The Most Accurate Name Ever

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


Romance is not a genre I tend to favor. Actually, that’s only partly true. I genuinely dislike romantic comedies as a general rule, but I’ll watch a good romance if the mood strikes me. Note the operative word in that sentence: a good romance. So I gave David Lean’s first great movie, Brief Encounter a shot.

This story couldn’t be simpler or more classically romantic and tragic. Two married people meet, fall for each other, and then go their separate ways. This is not a spoiler—if you’re paying attention, you know exactly what is happening here in the first ten minutes of the film, since the entire story is shown in flashback.

In the central role is Celia Johnson as Laura Jesson, a simple housewife with a husband and two kids. She’s relatively well-to-do, spending her days in London doing the shopping, having lunch out and sometimes taking in a movie. She spends at least part of her day around the train station, and it is here that she meets Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard). Alec comes to her assistance when she gets something in her eye and he extracts it. Later the same day, they find themselves in the same crowded restaurant and share a table, then go to a movie together. They agree to meet at the same place a week later.

They continue to meet at the train platform and spend their Thursday afternoons together, and it soon becomes evident to both of them (and to us) that the two have fallen deeply for each other despite both being married. They both realize what has happened and the only real possible outcome for this love, but still it continues, because the two can’t stay away from each other.

The pair are discovered twice; first by a couple of her friends in a restaurant and then later when the pair retire to an apartment owned by one of Alec’s friends. Based on these two occurrences, Alec reaches a major decision in his life—to head to South Africa to help create a new hospital. They plan to make the most of the time they have left before he heads off half a world away. The immediate belief here is that the two will probably never see each other again, but if they do, it still will never be the same.

There’s a sense of tragedy around the pair, and we know right away that they are doomed from the start. We know nothing about Alec’s wife and kids. We know precious little about Laura’s kids, but we do see her husband a couple of times. He seems like a stereotype for wealthy and boring, which may well be the reason Laura consented to this sort of affair in the first place, because of her desire for something more.

Despite other members of the cast, only Laura and Alec are fully realized characters here, and that’s as it should be. Other characters are there to judge our two lovers, as foils for their behavior, or as a reason to make a particular decision like Alec does at the end. There’s no space here for anyone else.

The story, as mentioned above, comes to us via a flashback with only spotty glimpses at the present. Laura is, throughout her mental recounting of this affair, wrestling with the reality of her life, comparing Alec on the one side and her husband and children on the other side. Each possibility pulls her in different directions.

Where this film fails for a modern audience is in the timidity of the romance. The two attempt to spend a bit of a night together, but otherwise, they are nearly as chaste as a pair of strangers. There are a couple of passionate kisses toward the latter half of the movie, but otherwise, the romance is actually a little tepid. A few stolen kisses, some smoky glances, and idle talk are difficult to read as romantic on any sort of sustained basis. Remade today, our twin heroes would be splitting the cost of a cheap motel.

Regardless, there’s a sense of tragedy and loss running through this film that is very effective. This is David Lean before he became the master of the grand epic film. What comes as little surprise is that many of the themes he explores in larger, grander films are here as well. Many of Lean's epics focused on the individual story or the story of people together in the middle of a grand sweep. This is that, without the grand sweep.

Brief Encounter lives up to its name. It’s a short one, but lovingly filmed with careful pacing, if too bland in terms of almost everyone in the cast. Watch it with someone you love.

Why to watch Brief Encounter: Romances don’t get more romance-y.
Why not to watch: A couple of mooning kisses equals a lifetime of angst.

More Like Foolish Director

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

A number of other 1001 Movies bloggers are quite a bit brighter than I am. That goes without saying. Specifically, though, they are smarter than I because they made a concerted effort at the beginning of their personal quests to watch all of the silent movies right away. I have not been nearly that smart, although as of late I have been trying to rectify that. This is my fourth silent film in the last week, and there’s at least one more coming pretty soon.

Foolish Wives comes out of my personal collection. I found it a few months ago in a resale shop for a couple of bucks and picked it up because I recognized the name. That may have been a mistake—I don’t know if this film is in the public domain, but I’m sure I could have found it elsewhere and spend those couple of bucks on something I’d have enjoyed more. Another movie, perhaps, or a couple of burritos. Several times in the past I have watched a film and thought to myself, “I am watching this…why?” In this case, the question is, “I paid money for this and am watching it…why?”

