number of recent indie films, it was made on a relatively small budget (roughly half a million by estimates I have seen) and looks like it was made for a great deal more. It’s a giant monster movie, an alien invasion movie, a drama, and a romance all at the same time. This makes Monsters sound like it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, but that’s not really the case. For all of the directions it goes in, this film is really pretty focused.

The thrust of the story is pretty basic. A number of years ago, a space probe broke up over Mexico. Not too long afterwards, gigantic alien creatures began stomping around Mexico, and I do mean gigantic. These creatures now rule roughly the northern 2/3 of Mexico in an area called the “Infected Zone,” and the United States has built a huge wall to keep them from crossing the Rio Grande.

In Mexico, Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able), the daughter of a publishing magnate, is hiding out. It seems that she is having second thoughts about her engagement. But Mexico is a dangerous place to be. While the creatures tend to stay within the Infected Zone, they don’t always, and thousands of Mexican citizens are killed every year. It’s time for Sam to go home, but even travel is difficult, and not leaving in time will force her to stay in Mexico for another six months. That may not sound so bad, but Mexico, thanks to the creatures, is essentially a warzone.

Sent to bring her back is Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a photojournalist who works for Sam’s father. He’s in Mexico to get pictures of the giant creatures and the destruction they cause. But now he has to babysit Sam back to the U.S., or at least get her on a plane or a boat that will take her there. And, of course, if the journey to the coast was an easy one, we wouldn’t have a movie. Eventually, completely out of other options, the two are forced to attempt to enter the U.S. by passing through the Infected Zone, a sort of massive-alien-filled El Norte.

This sounds like an action movie, doesn’t it? If Edwards had had a larger budget, it probably would have been one. Alas, that simply wasn’t the case. Edwards was forced to work within the constraints of the limited budget he had, a budget that forced him to essentially film actual scenes with unknowing passersby filling in as extras. So what we get instead of gun battles against 60-foot-high tentacle beasts out of a Lovecraftian dream is an indie romance between Sam and Andrew.

This was unexpected. It’s also something of a disappointment.

I recently had a conversation with Kai Parker over at Man, I Love Films about one of the reasons he’s not a fan of many films before about 1980. One of the reasons he cited is that couples seem to fall in love instantly in older movies without any justification of it. I see that, but I’d hold this film up to Kai as an example of modern films not stepping away from that old model in the least. Sam may well be engaged to someone back in the States and Andrew has a son, but these two are immediately attracted to each other. In fact, the reason they are forced to go through the Infected Zone is because Andrew is robbed of their passports, which happens when Sam has a temper tantrum after seeing him with another woman. And this is after one day together. Take that, Kai.

I won’t say that Monsters isn’t an interesting or entertaining movie, because it is both of these things. And, despite it’s apparent multiple personalities, it seems to know what it wants to be. However, it comes in vastly different trappings from the standard indie romance film, which is what it is in its heart. It may well also be a subtle indictment on American immigration policy, but that’s a stretch for a film from a British filmmaker.

More or less, this is my problem with the film. I wanted this to be a film about fighting these awesome creatures, and while there are some tense moments and some decent effects for this low budget, it would be a much more interesting film as well as a much more entertaining one if it had been more about the critters and less about romance blooming between two people thrust into a difficult situation with each other. Even those times it feels like we’re finally going to see one of the aliens, we generally instead have a scene that develops our two principal characters instead. Normally, I’m all for character development instead of explosions, but when the film ostensibly deals with giant land-based octopus beasts, the opposite is true.

This is worth watching to see a film that capitalizes brilliantly on its small budget, but there are more interesting and entertaining places this film could have gone.

Why to watch Monsters: Low budget science fiction that looks more expensive than it is.
Why not to watch: It could have gone more interesting places.

Suicide is Painless

2011-12-09T22:58:00.002-06:00

Film: M*A*S*H
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I wasn’t that conscious of movies when I was two or three years old, which is how old I was when M*A*S*H was released. As a kid, the most relevant thing with that name was the television show, the one that ran for three times longer than the war upon which it was based. I spent a lot of evenings watching the show, and as I got older and the show was eventually retired, I watched a lot of reruns. What that means is that I have a particular view of M*A*S*H, and it’s a view that doesn’t really jibe with the film.

This isn’t to say that the film isn’t great, though, because it is. It’s a very unusual film, though, for a number of reasons. It’s also very much an Altman film in that the cast is freakin’ huge and there are tons of characters to keep track of during the course of the film. However, as a person who is so familiar with the television versions of many of these characters, it’s impossible for me to tell if the film is difficult to follow. I know almost all of the main characters, so in a real sense, I know what to expect of them.

Essentially, we have a group of doctors in a mobile Army surgical hospital (hence the initials) a few miles from the front in Korea. They patch up soldiers when they come in wounded, and otherwise spend their time trying to forget that they are in Korea. They drink, play pranks on each other, and chase nurses with reckless abandon.

The doctors that we become acquainted with first are Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerrit, almost unrecognizable without the trademark mustache). They are the new surgeons at the 4077th hospital, and the minute they arrive, they begin to turn the camp upside down, getting things running the way they like them. This task is made easier because their commander, Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), is a pushover. It’s made more difficult because their bunkmate, Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), is a by-the-book officer and deeply religious. Things are compounded in both directions with the arrival of Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), who sides with our degenerate doctor heroes, and a new head nurse named “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).

Essentially, M*A*S*H is completely without a plot. There are events that happen, and we see the camp personnel deal with these issues. We deal with the issues of the doctors not being up to military muster, with the fact that the camp dentist, “Painless” Waldowski (immediately recognizable character actor John Schuck) wants to commit suicide because he believes he has turned gay, and a surprise trip for Trapper and Hawkeye to Japan. Everything eventually culminates in a football game with another military outfit, complemented on the 4077th’s side with a ringer—an ex-professional football player-turned-neurosurgeon named Oliver “Spearchucker” Jones (Fred Williamson), given that nickname not because of his skin color, but because he used to throw the javelin.

M*A*S*H isn’t about a story, or getting through a particular plot or series of events. Instead, it’s about surviving the insanity of war, and the irony of being a medical doctor in a place of death and destruction. In fact, one of the reasons that there is so much humor in the film is because it is a natural contrast to the pain and misery of war. The other reason is that extreme situations like war often bring this sort of behavior and attitude out in the people trapped in the middle of it. We laugh so that we are not sickened by it. This is also why a lot of the humor here is so dark and so cruel. That’s the only reason for the broadcasting of Frank’s tryst with Hot Lips, and why the shower is rigged to collapse when Hot Lips enters it.

The film also works because the operating room scenes are both brutal and banal. Men are on the table with horrible wounds, and while we don’t specifically see any body parts or grue (or at least not too much), there’s an ocean of blood, and the doctors and nurses are up to their elbows in it. At the same time, the doctors and nurses discuss average, everyday topics, almost as if they are fixing toasters.

Altman is a difficult director for me to get behind, often because there is so much to pay attention to in his films. There are often so many characters that it can be tough to keep everyone straight. M*A*S*H does not suffer from this though, although that may only be because I know these characters so well. This is a hell of a film, and one that has aged surprisingly well, a fact that may be due to the influence of television as well.

Why to watch M*A*S*H: It spawned a true American cultural landmark.
Why not to watch: There really isn’t much of a plot.

Manson Family Circus

2011-12-08T07:09:00.003-06:00

Film: Last Chants for a Slow Dance
Format: VHS from Eastern Illinois University Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

Sometimes, we are presented with something that we simply can’t really understand. Last Chants for a Slow Dance is sort of like that. It’s an ultra-indie film, made on a budget of about $2,000 (albeit 1977 dollars, but still), and it looks like it. In fact, it looks quite a bit like home movies of the Manson Family, or the formative years of Ted Bundy.

Tom (Tom Blair) is a drifter who appears to spend most of his time driving around Montana in his truck, allegedly looking for work. Back home he has a wife and two boys, and soon discovers that he has another child on the way. He claims to love his wife Darlene (Jessica St. John), but is unfaithful every chance he gets. He has no money, but has enough for gas to drive around and to hang out in bars and pick up women. He laughs almost constantly, like a nervous habit. Oh, and he’s also a stone-cold murderer who loots the bodies of those he slays, which might explain where his money comes from after all.

There isn’t a massive amount of narrative in this film. Generally, when we get a film that is lacking a basic plot and even a rudimentary story structure, it means that what’s left is a character study. I’m not sure this qualifies as a character study, either. It is, more or less, a slice of time out of this character’s life. We see him driving, we see him at home interacting with Darlene, we see him picking up women in bars and having sex with them, and ultimately, we see him pull over for a car in trouble and eventually shoot the driver and walk away smiling and singing.

Ostensibly, this film was based on Gary Gilmore, and I have no idea how accurate it is or how much came from the Gilmore case and how much came from writer/producer/director Jost. There is a chilling quality to it, though, a sense of a man simply “finding work” in a way that most of us would find repugnant. Tom doesn’t kill for pleasure or sport, but because he needs money. Once he has killed a victim, he’s not erotically satisfied or mentally sated. Instead, there is a sense of satisfaction, of having completed another job.

In that respect, Last Chants for a Slow Dance seems to presage a number of films. There is in some part a feeling of both Natural Born Killers and the Anton Chigurh character from No Country for Old Men in Tom’s almost nonchalance about murdering an innocent individual on the side of the road. For Tom, there is only the necessary goal of collecting enough money to keep going. Money in hand, he’s off to hunt women for sex and bars for alcohol until the cash runs out again and the cycle will repeat. He is, in a real sense, a predator of humans.

It’s difficult to tell if the film essentially looks like home movies (to the point of having sound unsynched with the visuals for the first few minutes) because Jost was going for that sort of look or because he simply couldn’t afford to do anything better. Certainly there is a homemade quality to the film, a sense of the amateur auteur. Jost frequently uses very long takes, planting his camera and simply filming what is in front of him for several minutes at a time. Often, particular scenes go on for much longer than it seems possible or advisable. But this works; it lulls the viewer initially into a sense of ease. At the end, the same lengthy takes of driving or of the roadside provide an opportunity to contemplate what has happened and what may happen next.

In short, this is a difficult film to take in. It is oddly powerful and strange, amateur without being amateurish. I am now very curious to see the other two films in what is loosely known as the Tom Blair Trilogy, but that is a project for another day.

(Note: While more films will be added next year and presumably every year, at this moment, I've hit the halfway point. 545 down, 544 to go.)

Why to watch Last Chants for a Slow Dance: The purest definition of indie ever made.
Why not to watch: Slight narrative and long takes of not much happening.

Family Gatherings Must Be Weird

2011-12-06T18:55:00.003-06:00

Film: The Graduate
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Certain films slip under everyone’s radar. Every film geek and snob has a film or two that they haven’t yet seen for one reason or another. Me? I have a whole list of those films. One of the ones at the top was The Graduate until just now. For the generation before mine, the older section of the Baby Boomers specifically, this is a pivotal film in many ways. One could argue it as one of the most important films for that generation pre-Woodstock, and I don’t think that argument would be amiss.