I can’t really tell you why I spent time with this film. I have three layers of complaints. We can start with the easy layer first. The history on this picture suggests that von Stroheim’s initial film ran something along the lines of eight hours. When confronted by his studio as to how people could reasonably watch this in an evening, von Stroheim is alleged to have commented that the film was perfect, and presenting it to an audience wasn’t his problem. I have to wonder what the man was thinking—the film barely sustains a length one quarter of that. Be that as it may, the film has been chopped a number of times; there are versions running past the three-hour mark and one running less than 90 minutes. It is what it is.

The second layer of complaint I have is specific to the version I watched. It’s a punishing DVD, with only six scenes, each one relatively equal in length. The scene breaks are less natural pauses and more places selected arbitrarily, with a new “scene” starting in the middle of a title card or an actual scene. It can’t be that difficult to break this up into actual segments, can it?

Further, the music selected for this version of the movie is ridiculously bad in terms of matching up with the story. It’s almost as if someone merely selected music based on length rather than mood. If the film is legitimately as great as its press clippings, then someone should take the time to write an actual score for it. The action on screen rarely matches the music cue. At one point, the main character’s maid is crying, and the music is a lighthearted dance played by a string quartet. Earlier in the film, we get a massive orchestral hit when a man picks up the phone to order a room service breakfast.

Additionally, the print is quite muddy in spots and rough. Again, if the film is so great and so important, why hasn’t anyone bothered to remaster it? There are splotches and blotches, speed ups and slow downs, fuzzy spots, and a few place that look quite a bit like the film was impressed with an imprint of burlap. All in all, this makes for a painful viewing experience. I can live with that if the film is worth it, but it certainly affects my opinion and the overall experience. I try to remain conscious of such problems, but there is only so much I can do to prevent myself from being swayed to the negative by such carelessness as the mismatched music.

The top layer of problems here are the ones that can’t be explained away with the director’s alleged megalomania or the decisions made by the producer of this disc. Bluntly, this movie is dull, dull, dull. We have Count Wladislaw Sergius Karamzin (von Stroheim), late of the Russian aristocracy. He lives in Monte Carlo with his two “cousins, Olga (Maude George) and Vera (Mae Busch), in an opulent style that the trio cannot hope to afford and that includes freakishly long cigarettes. They receive counterfeit money from a man named Ventucci (Caesare Gravina) and otherwise survive by bilking the wealthy and gullible. The Count, who goes by Sergius, romances married women for their cash, and the women attempt to do the same thing to the men.

A new chance for them becomes available when an American ambassador named Hughes (Rudolph Christians) and his wife (Miss DuPont) arrive from America. Sergius immediately sets to work on winning here and then providing a sob story about a debt of honor that needs repayment. Meanwhile, Hughes is suspicious of the man he has heard is an inveterate womanizer and con artist. The trio’s maid Maruschka (Dale Fuller) also loves the Count, and will do anything to win him over.

That’s the whole plot. I have no idea how that could have possibly sustained 480 minutes of footage, nor how anyone could have watched that much of what is often quite amateurish.

Sergius’s plot for getting money appears to be acting charming, and then asking for cash. This is a tactic that evidently works not only on bored wives, but also on the wives of ambassadors and homely, skull-faced maids. Sergius is shameless and wanton, which is great, but his shamelessness and wantonness comes in service of a bland story blandly told. The title cards, written in a way to evoke excitement, fail miserably. Part of this stems from the style of the cards. Everything is—written—with dashes—spaced—throughout—evidently to generate—more interest—in what’s—going on. (Now go back and read that like Shatner!) At times, the film is so dialogue-heavy that minutes are spent reading with brief flashes of the characters mouthing the same words.

There are a couple of things that work, and a few good jokes. I like that our criminals are Russian and that Sergius evidently really is nobility and a former soldier. It makes sense that he would be in Monte Carlo, as he no doubt fled Russia after the revolution a few years earlier. That’s effective and interesting, and while nothing is really made of this, it’s easy to think that this is precisely what von Stroheim (who also wrote the film) intended. There’s a nice joke in the middle when we discover that Mrs. Hughes is reading a book called Foolish Wives by Erich von Stroheim.

But a good little joke and some smarts do not a movie make. Or they do, but they sure don’t make an interesting one. I’d be willing to watch this again with a cleaned-up version and an actual score that fits the action. But at the same time, I think that if this film really was so important to the canon, someone would have scored it and remastered it already.

Why to watch Foolish Wives: You have time to kill.
Why not to watch: There is virtually any other movie to watch or thing to do.

Mild Mild West

Films The Great Train Robbery
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Movies, obviously, have changed a great deal in the 100+ years from those first few with rudimentary plots to the films of today. The Great Train Robbery has in common with modern films virtually nothing except that there is a moving picture on the screen and there is at least a semblance of story. Things we expect in movies, like sound, are obviously absent. But even things expected in silent films—title cards, director credits, a cast list—are missing as well. Instead, this is just 12 minutes of guys robbing a train, making a getaway, and a posse mounting up to track the bandits down.

That, in a nutshell, is the plot of this film, which is the first real Western ever made despite its being filmed in that rugged western state of New Jersey. What’s important to remember is that in many ways, the Wild West was still pretty wild when this film was made, and it isn’t too difficult to imagine an actual train hold-up much like this one happening for real somewhere west of the Mississippi while filming took place.

What is noteworthy here are a few innovations that took place. In 1903, when The Great Train Robbery first released, almost anything done in front of a camera involved some innovation. Things that we take for granted as experienced movie watchers (and virtually everyone in this day and age has enough savvy to follow a filmed story) did not exist as conventions at the turn of the previous century.

This is not the first film with a plot; that honor belongs to La Voyage Dans la Lune of the previous year. The Great Train Robbery takes that idea of filming a story and adds a few technical and cinematic achievements to it, though. First, the film was made in real locations instead of on a stage, and with real props instead of stage gimmickry. It’s a real train, and the actors use what certainly look like real guns instead of cardboard mockeries. They ride real horses.

This is a bigger innovation than it sounds like it should be. La Voyage Dans la Lune was more or less a staged production that happened to be filmed. Certainly there are camera tricks there that would be nearly impossible on a stage, but that is essentially what the film is. Actors stand in front of stage backdrops and use two-dimensional props. Here, the film shows a real world, mainly because it was filmed in the real world.

It also shows a real-life story, or at least a story that could be real life. Train robberies happened, and the actors are dressed as real people of the period. Again, that seems like a minor innovation, something so natural to us that it’s almost not worth mentioning—but this is the first realistic fictional story ever filmed, and that’s saying a lot.

Porter also does a few interesting things with the way the narration plays out. Rather than giving us a straight linear story, he cuts between different locations, showing us what happens to characters later in the film. We see at the start a telegraph operator being assaulted, for instance, and then when the robbers leave him tied up on the floor, the telegraph man is out of the picture. Except that he isn’t—he comes back after the robbery, when he is discovered tied up on the floor of his office. Before this, that kind of skipping back to earlier characters or previous locations didn’t happen. A story was shown as it happened, concentrating on the main action. Porter freed those bonds by showing that as a medium, film could allow us to compress or expand time and location, and that it was possible and effective to show a story from multiple different aspects.

This isn’t a great film. It’s rudimentary, as should be expected for something made when creating a film with a story still had an umbilical cord attached. This isn’t a film to watch for the fantastic plot, camera work, or direction. The reason this film is important is because of what it is and because of everything it represents. This is the birth of American filmmaking, and it’s equally the birth of removing the cameras from a stage and putting them out in the world. It is the first film to try to capture an exciting and lurid event as it was happening.

You know what? It’s about 12 minutes long. You should find the time to hunt this down online and watch it if you are even remotely favorable to watching film not just for plot and character, but for seriously studying the medium and seeing where so much of it started. Really, it’s 12 minutes long. You owe history at least that much of your attention.

Why to watch The Great Train Robbery: Cinematic history.
Why not to watch: No interest in where films came from.

Tarr...kovsky?

Film: Satantango (Satan’s Tango)
Format: DVDs from NetFlix on various players.

There are plenty of films in this world that make the average movie viewer distrust the serious film critic. Much of the catalog of Fellini, for instance, falls into this broad category. Films with really long takes, not much happening, huge pauses, shots of empty places, dry dialogue scenes, incomprehensible plots, and other staples of art films seem to thrill critics and both bore and frustrate someone who simply watches films for entertainment.


And thus we come to Bela Tarr’s Satantango (Satan’s Tango), a film that is the epitome of heralded art film that those not serious about movies will encounter initially with curiosity, then boredom, then frustration, and then outright anger. I admit, even though I consider myself more serious than most about studying film, this one was a trial. I’ve been watching it in bits and pieces for a couple of weeks—a necessity when the discs come one at a time from NetFlix and the film spans a full three DVDs.

Tarr’s style has been compared with that of Tarkovsky, and with good reason. This film takes the idea of a long take to ridonkulous levels, with some shots going on for ten minutes or more. In the full seven-plus hours of the movie, Tarr claims that there are only 150 different shots, and having seen the film, I don’t doubt that this is true. This is broken up at times with slow pans or tracking shots, but even these are a relative rarity for some long sequences.