Because it is such a pivotal and important film, it’s a difficult one for me to judge, because I my initial response to this film is to dislike it mildly rather than be completely enraptured by it the way I’m supposed to be. It’s kind of icky. It’s supposed to be a blend of comedy and drama, and I get that it could be seen that way, but so much of it is unpleasant that I have trouble seeing it that way. It’s not unpleasant in the way a number of films I’ve seen in the past two years is, but there is sort of an oily film over it.

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has just returned from college where he was quite the big man on campus. Now back, he is completely without direction, uninterested in getting a job and unequally uninterested in graduate school. He’s also very young—a college graduate and about a week from turning 21. At a party celebrating his return, he offers a ride home to Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who attempts to seduce him and tells him that she is “available” to him whenever he wishes. Just to make things jolly and fun, her husband (Murray Hamilton, immediately identifiable by his voice) is the law partner of Ben’s dad (William Daniels).

This goes on for awhile. Ben drifts aimlessly (and quite literally in the family swimming pool) and has copious amounts of sex with Mrs. Robinson. He discovers that he really has nothing in common with her. She’s essentially a bored housewife who drinks and smokes constantly and is looking for a little something more in her life, thus Benjamin. Ben, on the other hand, is pretty much disgusted with himself for sleeping with his father’s partner’s wife, but can’t break away because he doesn’t have anything else to do. This changes when he is forced to take the Robinsons’ daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross) out on a date. After a very rocky start, the two end up falling for each other, making one creepy and strange love/sex triangle. Like I said, there’s sort of a film of oil on this movie.

And yet, in a very real way, I understand exactly what all of the hoopla is about. Liking this movie is all about the “when.” This is a movie that needs to be seen at a particular point in life, at a particular time or age, and I’m well past it. It reminds me in many ways of The Catcher in the Rye. People who read that book at 15 or so love it and identify with Holden Caulfield for the rest of their lives. I read that book in my 20s and wondered what all of the fuss was about. Furthermore, I wanted to reach into the pages and bitchslap that little snot.

And that, for me, is The Graduate. I’m in my 40s now, and find nothing appealing or interesting about these characters. Benjamin Braddock is a creep, a jerk. He does little but feel sorry for himself and whine about it. The world essentially gets handed to him on a plate, and none of it is good enough or interesting enough to do anything for him. Elaine is a mush and a bit of a twit, a pretty face with nothing behind it. And Mrs. Robinson is, bluntly, a selfish bitch.

But here’s the thing: all of that is completely intentional. I get precisely what the point of this film is, I think, or at least a possible reading of everything in it that makes coherent sense. I’m not going to say that everybody else has it wrong, but I will say that the people who find Ben appealing and somehow laudable have it dead wrong. He’s a punk and he’s supposed to be a punk. Ben does nothing but screw up, and that’s exactly what he’s supposed to do here. The film isn’t about Ben “rescuing” Elaine or about the affair with Mrs. Robinson, or Oedipal issues. It’s about listless people adrift in the world doing things because they can’t think of anything else to do. Ben and Elaine and Mrs. Robinson are pitiful and pitiable because they can’t really be anything else.

And so, for that, this film is genius.

I don’t love this film, and I’m not sure at this point if I even like it. I do, however, respect the hell out of what Mike Nichols has accomplished with it. He has, for lack of a better word, tapped into that feeling of ennui, that complete lack of a point that everyone experiences at one time or another. Everyone is Ben Braddock at some point in life.

I’m not that guy anymore, although I’ve certainly been him in the past. I think if I had watched this film during those years of my life, I may well have placed this as one of my favorite movies ever. I’d see Ben Braddock as something of a hero, or at least as a sort of cinematic spirit guide. But I missed my chance. And so this will remain a film for which I will have a deep and abiding respect, but it’s platonic. Try as I might, I just can’t love it.

As a final note, almost all of the most famous moments from this film come in the first 20 minutes. It's kind of a letdown when everything you know of a film happens right away; it's almost like there's nothing to look forward to.

Why to watch The Graduate: Arguably the most iconic film of the 1960s, and everyone borrows from it.
Why not to watch: There’s something unappealing about the characters and especially the situation.

Post-Traumatic Stress

2011-12-05T13:19:00.003-06:00

Film: The Best Years of Our Lives
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I talk about Old Hollywood a lot on this blog, in part because I know that I have a couple of occasional readers who are either devoted fans or who hate it passionately. I understand both sides. I have an appreciation for films of the ‘30s and ‘40s, but I understand precisely why some folks don’t like them. I feel it’s a duty to suggest when a film fits into that stereotype and should be avoided by the haters or when it transcends them and should be seen by everybody.

The Best Years of Our Lives is very much a film that transcends the stereotype of overacting, schmaltz, and pure escapism. This is a film that would have been very much at home following virtually any war. I could see this film being made about returning Vietnam veterans, or Gulf War veterans, or vets of Afghanistan. In short, while the details of this film have aged in many ways, the themes have not, and the story is still as fresh and real and vital as it was in 1946 in the days following World War II.

We follow the fates of three men. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) was a bombardier in Europe. In the days before his deployment, he met and married Marie (Virginia Mayo). Now home, he has a wife he barely knows and no career. The only thing he’s capable of doing is working at his old job in a drugstore, spending part of his time behind the soda counter making floats and sundaes. His marriage never really got going and is now a shambles, in part because Marie was more in love with the uniform than with him, and in part because she isn’t content to stay home every night.

Al Stephenson (Fredric March) is the flipside of Fred. While Fred went from being poor in the real world to being a captain in the Air Force, Al went from a job as a loan officer in a bank to a mere Army sergeant (no disrespect meant to the sergeants of the world—this is strictly a rank issue. Sergeants, after all, make the military go ‘round). Now back with his wife Millie (Myrna Loy), daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright), and son Rob (Michael Hall), Al is attempting to fit back in to his civilian life. He does this with the liberal use of alcohol, much to Millie’s silent suffering.

Finally, we have Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), a Navy man who had both of his arms blown off. He’s left with two hooks for hands, and can do almost anything with them, except, as one of our other main characters notes, hold his girl, Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell). Homer’s story is in many ways the most tragic. For him, the loss of his hands means a loss of self-reliance. He wants only to be taken as the man he was, and sees any act of charity or assistance as pity, and he won’t have that. Moreover, he is unwilling to condemn Wilma to a life of looking after him because of his injuries.

What’s noteworthy about this film is that it doesn’t put a rosy spin on everything. Al’s drunkenness, for instance, is never really played for a laugh, but as a symptom of what he saw and experienced in the war. Called upon to give a speech at a gathering, Al continues to drink and Millie grimly ticks off the number of drinks he consumes. It’s tragic. Fred’s relationship with his wife turns sour the moment his back pay from the military runs out, and it never magically gets better because he deserves it or because that’s the way Hollywood movies work out. Their relationship enters a death spiral almost immediately and continues to circle until close to the end of the film. As for Homer, his anger and frustration are perhaps the most easily understood, but even here, we aren’t given a true Hollywood story. In the most poignant moment of the film, he brings Wilma into his bedroom and shows her the reality of his life without hands. It’s stark and painful and very, very real.

And this is precisely why this film is so good. It was created in a time when Hollywood directors and producers and studios sugar coated everything, a time when melodrama was king. But not here. These stories are real and visceral and human, which makes them compelling and worth watching. No one is spared the tragedy of these men returning from hell, least of all the audience.

It’s worth noting that Harold Russell really did lose both of his hands. He made only five movies in his lifetime, and this was his first. That he is less adept on screen than his costars is understandable. That he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role is equally understandable. While he is certainly not the greatest actor on this screen, he adds a real human touch to the film, and the presence of those twin hooks is so shocking and startling at first, the we almost ignore the man. By the end of the film, though, Homer Parrish the character is far more than the two metal hooks he wears, and that is a testament to any actor, as well as to a brilliant screenwriter.

This is a tremendous film, one of the great films of its decade and one of the great films of American film history. Just off years of making propaganda, pro-war films that boosted the morale of the home front, Hollywood managed to create one of the most powerful and moving post-war films ever conceived. The Deer Hunter works in much the same vein, but not with the same effect. The Best Years of Our Lives gives us no flashy situations, no violence or loss of life. What it does give us, though, is the sort of quiet human tragedy that any war creates. It is brilliant and sad and uplifting all at the same time, a true work of cinematic art.

As a final note, it’s been years since I saw this. The first time I did see it, I was a little kid. My father rented the film—on reels, no less—from the public library, and screened it on a fold-up movie screen in the living room. It was no less powerful now, 30+ years later.

Why to watch The Best Years of Our Lives: A film perfect for its own time, and continually relevant today.
Why not to watch: The title leads one to think it’s a film about happiness and fluffy bunnies…and it ain’t.

Rule Britannia

2011-12-04T00:15:00.002-06:00

Film: The Queen
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

When the world suffers a traumatic event, one question that gets asked frequently is “Where were you when you found out about _____?” When it comes to the death of Princess Diana, my answer is quite a bit different than most. Sue and I had just purchased a little vacation home (emphasis on little) and were spending that weekend working on it. We were completely out of touch with the world—no television, no radio, no newspaper. We didn’t find out for a good 48 hours. So I found out while eating lunch in a little townie bar on a Sunday.

The Queen is not about Diana, but at the same time, it is about her. The film covers the few days about and around the death of Diana in Paris and the week leading up to her funeral. So, while Diana herself appears in this film only as newsreel and interview footage, she is very much at the heart of the narrative. However, the film is truly about the royal family and how they dealt with Diana’s death and the aftermath. Central to this narrative is the head of the family, Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren).

What this film does is create a real sense of the royal family not as figureheads or monarchs or titular heads of the British Empire, but as actual people with lives and emotions. And, they have a number of specific concerns that virtually no one else in the world can appreciate. As the royal family, there are hundreds of years of precedent and protocol that must be followed at all times regardless of the reality of the situation. For them, the death of Diana was a singular and unique event.

Why? Well, strictly because they are royals. Diana had divorced Charles (played here by Alex Jennings) and was no longer a part of the royal family (an ex-HRH in the parlance of the film). Being a royal allowed for particular rights and privileges that now, based strictly on protocol, needed to be denied. And those rights and privileges were precisely what the rest of the world wanted Diana to have. The film depicts crowds of British citizens irate to the point of vehement anger that there was no flag flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. It didn’t matter to them, nor to the rest of the world, that the flag never flies at half-mast there. In fact the flag flies only to show the residency of a monarch. But that is what the people wanted, and its lack infuriated them. Precedent and protocol, a thousand years of tradition, no longer seemed to matter.

What this film does is, as I mentioned already, allow Elizabeth to become for the rest of the world a real person. Upon Diana’s death, her first instinct is to do what many of us would do; she looked to protect her family and attempted to keep the tragedy as a private affair within the walls of the family itself. She wanted the ability to deal with things on her own, to deal with her grandchildren not as royal scions, but as children.

The four members of the royal family who are actual characters in this film come off fairly unevenly. Both Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) come across poorly. Both appear hidebound and reduced to following tradition as a matter of course rather than for any good reason. Both seem almost devoid of sympathy or pity, wishing only for things to go back to the way they were before Diana’s fatal accident. Prince Charles comes across far more favorably, although by no means perfectly. There is a sense that he wishes to modernize the country and is willing to go along with the throngs of British citizens. There is also a sense that he is ferociously paranoid and fears assassination. The Queen herself comes off as a woman worn down by her duty and desperate to stave it off, but unable to do so. She is shown to us as a paragon of that long-gone past history when the monarch’s job was to face stoically whatever threatened her or her people.