The story concerns a failed collective farm in Hungary. The people are broke and broken, and spend their nights drinking, dancing, and stumbling around in a local bar. A conman they thought long dead returns and sells them on a dream of a new collective, a model farm, that will require their investment if they are to make it work. A bunch of them leave for the new place. And really, that’s the bulk of the film. Most of the time, people sit around drinking and waiting for something to happen, and it’s about as exciting to watch as it sounds like it would be.

But this film isn’t about excitement, and not all films should be. This is a meditation, perhaps on the failed Hungarian system or on the process of life itself. Certainly it’s bleak enough both in terms of how it is filmed and the story that transpires that it wouldn’t be difficult to assign this meaning to the film.

More than any other film, I’m reminded in parts of Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielmann, which couldn’t have been more of a trial for me had it been injected directly into my cerebral cortex. Tarr’s film has more happening, though, and is also in many ways an easier watch despite being twice the length. Many of the shots, while they seem eternal, are strikingly beautiful. While the film concerns itself in many ways with the banality of the existence of its characters, the ugliness of their environment, the terrible rainy weather, and human misery, there are a number of extended shots that are truly gorgeous.

Where Tarr loses the average viewer, and in many places lost me, is just how long he holds his camera in the same place without anything happening. We get close-ups of people that last for thirty seconds or a minute with no dialogue. Nothing happens. At times, I had to check to make sure the DVD hadn’t frozen, because nothing on the screen moved for half a minute, and just when I was getting ready to check, someone spoke or the camera twitched. Shots like this require intense patience both on the part of Tarr and on the part of the viewer, and this patience can be rewarded. These shots, for their lack of any action, are revealing in giving us genuine looks at the characters.

And yet, it could also easily be argued that there are far too many of these shots. Someone leaves a room, and the camera sits on the open door for upwards of a minute, an unchanging tableaux, until we are given a new shot. We watch people walk, camera in the face, with a background of unbroken gray clouds. At one point, a girl named Estike runs through the woods for what seems like a couple of miles, the camera tracking in front of her. In another scene, people sit around the bar while a man talks endlessly, repeating the same five or six lines over and over. Later, we watch people dance and act drunkenly for ten minutes or more while an accordionist plays the same few notes over and over. Tarr pulls no punches with shots like this—he opens the film with seven or eight minutes of cows walking in a paddock and a very slow tracking shot.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the film to watch comes in the middle, when Estike brutally tortures a cat. This may not sound like much, but this is painful to watch, and like every scene in this film, it continues far longer than it feels like it should to get the point across. Later, the girl spikes a bowl of milk with rat poison and forces the cat to drink it, saying over and over that she can do whatever she wants to the cat because she is stronger than the cat. Following this, the girl watches the drunken elders dance, then swallows the rat poison herself. It’s this sequence that caused the film to be at least temporarily banned in the U.K. despite Tarr’s assurance that there was a vet on hand the whole time, and his statement that the cat in question ended up as his personal pet.

Within the context of the film, we cover the same ground repeatedly. We see action from one perspective, then see the same action from another perspective later. The girl watches the dancers, for instance, and later, we watch the same scene from inside, catching glimpses of the girl standing in the rain.

Satantango was filmed to mimic the dance: six steps forward and six steps back. It’s a subtlety that is easily lost without being made aware of the fact, a statement true of many things in this film.

Is it good? Unquestionably, this is art film at one of its highest points. Tarr’s work is carefully crafted, smart, and unflinching. It’s also difficult to like. In other words, I’m impressed with the effort, the message, and the artistry here, but like many great works of art, it’s not something I want to spend a lot of time seeing. I went 43-plus years without sitting through this epic; I’ll happily go another 43-plus without doing it again.

Why to watch Satantango: This is art for art’s sake.
Why not to watch: A new definition of “long take.”

The Best Month Ever: June, 1982 Part 1

Films: Poltergeist; The Thing
Format: DVDs from personal collection on big ol’ television.

[These reviews have been included as a part of Pussy Goes Grrr's Juxtaposition Blogathon!]

Once upon a time, movie studios didn’t hold their best films until the last couple of weeks of December as Oscar bait. In those days, before the maniacal push for the Oscar, perhaps the greatest month of movies ever was June, 1982. Oh, there are better years for movies, certainly. Both 1967 and 1988 have more than 20 films on The List, but I stand by June of ’82 as the single greatest month. In rapid succession, releases included Poltergeist, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Blade Runner, and The Thing. Additionally, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out this month, and I hold that it should be on the list as the best example of one of America’s greatest cultural exports.

Is it possible there’s another great month out there? Sure, and if I did a little research, I could probably find one just as good or better. But why bother? This one holds a special place for me. I saw four of those movies (all but Blade Runner--I was too young to care about it) in the theater and remember each one vividly.