But is it good? I’m happy to report that it is. Frears has managed to catch something on film that is almost completely unique. Elizabeth has always been a popular monarch, but this crises damaged her significantly. Frears sugar coats nothing, hides nothing, and exposes anything he can. As a result, Elizabeth becomes more approachable—more of a human being. In my opinion, she comes out of the film looking like a tough woman who doesn’t get to make many of her own choices, and who holds up as well as she can.

The film also deals with the election of Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), a Labour Party candidate. Evidently, the Labour Party contains the anti-royalist element of England, but as the film progresses, Blair begins to take pity on Elizabeth just as we do. His wife, Cherie (Helen McCrory), comes out as sort of the other side of the coin from Prince Phillip. She’s opposite, but still just as insensitive and uncaring.

I’m surprised that I liked this film as much as I did. But I did. The fact that Elizabeth favors corgis doesn’t hurt, either.

Why to watch The Queen: A fair and honest portrayal of one of the major figures in the world.
Why not to watch: Extensive reliving of the death of Diana.

Buckle and Swash

2011-12-02T23:48:00.003-06:00

Film: Captain Blood
Format: DVD from Mt. Morris Public Library through interlibrary loan on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There is always a bit of melodrama in old Hollywood films. The heroes are always as close to purely good as possible and the bad guys have nothing of the good about them. The good guys always come out triumphant in the end, the bad guys come to an appropriately bad end, and the people we’re supposed to like live happily ever after. There are plenty of people who dislike movies before a certain point, and honestly, I can understand that. It’s one of the reasons I tend to really like film noir. While, thanks to the Hays Code, the bad guys always got what was coming to them in film noir, they at least had motivations that weren’t entirely evil.

Captain Blood is not such a film. Dr. Peter Blood (Errol Flynn) is as perfect a movie hero as one could find. We learn right away that he is a) a medical doctor, b) willing to put himself at risk to save the life of a fellow man, c) has a history of sailing and adventure, and d) devilishly handsome. Called to the aid of a friend wounded in a rebellion, Blood is arrested as a traitor for giving aid to a traitor. Rather than being hanged, he is sent off to the West Indies by the auspices of the foppish and arrogant King James where he will become a slave.

It is here that Dr. Peter Blood is purchased by Arabella Bishop (Olivia de Havilland), niece of the local military commander, Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill). And I don’t almost need to say what happens next, do I? The pretty and idealistic Arabella does what she can for the benefit of the sexy, equally idealistic, proud and manly Tasmanian stud, who publically is displeased by this but secretly appreciates it. Romance blooms slowly. She helps out by allowing him to treat the gout problem of the local governor (George Hassell).

Of course, this doesn’t stop Blood from trying to escape, and escape he does when the Spanish raid the West Indies settlement. He becomes a pirate, soon developing a reputation and a huge fortune. It’s evident that the governor can’t handle the pirates and he is replaced in favor of Bishop, who does all he can to quell the pirates. In the ensuing chaos, Arabella is returned to England. Oh, but she’ll be back, of course. There’s no reason she wouldn’t be, since all adventure-y, swashbuckling films of this era need a strong element of romance. And it wouldn’t be too much of a shock to tell you precisely how it ends, since you likely have an idea already, but I won’t spoil it completely. It does, however, end precisely as you think it will. Actually, it probably ends quite a bit more positively than you might think possible.

It’s worth mentioning that the great Basil Rathbone appears here as a villain as well—he’s initially an ally of Blood but takes to piracy to easily and too thoroughly to be considered a good guy. It’s just as well, because Basil Rathbone plays a pretty good villain. Of course, this ends with a massive sword duel, one of the better ones of the early cinema.

This movie rises and falls on the talents of its two main leads, Flynn and de Havilland. Fortunately for the film, they are both excellent in their roles even if their roles aren’t at all believable. Really, no one is as pure-hearted as Peter Blood (and certainly not the real-life Errol Flynn), but that’s okay. It’s all a part of the mystique of the film and of the era it comes from. It would not be at all a stretch to suggest that this film is a big part of the pirate mystique, too. In fact, I might go so far as to suggest that in many ways, Captain Blood is a big part of the reason that pirate films are what they are, and why pirates—traditionally about as evil as one could get in the real world—have a romantic image in the public consciousness. Yeah, Pirates of the Caribbean doesn’t hurt either, but Captain Blood came first by 70 years and influenced everything that came after it.

It’s hard not to like this film on some level. It’s not believable, and the characters are certainly idealized versions that are nothing like real people, but there is a real charm here. Olivia de Havilland was an absolute charmer, and Flynn, well, he was a movie star in every sense of the word, at least in this early part of his career. For the early years of adventure films, they don’t get a lot better than this one.

Why to watch Captain Blood: It’s a hell of a swashbuckling adventure.
Why not to watch: If you don’t like old Hollywood, you won’t like this one.

Month 23 Status Report

2011-12-01T21:23:00.002-06:00

Another month come and gone, with some interesting results. I don't honestly have a ton to say about what I watched in November except to say that my goal was to watch a lot of more rare and unusual films and didn't see as many as I intended. After all, these films are rare, and difficult to find, and so finding a lot of them all at once is even more difficult. I did manage a few, though, and have a real rarity lined up for the next few days, possibly as soon as tomorrow.

As for December, I expect that the next couple of weeks will be slow (end of term nuttiness) followed by a massive number of films to round out the end of the year.

The real news is that I'm now a mere five films away from half--540 watched, 549 to go. It will be an interesting feeling to be on the back half of this experience.

A Very Short Marathon

2011-11-30T23:39:00.002-06:00

Film: Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run)
Format: DVD from Rasmussen College Library projected on screen.

Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run) is a film with which I have a strange history. Several years ago, I was called in to substitute for a film study class. The movie that had been selected for that night was Lola Rennt. Tonight, essentially the same thing happened. I needed to find a film that would create a good discussion, that wasn’t too long, and that was immediately available in my school library. Naturally enough, I selected the same film. So I’ve seen this film twice, both times in a classroom that I wouldn’t normally have been in charge of.

Tom Tykwer’s film is an interesting one, and as I predicted, it made for a good discussion after we had watched it. There were, in fact, some excellent observations from the students, some of which I will almost certainly mention in the next several hundred words.

Anyway, we start with Lola (Franka Potente), who receives a phone call from her boyfriend, Manni (Mortiz Bleibtrau). Manni has been entrusted with a vast sum of money—100,000DM—but due to circumstances, left it behind on a commuter train where the sack of cash was picked up by a hobo. Now, he needs to replace that money in 20 minutes or his criminal boss will kill him, no questions asked. And so, Lola, who has her own problems, must run to help him.

From this point on, Lola Rennt becomes a sort of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, with the next 20 minutes played out three times, each one with minor changes at the start that create major changes in the ending. In each case, the changes that occur cause the timing of events to be slightly off, causing massive changes. A car accident is avoided by a sudden tap on the brakes, caused by Lola’s appearance a second sooner or later. Lives change and are changed, and in some cases lost, because of Lola’s position on the street at a given moment.

Really, this is the entire point of the film. Tykwer seems to be arguing that we are all merely puppets in the vast scheme of things, that our lives are entirely at the whim of forces that appear to be beyond our control. We see this not only in the cases of Lola and Manni, but also Lola’s father (Herbert Knaup), the woman he is having an affair with (Nina Petri), and even a few people who bump into Lola on her run through the city. We’re told these stories in a quick series of still photographs. In one case, for instance, a woman pushing a baby carriage experiences a series of events that cause her to lose her child and steal another. Another time through, her encounter with Lola is different, and she wins a lottery.

The visual style is fascinating. Lola’s run through her apartment is told with animation each time, while her run through the streets of her unnamed German city are exercises in editing, pacing, and rhythm. Often, our view of Lola changes in time with the music, happening rhythmically as she progresses. We get flash cuts of her from different angles, see her from far above running through an open plaza, always moving toward someone or something that can help her save Manni. Visually, Lola is always the center of attention because of the severe color of her hair, a shocking red. Her clothing is relatively neutral in color, making her face the constant draw, and since she is almost always on screen, she is always where we look.

The runs are, as mentioned, heavily edited. Between, we are treated to slow, almost dreamy passages of Lola and Manni lying in bed talking. These moments slow the film down, but are necessary breaks from the overwhelming pace of the 20-minute segments. These segments are red, reminiscent of Lola’s hair color despite the fact that at these times, she is evidently a bleach blonde (or at least has a much lighter hair color).

I like this film. I think it’s entirely possible for people to dislike this film, mostly from being overwhelmed by it, but I think it’s frenetic pace works really well. More importantly for me tonight, the class seemed to enjoy it quite a bit, which made discussing it much more fun. One of the better observations in the class was that much like a video game with save positions, Lola appears to learn from her past experiences. She’s given a gun in the first run but isn’t sure how to use it and must be instructed. On the second run, she takes a gun from someone and is familiar with it immediately. It’s possible that the other characters learn as well; the guard at her father’s bank seems to understand at some level that Lola is going through the same thing over and over again until she gets it right.

Lola Rennt is an inventive and interesting film as well as an exciting one. Normally, when I watch something this short (it’s about 75 minutes without the end credits), I wish it would go a touch longer. Not in this case. The length is perfect. Any more would be unnecessary and completely overwhelming.

Why to watch Lola Rennt: A nearly unique take on narrative style.
Why not to watch: Lola runs…a lot.

Boo Radley

2011-11-29T23:55:00.002-06:00

Film: To Kill a Mockingbird
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on portable DVD player.

I don’t know when filmmakers really first took a long look at the idea of racism as a topic ready for film. Griffiths touched on it back in the silent era, albeit not very sensitively. But it took a very long time for Hollywood to actually really address ideas of racism and racial equality, a topic still being addressed to this day. In many ways, today’s results are just as uneven as they have ever been. We’ve gone from a culture which depicted non-whites as negative stereotypes to one that has a tendency to depict non-whites as positive stereotypes.

To Kill a Mockingbird goes for something in the middle, attempting to depict something much closer to reality. The main black character in the film, Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) is truly neither negative nor positive, but is merely innocent. He’s nothing more than a man accused wrongfully of a crime, and as a black man, is unable to get anything like a fair trial in Depression-era Alabama.

Ah, but I’ve gotten far ahead of myself here. This film is an accurate depiction of the book of the same name by Harper Lee. Our main character here is Scout (Mary Badham), a young girl of allegedly six, despite the fact that she comes off much more as either eight or nine. She and her brother Jem (Phillip Alford) live with their father, Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), who is a lawyer in this small Alabama town. Over the summers, they gain a playmate in Dill (John Megna), a startlingly ugly little kid who spends summers with his aunt.

It is generally through the eyes of these children, particularly Scout, that we see the film. When Tom Robinson is accused of assaulting and raping a white woman named Mayella Ewell (Collin Wilcox Paxton), we learn almost nothing of the crime or the preparations of the trial until mid-way through the film. While these events are central to the story, they aren’t central to the kids, and are thus glossed over until they become central to them.

Much of the film deals with the identity and nature of Arthur “Boo” Radley (Robert Duvall in his first real screen role), the allegedly insane son of the Finchs’ neighbor. Boo Radley is a figure of fascination and fear to the young kids. They are fascinated with his insanity and his evident social reticence, and terrified of the story that he once attacked his own father with a pair of scissors.

The reason this film works, and work it does, is in no small part because of the kids, Scout in particular. While she absolutely does not pass for the age she is supposed to be, she is incredibly natural in the role, and completely believable. She comes off as both wise and innocent, which is the perfect and necessary combination for the role. There is a sense that, for instance, when she prevents a lynch mob from stringing up Tom Robinson before the trial, that she may know precisely what she is doing.

While the film comes from Scout’s point of view, and from a lesser extent from Jem’s (particularly at the trial), it is Atticus who is the real center of the film. As the defense attorney, he is obviously central to the trial, but he is also the moral center of the film as well. He decides to defend Tom regardless of the personal cost to him. He knows that in this small Alabama town that his case is a loser no matter what. He demonstrates clearly the man’s innocence—the fact that Tom had no use of his left hand is a clear indicator of that—but Atticus knows that the case is lost from the first moments. His pleading with the jury is evidence of this as well. And yet, he goes through with the case because it is right to do it. One of the best and most moving moments of the film comes after the conclusion of the trial. Tom has been led out and the white spectators have left. Atticus stands alone on the courtroom floor packing his briefcase while the black spectators stand in the balcony above him. As he turns to leave, the black reverend tells Scout to stand as her father walks past, a gesture of respect for this man who has sacrificed his own reputation simply because it was the right thing to do.

There is a sweetness to this film despite its subject matter. There is a sense of nostalgia, of childhood in the games the kids play, the mystery they create around Boo Radley, and the loss of innocence as the trial comes to its inevitable conclusion. In many ways, the kids grow up through the film because they are forced to do so by the events that surround them. They, after all, are the children of the man who defended Tom, making the school playground a suddenly dangerous environment.

This is a truly great film, rewarding and deep and intelligent. Don’t let the fact that the book is regularly assigned to junior high students prevent you from finding this and watching it. You will not be disappointed.

Winnipeg vs. San Jose

2011-11-27T20:42:00.005-06:00

Film: West Side Story
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Before I started this journey, I had a track record with musicals. I don’t like them much, although there are some exceptions. If we disregard those exceptions, though, I had basically two opinions on musicals. First, if I’d seen it, I didn’t like it. Second, if I hadn’t seen it, I didn’t want to. Those few others were held up as the exceptions proving the rule that musicals leave me cold. I don’t like something that purports itself to be the real world, but contains choreography and orchestras evidently hidden around every corner. Of the musicals that inspired my wrath, one of the chief ones was West Side Story.

Oh, I know its long and storied history. I know that it’s based on Romeo and Juliet, and that it won a shit-ton of Oscars. I know that the songs are generally regarded as some of the finest in the history of musical theater (and by analogy, film). But I hated it, admittedly more on the general principle that it’s a musical rather than for any concrete reason.

So I’ve watched it again. I still don’t love it, but now I have reasons more sound than just it’s a musical and therefore icky.

Let’s start with the ending, and yes, I’m going full-bore into spoilers here. West Side Story has been around for 50 years, is highly acclaimed, and based on a story that’s been told for 400 years and was itself reminiscent of ancient Greek tales (Pyramus and Thisbe come to mind). If you don’t know how Romeo and Juliet ends (or for that matter how West Side Story ends), it’s your own fault at this point.

Bluntly, they mess with the ending. The whole point of Romeo and Juliet is that the star-crossed, tragic lovers both die, and do so from a misunderstanding. Maria (Natalie Wood) survives the film. She threatens to kill herself, but doesn’t. So this major theme, this significant part of the ending, is simply ignored. I’m not saying I want Maria to die; I’m just saying that her death is sort of an important part of the tale being told here.

Next, let’s deal with the fact that our characters here are, essentially, punks. These are not heroic characters except in their own minds. They are juvenile delinquents bent on fighting to protect a little patch of ground. And, of course, they seem to spend a lot of time practicing their choreography and singing as opposed to, y’know, doing gang stuff.

Sorry. But they are delinquents, with the exception of Tony (Richard Beymer), who has a job and has done his best to get out of the gang world. His gang, the Jets, is run by Riff (Russ Tamblyn), and is made up of American mutts of various ethnic backgrounds, but all born in New York. The rival gang, the Sharks, is entirely Puerto Rican, and run by Bernardo (George Chakiris), who happens to be Maria’s brother. Of course, he is overprotective of his sister and most especially wants her to have nothing to do with the white kids, Tony in particular.

And there are some pretty good fights, and a bunch of songs that go around them. The Jets suggest one big rumble with the Sharks to decide who gets to go where, and Tony convinces them that it should be fists only, and only one member from each gang. Why? Because he is immediately enamored of Maria and she of him, and so he’d like there to be some measure of peace between the two gangs. Of course, everything goes wrong. Bernardo kills Riff, Tony kills Bernardo, and then all of the Sharks want to kill Tony, who only wants to run away with Maria.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that the songs aren’t good, or that the dancing isn’t good, or even that it is poorly staged. It simply comes down to the fact that I don’t like it very much. I’m not a tremendous fan of the story, and that’s a big part of this. I don’t love Romeo and Juliet in terms of Shakespeare’s canon—there are a number of his plays I like a hell of a lot more. And that really damages my opinion here.

It’s also long, and could probably stand with a little chopping here and there. Perhaps a song here or there to get us to something a bit under 150 minutes. It could do with some trimming, although in all honesty, we could shave off a good 8-10 minutes by getting rid of the essentially pointless overture and unnecessary intermission.

Would I like it if I liked the story? Well, probably. The songs really are good, and it is beautifully filmed. In fact, the story is really the only place I can find real fault here. And that’s something that no film can overcome.

Why to watch West Side Story: It’s a classic musical for a reason, and it’s based on Billy the Shake.
Why not to watch: There’s that whole “it’s a musical” thing.

Songs About Rainbows

2011-11-27T13:59:00.001-06:00

Film: The Muppets
Format: Sycamore Theater.

We’re going to go off script for a day. Sue and I took the girls to a matinee showing of The Muppets yesterday. There really isn’t a chance in hell that this film will ever be place on The List. There are already enough corny and sappy kids’ movies here and too many films from 2010 that will be added in the next edition (in my opinion) to make room for a film that is reminiscent of sappy Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musicals from yesteryear. But I still want to talk about this film. I see things in the theater so rarely, that when I see something I really like, I’m compelled to comment.

We’re introduced to Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), who is a Muppet living in a human world with his brother, Gary (Jason Segel). Gary has been dating Mary (Amy Adams) for ten years and plans a big, romantic dinner in Los Angeles with her. They go, and Gary insists on bringing Walter, who has spent his entire life watching old Muppet Show reruns. All Walter wants is to see Muppet Studios. However, the studio has fallen on hard times. The Muppets have all gone their separate ways, and wealthy oil tycoon Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) wants to buy the studio and drill for oil underneath it. Of course, the only way to save the studio is for the Muppets to join up again and put on a huge show/telethon to raise the $10 million needed to buy the studio back.

Really, that’s it. Along the way, we get a few songs (some of which are disturbingly short) and a lot of Muppet-style hijinks, the sort of stuff those of us old enough to remember The Muppet Show can recite by heart. All, or at least many of the Muppets show up at times—we spend a great deal of time with Animal and the rest of the Electric Mayhem (still a great band name), Fozzie, Scooter, and of course Kermit and Miss Piggy. Many of the other Muppets are tangential to the film—I’d have liked a lot more Rowlf the Dog, for instance.

This is a film that has its heart in the right place, though, but it tries to show it far too quickly. The film feels a little short. There’s room here for another 10 minutes of sight gags and bad jokes. That is what I’d have liked to see.

I love how self-aware the film is, though. Throughout there are a number of jokes made specifically referring to the fact that this is a film. There are also plenty of callbacks to the original series of Muppet films, the television show, and those Garland/Rooney musicals of yore, and many of these things are done consciously as well. For instance, when the gang goes to collect Gonzo, we discover that (much like Mr. Fabulous in The Blues Brothers), Gonzo is sitting pretty and has no real reason to give up his life. But, of course, he does.

And it’s here that there’s a real plot hole. Gonzo runs a huge plumbing company, and to join the rest of the team, he literally blows it up. One wonders why he couldn’t have simply sold the company, thus giving the Muppets a great deal of the money (if not all) that they’d need for the studio. But, of course, if he did that, there’d be no movie. Still, it’s the first thing I thought of.

The greatest level of self-awareness of this film, though, is the fact that the Muppets live in the real world and have real problems and real lives. Kermit, who has always been a beacon of hope and self-reliance, has doubts as well as relationship problems (real ones) with his love interest. Kermit having doubts wouldn’t have happened in an earlier time. That, more than anything is what brings this film into the modern day.

The writers of this film love the Muppets as characters. That is evident. And, fortunately, that’s enough. This film is fun and heartwarming and sweet. Go see it and take the kids. This is a “feel good” film of the highest order; it will make you feel good. And if you don’t get a little misty when Kermit sings “Rainbow Connection,” there’s something off with you.

Why to watch The Muppets: Because it’s charming and sweet, and reminds us that cynicism isn’t always right.
Why not to watch: Plot holes, Y U NO get fixed?

Establishing the Costner Rule

2011-11-26T19:47:00.002-06:00

Film: Dances with Wolves
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on big ol’ television.

There’s a rule for Kevin Costner films, or at least something of a guideline. Essentially, Kevin Costner films that are Westerns or films about athletes are pretty good, and anything else in his film catalog is essentially crap. Thus, Silverado, Field of Dreams and Bull Durham are excellent films and worth watching. On the other side, Waterworld and The Postman suck. There are exceptions, of course. There are those who will tell you that Dances with Wolves is one of those exceptions. We’ll be discussing two noteworthy exceptions soon enough.

In fact, Dances with Wolves is one of those “Oscar mistakes” that happen every now and then. For many, it’s especially galling that this film won Best Picture and Costner won Best Director over Scorsese and Goodfellas. I’m not going to comment on that. That all boils down to opinion, and truthfully, Goodfellas probably is a better movie and will have a longer and more meaningful impact on film. But I’ve already written about that film, so I’m going to leave off talking about it now.

What surprised me most about putting Dances with Wolves in the spinner was the length. I remember this being a long movie, and I had assumed it would be a touch over three hours. Instead, it’s a touch short of four. For all that length, it doesn’t drag terribly, although it could easily be cut down to something much closer to three hours without losing much.

Anyway, this is the story of Lt. John Dunbar (Costner), who starts the film as a Union officer badly wounded and moments away from losing his leg to a surgeon’s knife. He manages to squeeze his boot back on and drag himself outside to the battle line, where the North and South are in an uneasy ceasefire. Looking to end his own life, Dunbar rides out toward the Southern lines, inviting fire, and giving the Union the opportunity to charge and overwhelm the Confederates. As a reward, he gets some quality medical care, keeps his leg, and gets his choice of post. He selects Fort Sedgwick, which is as far out on the frontier as he can get.

When he gets there, he discovers the fort completely abandoned, and takes it upon himself to rebuild it. He soon encounters the local tribe of Lakota Sioux, and the bulk of the film deals with his relationship with these people. The most important of these to Dunbar are Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), Wind in His Hair (Rodney A. Grant), Ten Bears (Floyd Red Crow Westerman), and Stands with a Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman captured by the Lakota at a young age. Because she can still speak a little English, she serves as interpreter for the meetings between Dunbar and Kicking Bird, and also as Dunbar’s instructor in Lakota. And (naturally) romance blossoms.

And then the white men come and ruin everything as only true melodramatic villains can. Really, the entire point of the film is to demonstrate for about three hours the essential nobility of the native people and then hammer home the essential recklessness and evil of the white invaders. Just as the pendulum swung far one way with Westerns back in the day painting the natives as savages, Dances with Wolves kicked it to the opposite extreme, positing that the Lakota maintained an essential human nobility and dignity that we white people could never match.

The truth? It’s probably somewhere in between.

But in truth, Dances with Wolves is an excellent film, one that has suffered from the backlash of being seen as better in the moment than a film that has and will have a much more lasting impact on film. It’s the same thing that happened to Titanic. This film gets the beat down from people who think that Goodfellas should have won more awards, and to make the case, are happy to bring up every possible negative of Costner’s film.

The melodrama is overdone; the Union officers who arrive at the end, for instance, lack only Snidely Whiplash mustaches and train tracks to tie a virgin to. The romance between Dunbar (who is given the Sioux name Dances with Wolves because of his relationship with a wolf he names Two Socks) and Stands with a Fist is telegraphed a full hour ahead of it becoming reality. Evidently, this is the main addition of the version that I watched, and while this isn’t bad, it doesn’t really add much of importance to the film itself.

Dances with Wolves isn’t going to make anyone a Western fan. It’s also not going to turn anyone into a Kevin Costner fan. But, it is pretty good. But I heartily recommend the shorter, 3-hour version rather than the much beefier one. And really, you should be prepared for a giant guilt buffet, particularly if you are a white American.

Why to watch Dances with Wolves: It’s better than you remember.
Why not to watch: It plays the guilt card with reckless abandon.

No Shoes, Full Service

2011-11-25T23:26:00.002-06:00

Film: The Barefoot Contessa
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

When people talk about movies about the movies, one that rarely gets mentioned, at least within earshot of me, is The Barefoot Contessa. Having watched the film, I think this may be simply because people haven’t seen it, not because it doesn’t rank with films like 8 ½ or The Player. It’s one hell of a film, and it’s one hell of a meta-film. There’s quite a bit more here than just a story.

Movies about movies require a particular level of self-awareness, and this film has that in spades. We start at the end, at the funeral of the eponymous Contessa. The bulk of the film is told from the point of view of Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), a screenwriter and director hitting difficult and desperate times. At the start of the story he tells, Dawes is starting to claw his way back in Hollywood as much as he can. To get there, he’s hooked up with Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens), a man far too wealthy for his own good with a yen to stroke his own ego by making a movie. To do this, he wants a new face, and has gone to Madrid with Harry, his publicist Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien), and a fading drunk actress named Myrna (Mari Aldon).

They meet a dancer named Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), and despite her immediate dislike of Kirk Edwards, she agrees to a screen test. In part, this is because she trusts Harry. In part, this is because her terrible, hateful mother wishes her not to. And then, well, then the film becomes something very different than one might expect. It goes in directions different and unusual for a film that is at least in part a skewering of the Hollywood system and the movie industry. Fortunately, this makes it a better film, because it makes it a less predictable film.

In truth, the plot here isn’t particularly difficult to explain or understand, but it is staggering, and worth discovering on one’s own without having it much spoiled. There’s a lot here I’d much rather talk about than a plot summary, anyway, because this is a film with a number of levels, and it clicks on all of them.

Bogart plays his role with a degree of world weariness that seems to suit him. He looks world weary. His face was made for black-and-white photography, and in color, as in this film, he looks old and worn, but has lost none of his power as an actor. Bogart plays this role as it should be played—a man who has been beaten down and defeated by life, but who has emerged on the other side of it with a measure of happiness and self-respect. Having given up the bottle and (one imagines) any number of other vices, he is content with his scripts, the films he directs, and the love of Jerry (Elizabeth Sellars), a script girl who loves him back just as intensely. O’Brien’s Oscar Muldoon is the quintessential Hollywood press agent; he’s sleazy and dirty, and would feel right at home in a film like Sweet Smell of Success, but like Bogart, has a certain world-weariness to him that suits both his own hangdog expression and the role. Oscar has seen everything, covered everything up, and made amends on someone else’s behalf for anything imaginable, and he’s acquired the 1000-yard stare to go with it. And he still does it, but he’s also wised up to exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it.

There are three men in the film who vie for Maria’s romantic attention, and all three have some particular similarities. The trio is made up of fabulously wealthy men who all have a particular vulnerability. Kirk Edwards is the first, although he truly never has a shot with Maria. He’s far too controlling, a little boy in a man’s body, demanding his own way and using both his money and threats to force others into compliance. When, halfway through the film he is essentially rendered impotent, he reacts in the only way he knows how. Second is Alberto Bravano (Marius Goring) has all of the foibles of Edwards without the self-righteousness but with a disturbing shamelessness that makes him particularly unappealing. Third is Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi), who eventually wins her and marries her, but is physically impotent, which for Maria may be the biggest crime.

And then there is Maria, around whom the entire film revolves. It is, after all, her funeral that we start at and her funeral that we return to at the end of the film. I’ve never been a big fan of Ava Gardner, but that may only be because I didn’t like the first several of her films that I saw. Had this been my first exposure to her, I’d have been a fan from the start. She inhabits this role perfectly, as if born to play it. Maria Vargas is a poor girl made good, and a poor girl unable to live in that world. I don't know if that's true of Ava Gardner, but she makes it work here.

I watched this one on a whim tonight, just scrolling through what was available streaming and what still needed to be seen from the list. It was one hell of a good choice, because this one is one hell of a great film. This one I will watch again.

Why to watch The Barefoot Contessa: It’s a better film than you think for a film you probably haven’t heard of.
Why not to watch: Looking for this film is likely to turn up a bunch of cookbooks and cooking shows. Bite me, Ina Garten!

Bildungsroman

2011-11-23T23:10:00.002-06:00

Film: American Graffiti
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on big ol’ television.

Let’s talk soundtrack for a moment. Plenty of films have great soundtracks. Personally, I think the high point of the film score came with the release of Super Fly and the incredible work by Curtis Mayfield. For a soundtrack of found music, most people look to films by Tarantino and his ability to select the right song for the right mood. As much as I am ambivalent to Tarantino’s work in general, I do have to credit him with a good ear. But the soundtrack for American Graffiti is impossible to top. If I remember correctly, it was a two-record set, and every song was a hit in the early days of rock and roll.

This is completely appropriate for a film that is more or less a love letter to those days when rock records were about teen love and drag races, because that’s really what American Graffiti is. It tells of a much simpler, easier time, when juvenile delinquents caused a little property damage instead of running around armed. Kids showed up to school with a hickey, not pregnant. Okay, I don’t really believe any of that, either. However, it is the position that the film takes, because the film is looking at this time through the lens of 10 years worth of nostalgia.

The film takes place on the last night of the summer of 1962, and concerns the fate of a number of kids, specifically four young men. It’s a pretty standard formula, and one that has been repeated a number of times (the first American Pie film comes to mind). Our quartet consists of Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), who is not sure he wants to go to college on the East Coast. Going with him is Steve (Ron Howard), who is currently dating Curt’s kid sister, Laurie (Cindy Williams), but wants to see other people while he’s away. Staying in town are John (Paul Le Mat), the current king of the dragstrip, and Terry (Charles Martin Smith), a semi-nerd with the unfortunate nickname of Toad. Toad’s biggest problem isn’t his horn-rimmed glasses or his pink shirt, but his lack of a car.

On this final evening of the summer, the four meet, separate, and have their own adventures as the cruise the town for girls and, essentially, look for meaning in their lives. Each one of them is looking for something, and none of them is really sure what the goal is. They’re just doing what they’ve always done, but on this night, there seems to be a little more at stake.

Curt ends up on his own and runs afoul of the local gang of car-crazy juvenile delinquents, the Pharoahs. To save himself from being pummeled, he performs his own acts of delinquency. He also spends the evening chasing a blonde vision in a white T-bird (Suzanne Sommers), going so far as to contact the local radio station to send out a dedication to her in one of the sweetest scenes in the film. Curt doesn’t know what he wants—he doesn’t want anything to change, but comes to realize that life is what he makes it, and the life he wants isn’t here.

Steve, on the other hand, does seem to know what he wants, and knows it’s not here. He cares very much for Laurie, but wants to be set free to experience the world, something that Laurie resists strongly. After all, they’ve been together for a long time and seem like a perfect couple. Their break-up in the middle of the film is a real break in Steve’s life, causing him to reevaluate everything he thinks he wants and needs.

John feels stuck in the town, but doesn’t really seem to consciously want anything more. At least, on the surface, he appears to be content, but there is a sense of ennui in him that runs pretty deep. He cruises the strip and, after offering an invitation to a car full of girls, ends up cruising with the 12-year-old sister of someone else. Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) is at first a nuisance, but eventually, John comes to feel about her like a little sister. Also, since John is the equivalent of the fastest gun, he’s being pursued by another drag racer (Harrison Ford) through the town.

And then there’s Terry, a sort of loveable loser. Terry the Toad is essentially the group’s Ringo. Steve, who is going to college, gives Terry the use of his car, and Terry uses this to pick up Debbie (Candy Clark), and has a series of misadventures with her. All Terry wants is a girl to like him, and will go to any length to convince a girl that he’s worth being with.

And really, that’s the whole movie. Each of the four storylines bounce into each other, and the film is essentially told in order, switching between the four characters throughout as they go through this final evening. In their own way, each of them grows up. Curt discovers that he needs to let go, Steve finds what he wants out of his life, and Terry realizes that he’s not necessarily the loser he thought he was. And then there’s John, who seems to come away from the night with the realization that he won’t always be the fastest gunslinger behind the wheel and needs to discover something to do.

All of this is great. American Graffiti is charming and fun and wildly entertaining. And then there’s the final moment of the film before the credits roll, and we learn about the lives of these four guys after this night. That makes sense with a film like this, and while I’ve seen this film before, it had been a long time and I had forgotten this was there. And these “whatever happened to” bios were ridiculously depressing. It was a huge downer after such a sweet and tender film.

It’s good. Surprise, surprise, it actually had some pretty decent dialogue, which has always been the Achilles heel of George Lucas. Just be warned that when you see the shot of the airplane flying off into the big blue, you may want to stop the film and consider that the end.

Incidentally, you can almost certainly cite this film as the source of the television show Happy Days, and thus Laverne and Shirley as well as the casting of Ron Howard in the first and Cindy Williams in the second. Who knew Richie Cunningham and Shirley Feeney went steady?

Why to watch American Graffiti: Nostalgia done the way it should be.
Why not to watch: The “what happened to” graphics are a let-down.

Rebuilding the Old West

2011-11-22T23:54:00.002-06:00

Film: True Grit
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

It always strikes me as strange when directors I like do remakes, because the remake often strikes me as the lowest form of movie making. Oh, I know that’s not really true, but it does feel that way. It’s how I reacted when Scorsese remade Infernal Affairs as The Departed. So when the Coens remade True Grit, I was sort of nonplussed. And I was even more of that opinion when I remembered that this was the second time this had happened; the Coens remade The Ladykillers a few years ago.

Anyway, True Grit is a story of revenge. Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) sees her father killed and wishes the man brought to justice. Specifically, she wants to see the man hang. To see this come to pass, she hires Rueben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a marshal who seems to be the exact opposite of young Mattie in every respect. Mattie has a head for business and numbers, brooks no backtalk, and always attempts to deal from a position of strength. She isn’t shy about dropping the name of the family lawyer at every opportunity if she thinks it will get her what she wants, and she isn’t shy about making moral judgments on others. Cogburn, on the other hand, is a hard-drinking, vicious lawman who is really a lawman only in name. In truth, he’s little more than a talented gunslinger who sometimes shoots malefactors.

Cogburn attempts to go on the hunt without Mattie, but she has none of it. They are joined on the trail by LaBouef (Matt Damon) a proud Texas Ranger who is coincidentally searching for the same man, albeit under a different name. It seems that the man who shot Mattie’s pappy is a wanted man in Texas because he also managed to shoot and kill a senator. The trio rides together and splits up multiple times over the course of the movie, generally with LaBouef (pronounced as “lu-BEEF” throughout; my friends of the same last name in spelling say it differently) riding one way and Mattie and Cogburn riding another.

Finally, there is the confrontation, which is a big one. Mattie finally catches up with Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), who is now riding with notorious outlaw Lucky Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper, who was possibly cast for the awesome reason that his last name is the same as that of the character), who also happens to be wanted. This means a bigger bounty for Cogburn, who seems to want little more than just enough money for his next meal. He doesn’t worry about whiskey—as a marshal, he just confiscates what he wants to drink.

And really, that’s it. True Grit is a pretty straightforward tale of a young girl looking for revenge for her father, and finding it in some unexpected places. The title, I think, refers not to Cogburn, although he certainly proves his mettle in the course of the film. Similarly, it could but does not refer to LaBouef. Mattie is the one with real grit here, and she demonstrates this at every possible turn.

For me, one of the real joys of the Coen brothers is the dialogue. No Country for Old Men is my personal favorite of their films, and one of the main reasons I like it so much is because the dialogue is so precisely and carefully written. Here, there are a number of times that the writing is more of a distraction than it is an aid in telling the story. The characters generally speak without contractions, making everything they say sound artificial and forced. It would be easy to ignore if it popped up here and there, but it’s through almost the entire movie. In that respect, this film reminded by quite a bit of the same issue I had with Guys and Dolls. The forced artificiality bothers me because it seems so unnecessary.

I like this film pretty well, but I do have to question what all the fuss was about, and this is coming from the perspective of someone who really likes the Coens. I at least like all of their films that I’ve seen, and some I genuinely love. This one, though, while good and enjoyable, doesn’t seem to be a film that rises to the level of required viewing. Well filmed, yes. Well acted, yes. Necessary? I’m not so sure.

It would, however, make a dandy double feature with Unforgiven.

Why to watch True Grit: A classic reborn modern.
Why not to watch: It’s reborn, but really, so what?

Road to Nowhere

2011-11-21T16:57:00.003-06:00

Film: Stranger than Paradise
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Since the first moment someone unconnected to a studio got access to a movie camera, indie cinema existed, or at least had the potential to exist. To the minds of many, though, indie cinema really started, or at least became something significant, when Jim Jarmusch made Stranger than Paradise, a virtually plotless piece of Americana that explores one of the great questions of any age: boredom.

We deal initially with Willie (John Lurie), who is formerly from Hungary and is actually named Bela. But he’s become fully Americanized and identifies as American, and doesn’t even really like to hear Hungarian being spoken. His aunt (Cecillia Stark) calls him to remind him of the arrival of his cousin, and that now, instead of her staying for a day or two at his New York apartment, she’ll be staying with him for 10 days.

The cousin is Eva (Eszter Balint), who is young and pretty, and completely unadjusted to life in the States. We also meet Willie’s friend Eddie (Richard Edson), who immediately finds Eva attractive, but who is essentially pushed away from her by Willie. Eva and Willie don’t like each other too much at first, but eventually grow to a level of acclimation with each other, particularly when Eva steals food and gives it to him. He reciprocates by buying her a dress that he likes (and she doesn’t) and by deliberately misteaching her American idioms. And then, the 10 days are up and Eva heads off to Cleveland.

A year later, after scamming a bunch of money in a poker game, Eddie and Willie borrow a car and go to visit Eva. What they discover is that life in Cleveland is just as boring as their lives in New York, and after a few days, they’re just as bored. Everything looks the same to them, and the television is exactly the same. So they decide to go somewhere really different, heading to Florida. But before they go, they “rescue” Eva from her job at a hot dog restaurant. And in Florida, everything changes, but remains strangely exactly the same for all three characters.

There are three parts to the film—New York, Cleveland, and Florida, and each one is about half an hour long. In each, we see variations of the same story. In its own way, it sort of presages a film like Lola Rennt, although without specifically repeating itself each time.

Jarmusch’s style in this film is interesting. He doesn’t ever cut from one scene to the next—each scene is a take of varying length followed by a second or two of a black screen. What this means is that the film feels choppy at first, but this rhythm soon becomes normal, and moving from one shot to the next feels natural.

It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the fact that nothing really happens in this film until the last 15 minutes or so is entirely the point of the film. Our characters are aimless in the absolute meaning of the word—they have no direction. Even when they appear to have a direction, as when Willie and Eddie decide to go to Cleveland or to Florida, they aren’t going there with any specific reason in mind. Instead, it’s merely an excuse to get away from where they are and an attempt to get rid of the crushing boredom of their everyday lives. The fact that they are continually unsuccessful in this is also the point. Their lives have no direction, and no real meaning, and no real point.

Again, nothing really happens until the very end. At the end, we get all sorts of events at the same time, a complete opposite of what the first hour and change has been. That there is no plot for the bulk of the film is what makes it so compelling in its own way. At least that’s what makes it so important as an indie film. Jarmusch essentially took everything that we expect to see in a film—like a story that makes us want to keep watching—and did away with it completely. We’d get much the same story if the first hour were compressed into 10 minutes, and that would very much seem more palatable to many movie watchers.

Is it good? That’s a difficult call. I can understand the film’s importance, but I have a much harder time judging it on whether or not I’d want to see it again or really have much to do with it beyond what I have already. It’s certainly a noteworthy film and critical for understanding independent filmmaking…but ultimately it leaves me feeling unsatisfied.

EDIT: The more I think about this film, the more I see what Jarmusch was trying to do with it, and the more I appreciate it. There is a sense of disaffection in this film that is impossible to avoid, and that's sort of the point. Our characters want things handed to them, essentially, and no one hands them things (except at the end), and when it does happen, they manage to screw it up. You can see this same desire, lack of movement, and essential screwing up even more in today's world. So maybe I'm not so unsatisfied. Stranger than Paradise is a cinematic time bomb. A day later, I'm left pretty impressed.

Why to watch Stranger than Fiction: The birth of modern indie.
Why not to watch: Despite traveling across the country, it doesn’t really go anywhere.

Haunted

2011-11-20T23:55:00.005-06:00

Films: Rebecca; Vertigo
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player (Rebecca); DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television (Vertigo).

If you’ve watched the Hitchcock that everybody watches, it’s easy for him to fool you. The truth is that virtually all of Hitchcock’s movies have a similar thread running through them. He only had a couple of basic stories he liked to tell, and most of them involved murder in one respect or another. But Rebecca, the first film he made in the U.S., has the feel of a romance, at least at the start. There are certainly romantic elements that run through the entire film, but this is not a real romance.

A young woman who is never named for us (Joan Fontaine) is vacationing in Monte Carlo with the overly-wealthy Edythe van Hopper (Florence Bates). The younger woman is a paid companion, there to keep the older woman entertained. It is here that they counter George Fortescue Maximilian de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who goes by Maxim. He’s in Monte Carlo as a sort of recovery. See, a year earlier, his wife died in a mysterious boating accident. Mrs. Van Hopper tries to ingratiate herself with the rich, young man, but he’s having none of it. He does, however, appreciate the pretty young thing at her side. They have a whirlwind romance, and when it’s time for Mrs. van Hopper to go away, the young woman instead marries Maxim.

And then the fun starts. The two return to Manderley, the ancestral home of the de Winter family, and the new Mrs. de Winter is suddenly confronted with a few important facts. First, Rebecca, at least according to a lot of people, was pretty damn near perfect. Second, she (our main character) has no real idea of how to run a large manor house like Manderley. Third, and most importantly, Rebecca’s former servant and current housemistress Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) worshipped Rebecca, and thus hates everything about the new Mrs. de Winter.

Like I said a the start, Hitchcock really only had a couple of stories he liked to tell. One of them was about mistaken identity, and he got a lot of mileage out of that basic idea. The second of his major themes was insanity, and that’s the role that Mrs. Danvers is going to play for us here.

Anyway, Mrs. de Winter tries her best to fit in, and seems to be thwarted at every turn by Mrs. Danvers, who hates her passionately. Regardless of how evident it is that this hatred exists, Mrs. de Winter attempts to trust her, going so far as to use Danvers’s suggestion for a costume party with disastrous results. And then, the unthinkable happens. The boat in which Rebecca foundered is discovered and it still has Rebecca’s body inside—a problem since Maxim identified a body as hers a year earlier. And, it seems that Maxim has a few skeletons of his own that need to be revealed before we get to the end.

It’s an interesting story all the way around. There is a sense of doomed romance about our main couple that would seem to be very much at home in the Victorian period. While the film is modern in the sense that it essentially takes place in the time it is filmed, it does have that sort of antique feel to it. The story feels older, like it should be playing out a century or so before it actually is, and it would play in that time as well.

It’s also too long. The run time is just over 130 minutes, and a good half hour or so could be easily trimmed from this film to speed up the process and tighten up the suspense a bit. It feels far too roomy for the story it wants to tell, almost as if Hitchcock wanted to explore something new and wasn’t quite yet sure of how to do it. While the story never really gets boring, there are too many scenes that don’t have much impact. For instance, in one scene, the new Mrs. de Winter breaks something. This comes up later when Danvers accuses another servant of stealing it and threatens to have him fired. It doesn’t establish much—perhaps that Maxim becomes aware of his wife’s discomfort with Danvers, but that can be easily established elsewhere and get rid of a good five minutes between the two scenes. There’s too much of one thing in a scene being set up and a lot more call for efficiency in the way the story is told.

That said, it’s a good film and one worth watching. It goes to some pretty lurid places for the time, and I imagine it may have had a difficult time skating past the Hays Code. It’s also quite interesting to me that when Hitchcock first decides to film in America, he films a story set in his own country.

Much the same ground is covered in Vertigo, a film that comes nearly two decades later in Hitchcock’s career. There are some real similarities in that the main character in this film is haunted by the spirit of a dead woman. This time, though, the plot is far more intricate and far closer to what most people think of when they think of Hitchcock. There are twists and plots within plots, precisely what we expect.

Policeman John “Scottie” Ferguson discovers that he has acrophobia when the chase of a criminal leaves him hanging off the edge of a building and leads to the falling death of an officer. Essentially unfit for duty now, Scottie retires from the force and looks for something else to do. That something else comes in the form of Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), an old college acquaintance. Gavin tells Scottie an incredible story; he wants Scottie to tail his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), because he thinks she is slowly going crazy. More specifically, he believes that Madeleine is being possessed by the spirit of her grandmother, Carlotta Valdez.

It’s at this point that I heartily recommend that you go listen to the Harvey Danger song “Carlotta Valdez” while reading the rest of this review. Anyway…

Scottie decides to take the job to help out his old pal and because he gets a good look at Madeleine, who is quite the Hitchcockian cool blonde. He tails her for awhile, and it does seem that she is acting in very strange ways. But Scottie is entranced by the woman, and appears to develop feelings for her, so it comes as a terrible shock when she takes a swan dive off the top of a bell tower, killing herself on the rocks below. Because of this, it comes as an even greater shock to his system when he starts seeing a woman around town who looks exactly like Madeleine in every detail. It’s strange enough, in fact, that he starts to get suspicious and launches his own investigation.

This is where the film starts to get really strange. I won’t spoil it or even get too close, but essentially, Scottie is so taken with this new woman that he attempts to turn her into Madeleine, bleaching her hair to blonde, and forcing her to dress exactly like Madeleine did in an effort to recreate the relationship with the dead woman. He takes it to an obsessive, nearly psychotic extreme, attempting to convince her that she really is the dead woman. It’s a dark fantasy, one that borders on the taboo of necrophilia, and while it’s fascinating, it’s also pretty creepy.

I’d be remiss at this point if I failed to mention Scottie’s former fiancée, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). She acts as a sort of conscience throughout the film, giving Scottie someone to talk to and bounce ideas with. Midgs is a really fun character, the kind of a girl who is the protagonist’s best friend despite their failed romance. I like Midge, and sort of wish there was more of an excuse for her to be on screen more.

It’s worth saying here that Hitchcock was a smart director in that he liked very much to keep his audience guessing. Sometimes he gave his audience the standard Hollywood happy ending with the bad guys dead or captured and the good guys triumphant. He also sometimes went the other direction and ended the films on a down note. Vertigo is extremely dark in its ending, about as dark as Hitchcock ever got, and it’s something that very much makes the film work the way it should. This one probably couldn’t end on an up note and be even remotely palatable. That, and like many a film in Hitch’s repertoire, the conclusion comes a few moments before the end of the film—there’s almost no denouement to give the audience a moment to recover from the final shock.

It will ruffle a few feathers when I suggest that of Hitchcock’s great films, Vertigo is probably the least. His five great films are Rear Window and then the incredible four consecutive Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. All are great and worthwhile, but this one in many ways has aged the worst. The surreal elements, certainly some of the highlights of the film when it was made, come off a bit silly now despite the fact that they are still pretty stylish and have that unique Saul Bass-y feel to them. But Hitchcock’s desperate need to control every aspect of every shot led him to use a lot of in-studio shots with a lot of rear projection, and rear projection never looks as good as it should to a modern audience.

Why to watch Rebecca: Hitchcock branching out a bit.
Why not to watch: It’s too long for its story.

Why to watch Vertigo: It’s essential Hitchcock.
Why not to watch: It hasn’t held up as well as it could have.

I Fought the Law

2011-11-18T23:52:00.005-06:00

Film: Papillon
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

It’s always interesting to go back to a movie you haven’t seen in awhile. It’s been years since I’ve seen Papillon, decades even. Yet there are things about this film that I recalled at least in part. I remember, for instance, the guy with the disturbing facial tattoos. I remember the scene in the leper colony. I remember Dustin Hoffman’s glasses, and Steve McQueen’s ruined teeth.

The film is the roughly autobiographical story of Henri “Papillon” Charriere (Steve McQueen), falsely (according to him) accused of killing a pimp and sent to the French penal colony of Guiana. Called “Papillon” because of the butterfly tattoo on his chest, he spends his time in the hellish, nightmare conditions of the colony attempting to escape by any means possible. His sentence was life, essentially giving him nothing to lose—although escaping and being caught three times means the guillotine.

On the long boat ride from France, Papillon befriends Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman), a renowned counterfeiter. Papillon wants some of Dega’s money, and suggests a mutually beneficial arrangement. Dega, figuring that money will be useful in Guiana, has swallowed or otherwise hidden money on his person. Every other prisoner on the ship would happily kill him for his money, so Papillon agrees to protect him in exchange for enough money to purchase a boat in Guiana.

Guiana proves to be as terrible as could be expected, and Papillon’s escape attempts are confounded at every turn, landing him in solitary for two years, and because of food smuggled to him, he spends a great deal of that time on half rations. This only fuels his desire to escape even more, and leads to one of the more interesting extended parts of the film, leading to the guy with the disturbing facial tattoos, the leper colony, and eventual recapture and five more years in solitary.

And still, he wants nothing more than to get away. He ends up on an island considered unescapable, reuniting with Dega, and still convinced that he can escape back to the South American mainland and desperate to get away.

There are any number of things I could suggest that this film is about. It may well be about the indomitable nature of the human spirit. Certainly this is a quality that Papillon exhibits throughout the film. When Dega smuggles him coconuts in solitary, Papillon holds out, never divulging the name of his friend, and survives for months on half rations, and for six months in an almost completely darkened cell.

It may also be about the strength of friendship shared between these two men and several other men—Julot (Don Gordon), Maturette (Robert Deman), and Clusiot (Woodrow Parfrey) in particular. These men frequently make sacrifices, sometimes dangerous sacrifices that may add years onto their sentences, for each other. There is a unique bond of suffering between these mean—they become drawn to each other because of their ordeal.

It’s also entirely possible that this film’s purpose is to act as something like an expose on the prison system and legal system abuse of this sort is far more common. Papillon is granted two years in solitary and six (presumably after using someone else’s fake id), and the conditions that he, Louis, and all of the other men sent to Guiana experience are as terrible and dehumanizing as any prison shown on film.

So which is it? I think it’s all three. Papillon is a big enough film to encompass all of these possibilities and more. McQueen gives a memorable ad the title character, always looking to cut a deal that will put him back on the way to the mainland and his freedom. Hoffman is equally good as Louis, who by the end o the film is is a mental and emotional cripple, a shadow of his former self.

I remember Papillon for the simple fact that it is worth remembering. It doesn’t hurt that Steve McQueen is one of the all-time great film stars and arguably the most relevant for the year in which this was filmed. The relationships between the two men is subtle and touching without getting sappy or maudlin. Despite all of this, Papillon is in many ways a tragedy. And it’s a damn good one.

Why to watch Papillon: A movie about the triumph of one man.
Why not to watch: There's a limit to how much one man can take.

It Dares Speak Its Name

2011-11-17T23:57:00.003-06:00

Film: Tongues Untied
Format: Internet video on laptop.

One thing I’ve learned in the nearly two years that I’ve done this site is that often you take films when, where, and how you can get them. If that means that the only way to watch something is a grainy version on the internet complete with Greek subtitles and interspersed with advertisements for Kashi cereal, well, that’s what I have to deal with. With Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied, that’s exactly what I had. Grainy footage, Greek subtitles, wonky sound, and Kashi and antiperspirant ads every five minutes. The crap I put up with…

And yet, this film was worth it. This is an hour of anger, rage, pain, pride, and power. I knew the very, very basics of this film going in—that it’s a documentary about gay black men—and really nothing else. And I didn’t expect the reality of this film.

The title of the film, Tongues Untied has a variety of meanings in the context of the film. It’s a chance in many ways for the men in this film, particularly the poet Essex Hemphill, to express the reality of their own lives. As black men, they feel denied a voice in American society. As gay men, they are equally denied a voice in the black community, which does not in general have a positive track record in dealing with gay issues. And so, these men are doubly denied the right to speak. It’s also an interesting play on the idea that homosexuality is the love that “dare not speak its name.”

The film is unabashedly and unashamedly sexual in its content and its delivery. I’ll admit that I was completely unprepared for the naked black men jumping around, flaccid penii a-flopping at the start of the film, and while this is a blatantly sexual segment of the film, it’s not in any way the most sexually charged moment.

Frankly, I’m pretty gobsmacked by this film. I’m neither black nor gay, and honestly didn’t think that I would find anything in this film that I would find much to latch onto. And yet I did. This is a film of real power simply because it is so openly sexual and open in its claim of power. Riggs and his film don’t ask for society—heterosexual and/or black society—to accept them, but instead proclaims its presence and demands not acceptance, not tolerance, but simple recognition. The film demands that its subjects be seen as men, as black men, and as people.

It’s a short film; it runs just under an hour. Much of it comes in the form of the poetry of the aforementioned Hemphill, whose words are powerful, sexual, and demanding. Much also comes from Riggs himself. There are also moments of humor here—the group of men offering and participating in a class on Snap!thology, learning how to best snap their fingers for effect is fun and charming.

But there’s some real eye-opening issues here. Riggs includes snippets from black preachers railing against the gay community, condemning all gay men. He also includes pieces of Eddie Murphy performances that bash the gay community in general and gay men in the specific. There’s an undercurrent of awfulness here. There is a sense that these men have been marginalized in the black community in many ways because the black community itself has been marginalized. These men become outcasts and scapegoats because it is a way for those already cast down by society to see and ridicule and hate something even further below them—those experiencing prejudice for one thing expressing their superiority over those who experience it for two. Riggs never comments directly on this, allowing instead the poetry, the faces of the men in the film, and his film itself to respond for him.

I really didn’t know what to think going into this film, and I wasn’t really prepared for it in all the ways I should have been. But really that doesn’t matter. This film is raw and open and angry, and works not despite this, but because of it.

If nothing else, I understand fully why it ended up on The List.

Why to watch Tongues Untied: It’s extremely powerful.
Why not to watch: You may not be prepared for this film.

The Family that Slays Together...

2011-11-15T23:19:00.001-06:00

Film: Kind Hearts and Coronets
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.

Ealing comedies are their own thing. They aren’t laugh-out-loud funny the way that we tend to think of comedies. Oh, they might well have been that funny 60 years ago, but today, there’s a quaintness to them that they can’t quite shake. They’re more cute than hysterical, more sweet than biting. The exception to this rule is Kind Hearts and Coronets.

The big sell for this film is that Alec Guinness plays eight different members of the D’Ascoyne family ranging in age from 24 to something north of eighty-ish, and one of the character he plays is a woman. But Guinness isn’t considered the star of the film by any stretch, despite being the main attraction. It’s a testament to the man’s skill in front of the camera that he manages to give many of these divergent people very different and distinct personalities.

The plot, for all its loops and switches, is pretty simple. The daughter of the D’Ascoyne family (Audrey Fildes) runs away with a commoner, an opera singer, and is immediately disowned by the family at large. Her husband dies of a heart attack the moment he sets eyes on his infant son, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini (Dennis Price, who also plays the father for the couple of minutes he is in the film). Throughout his young life, his mother attempts to reconcile with the family, but is rebuffed at every turn, causing Louis to develop a large grudge against his relatives. When is mother dies and is refused burial in the family plot, his grudge turns murderous.

See, through a quirk in the title, the Dukedom of Chalfont can transfer through the mother’s line as well, making Louis very distant in the line for the title. Forced into the trades and working in a shop, Louis begins to scheme. His plan is to slowly kill his way up the ranks until he can achieve the dukedom, acquiring the title (and specifically the riches) that are, in his mind, rightfully his. A chance encounter with one of the D’Ascoynes sets the plan in motion, and he starts killing his way through the ranks, needing to knock off eight people until he inherits (all eight of the D’Ascoynes are played by Guinness).

Complicating matters is a rather strange love trapezoid. Louis is, he thinks at first, desperately in love with Sibella (Joan Greenwood), a childhood friend. But Sibella is flighty, kind of stupid, and most importantly, something of a gold digger. She’ll have nothing to do with Louis, opting instead to marry Lionel (John Penrose), another childhood friend. Sibella toys with Louis until the eve of her marriage and then almost immediately starts an affair with him.

As for Louis, the more he sees Sibella, the more he believes that she simply doesn’t deserve to be a duchess. Instead, he begins courting Edith D’Ascoyne (Valerie Hobson), the wife of the late Henry D’Ascoyne, who was second on Louis’s list of murders. And so with two women essentially pursuing him, a number of murders on his hands, and a mysterious death that points a finger at him, Louis is now in serious trouble. In fact, the film starts with him writing his memoirs in prison on the eve of his execution.

This film is dark. Really dark. Pitch black in terms of comedy, and most of it still works perfectly. Louis is a complete bastard and shows no compunction at killing anyone who gets in his way. The irony here is that beyond the first murder (a highly entertaining affair, actually), he doesn’t have a lot of excuse to continue doing what he does. Ascoyne D’Ascoyne, the first victim, is a complete bastard, and while murder is never really conscionable, he sort of gets what he deserves. Of the other seven victims (and truth be told, a couple die without assistance), six are elderly and won’t live terribly long. The last is Henry, who genuinely seems to like Louis, and would almost certainly welcome him back into the family, if not specifically giving him the title and the lands. It almost seems like he could have simply killed off Ascoyne and then waited patiently.

More to the point, there is virtually no one likeable in this film, and in this case, that works perfectly. Louis is callous, vain, and vicious in his revenge. Lionel is spoiled, stupid, arrogant, and possessed of few social graces. Edith, who becomes the mountain that Louis must climb, is a self-righteous prig. In fact, the death of her husband happens in the way it does because he is forced to keep alcohol in the shed out back, lest she see him drinking it. Finally, there is Sibella. She deserves her own paragraph.

Sibella is, for lack of a better way to put it, the cheerleader/captain of the football team who wouldn’t deign to look at someone not of her social standing. She initially proposes to marry Lionel simply because Lionel has a lot more money than Louis, and the prospect for a great deal more. When Louis begins to move up in the world, she immediately transfers her affections to him. In many ways, she is the femme fatale of the film, and acts in a way very much befitting the coldest and most callous of what film noir has to offer. It’s insanely easy to dislike Sibella, which is naturally exactly what you are supposed to do with her. She’s awful, and even when he decides that she’s not duchess material, Louis is helpless against her.

But, it’s this natural dislike of these people that make the film work as well as it does. We don’t want good things to happen to these people at all, and they don’t.

All this aside, there’s really one main reason to watch this film, and that’s for the work of the great Alec Guinness. He is excellent throughout the film in all of the different roles he plays. The comedy is midnight black, and Sibella is a shade over the top, but Guinness manages to be entertaining at every moment he is on screen. If for no other reason, he’s why Kind Hearts and Coronets remains an important film, and a funny one. Just realize going in that the laughs come from a place that most of us don’t like to admit we have.

Why to watch Kind Hearts and Coronets: Alec Guinness + Alec Guinness + Alec Guinness….
Why not to watch: Any character worth cheering for is on the hit list.

Use All the Cliches!

2011-11-14T23:54:00.003-06:00

Film: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television.

Let’s start with this: there’s not an ounce of historical accuracy in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Wyatt Earp showed up in Tombstone with essentially no legal authority except that given him by his brother, Virgil. He never had a torrid affair with a female gambler around this time, and he already had a common-law wife who was an opiate fiend. Whatever. We’re not judging this film based on its historical value, but on its value as a film, right?

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is about the famous gunfight, and this is the reason that Surges threw history out the window when it came to the story. The real story isn’t that interesting, really. The gunfight lasted about 30 seconds, and there’s some controversy as to whether or not the “bad guys” were trying to surrender to the Earps when they were shot. That would make for kind of a crappy mid-50s Western, though, so again, we’re not going to worry about accuracy here.

Much of the opening of the film concerns the nascent friendship between upright lawman Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and the degraded, tubercular dentist Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas). Initially, they don’t think much of each other. But then Earp saves Holliday’s life and quite a bit later, Holliday saves Earp, so they at least gain a great deal of mutual respect for one another. It’s a bromance as only could happen in a macho Western.

As we might also expect in a typical Western, there’s some frontier-style romance. For Holliday, the woman he shacks up with and abuses is Kate (Jo van Fleet). She spends part of her time with Holliday and the rest with Johnny Ringo (John Ireland). Earp discovers a woman named Laura Denbow (Rhonda Fleming), a professional gambler. It’s evident in the first two minutes they’re on screen together that they’re going to end up sexing it up eventually, so when they do, it comes as no surprise.

There’s plenty that goes on with these two men getting a lot of people angry at them, although they seem to stand mostly on the side of good and law. And eventually, Earp decides to hang up his badge, marry Laura, and open up a store in California. But that’s when he gets an urgent telegram from his brother Virgil (John Hudson) in Tombstone. Trouble is brewing, and he’s a dead man without some considerable help. So Earp goes, despite the fact that Laura says she won’t live this way for him.

And so finally, after about an hour and a half of movie, we get the two sides lined up for the big confrontation. On the one side, we have the Earps—Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan (DeForest Kelly), and Holliday. Jimmy Earp (Martin Milner) is left out of this exclusive group because he gets capped earlier. On the other side is the Clantons—Ike (Lyle Bettger), Billy (Dennis Hopper at about age 6), Johnny Ringo, and a few others. And it takes us the whole film to get there.

Really, that’s the problem here. The film is a touch over two hours long, and the eponymous gunfight happens in the final 15 minutes of the film. The whole movie builds up to this, but almost none of it does much but set up the characters a bit and give them a reason over and over to go and shoot at each other. In short, it could have been handled faster and in ways that were even a touch more interesting to get us to that point. What we get instead is virtually every single western trope and many a movie trope besides to give us a false sense of wanting to continue to watch what happens. And I do mean every trope. Billy Clanton gets pulled aside by Wyatt and told not to follow in his brothers’ footsteps, but Billy rides with them, because they’re his brothers—essentially the same reason Wyatt arrived in Tombstone. There’s even a drunk tossed through a saloon door at one point, and there's a railing kill, when someone is shot and tumbles over a balcony.

Anyway, the gunfight itself is pretty good, even if it’s as predictable as the rest of the film.

What strikes me most odd here is the theme song, which pops up now and again to narrate on what has happened and what will happen. When Wyatt rides off to Tombstone, for instance, We get a verse or two about how he’s riding off to Tombstone and leaving behind the woman who loves him. See, I knew all of that already because I’d been watching the movie. I didn’t really need the Western equivalent of a Greek chorus.

You want the truth here? While it’s fun to see Dennis Hopper at this young age and DeForest Kelly wearing a tin star instead of a Star Fleet badge, there are far better and more engaging Westerns out there. Frankly, Tombstone is a better movie.

Why to watch Gunfight at O.K. Corral: Westerns don’t get any more western.
Why not to watch: Every trope you’ve ever heard of is here.

Just an Ordinary Average Guy

2011-11-13T11:58:00.001-06:00

Film: Il Conformista (The Conformist)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

We expect certain thing from spy movies in general. The standard spy movie follows a path like Three Days of the Condor or the Jason Bourne films. In these, a spy gets put into a strange or terrible or bad situation and needs to fight his way out of it. We root for the spy in these cases. James Bond is probably the most classic example of good guy spy. Even when Bond is a bastard, we still kind of like him and expect him to come out on top. The other end of the spy thriller holds stories like The Eye of the Needle, where the spy is the bad guy and needs to be stopped by the film’s heroes.

So it’s a touch ironic that a film called Il Conformista (The Conformist) doesn’t conform to either of these two possibilities. The spy, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is our main character, but he’s almost impossible to root for. The first part of this is that he’s really not a spy, but a government-paid assassin. That isn’t enough to stop most people from still rooting for him though. What does is that the government he works for is Mussolini’s fascist government in the 1930s.

Our character is interesting in a way, though. The film has this name, and is named after him, because he wants nothing more than to fit in wherever he is. We take up the story as he is planning to get married to the very sexy and evidently sex-starved Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli). We learn a lot of his past when he is essentially forced to go to confession before the wedding, since the priest will not marry the pair until both have confessed.

What we learn is that he was excluded from other children as a child, and thus was often badly abused by his schoolmates. He was also evidently abused sexually by his family’s chauffer. It’s also worth noting that at this point, the chauffer has a pistol that Marcello takes and shoots randomly. He manages to shoot the chauffer at this point, too, and this murder is one of the things that he confesses to.

Marcello’s government contact, Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) tells Marcello that he is to head to Paris and contact a man named Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). Quadri is a retired professor who left Italy because he was staunchly anti-fascist, which in the parlance of the time means he is a communist. To make everything work, Marcello marries Giulia and takes her to Paris on their honeymoon. And it’s there that Manganiello tells Marcello that Quadri needs to be eliminated. This is complicated by the fact that Marcello, despite his recent marriage, wants to get humpy with Anna (Dominique Sanda), the professor’s sexy wife who may have been a prostitute and may have a history with him. Oh, and it turns out that Quadri was once one of Marcello’s professors.

This is an odd movie, and it struck me oddly. I just watched the film and have almost no memory of it and almost no opinion on it. It is pretty stylish and nice to look at, but this desire of Marcello to simply fit in, to create the perfect life for himself, isn’t nearly explored enough. It’s brought up a number of times, but it didn’t really go anywhere for me. Certainly the ending gets to the same place and shows us exactly how far Marcello will go to fit in, but there’s not enough of why he is the way he is.

I don’t really know. I’m continuing to write on this, but I don’t have anything much more to say. Ultimately, that’s how I felt about Il Conformista; it keeps going, but doesn’t say much.

Why to watch Il Conformista: A spy thriller with a very odd resolution.
Why not to watch: It’s sort of hard to care.