Of the four, Poltergeist was the first to be released. Allegedly filmed by Tobe Hooper, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Spielberg, who wrote the story and produced, had a heavy hand in the direction. It looks like a Spielberg film, honestly. There’s a natural progression in terms of lighting, shot, and effects from films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark to this one to make a pretty solid connection.

This is the story of the Freeling family: Steven (Craig T. Nelson), Diane (JoBeth Williams), and kids Dana (Dominique Dunne), Robbie (Oliver Robins), and Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). They live in a fairly standard suburban home, in a newish subdivision. Steven works for the developer selling houses while Diane manages the house and the kids. All is well until one day Carol Anne starts talking back to the static on the television. A few nights later, during a thunderstorm, she speaks to the television again, and some ectoplasmic stuff comes out, burns a hole in the wall of a room, and we get the iconic line, “They’re here!”

These are what Carol Anne calls “The TV people,” and they start causing mischief around the house. During another storm, a tree breaks through the window in Robbie’s and Carol Anne’s room, pulling Robbie into the yard. While the tree appears to be attempting to eat him, Steven pulls him out, and the tree is carried away by a tornado. As all this is happening, Carol Anne is sucked into the closet and what appears to be a parallel dimension in which she can only talk to the people in the house through the television set.

The image of the little girl looking over her shoulder from the static-covered TV is only one of the iconic moments from this film. The other is Zelda Rubenstein, who plays the medium Tangina. A squat little woman, she is on camera only for a few minutes, but her presence in the film is huge, and one of the most memorable things from the film.

There’s also a sense of humor at work here. When a trio of paranormal investigators come to look at the house and to help find Carol Anne, one (Richard Lawson) talks about an event he filmed in which a child’s toy moved a distance of seven feet in seven hours. Steven, unimpressed, opens the room that belonged to Carol Anne, displaying a tableau of moving furniture and flying toys. Another investigator (Martin Casella) has a terrifying moment in the family bathroom. Later, the leader of the team (Beatrice Straight) tells the family that she and the first investigator will be back. The other will not be returning. Earlier in the film, the parents lay in bed smoking pot while Steven, evidently high as a kite, reads a biography of Ronald Reagan. That’s subtle, and funny.

For a PG movie, Poltergeist is terrifying. At one point, when we learn exactly what is going on in the Freeling’s house, Diane is trapped in the unfinished swimming pool. She climbs most of the way out and then slides back in in what is one of the great moments in film in the 1980s. I saw this with friends when it was released. The night I saw Poltergeist, it rained terribly. I had trees outside my bedroom window; I slept in another room.

There are too many great moments in this film to recount. It stands as one of the greatest films of its genre and its decade. Much of it, the iconic lines (“This house is clean.” and “Cross into the light!” resonate as much as “They’re here!”), the ultimate reason for the disturbances, and many of the shots and scenes have woven themselves into American and perhaps world culture. There’s a reason films like this one still get talked about.


My original plan was to watch E.T. as well, but of these four movies, this is the one I don’t have in my collection. It also happens to be my least favorite of the four. So we adapt and adjust. The Thing and Blade Runner were released on the same day in 1982. Of the two, it’s hard to pick a favorite, but I prefer The Thing. It has nothing to do with the direction, or the story, or the mise-en-scene. It has everything to do with the situation in which I saw the film for the first time.

I was 14, and my parents were gone for the weekend. My brother and sister were supposed to look after me, and while I was certainly old enough to spend a few hours by myself, they weren’t supposed to leave me in the house by myself at night. It happened to be June 26th, which was the day after opening night for The Thing. My brother and sister were dedicated splatter film fans, and desperately wanted to see this. Rather than draw straws to see who had to stay home, they took me, acting as my legal guardians for the night.

While certainly not the first scary movie I’d seen in the theater (Jaws and Poltergeist came first), it was the first time I saw one in the company of my siblings. I was a relatively squeamish 14-year-old, but I gutted this one out. Because of that—because I didn’t cry or hide my face or leave the theater, for that night I got treated like one of the big kids. It’s been one of the many reasons I have loved horror movies ever since.

This is a remake, and it’s far superior to The Thing from Another World from the ‘50s. Our action takes place in a research station in the Antarctic. When some people from a Norwegian station nearby appear to go berserk, the Americans investigate, and find everyone dead. They also find evidence that the Norwegians located something horrible below the ice. Taking back what looks like a mass of melted flesh, the Americans soon discover that the Norwegians did indeed find something, and that something is alive and dangerous.

The critter is a shapeshifter, and essentially each cell of its body is a separate entity. It invades a host, gestates, then splits apart in a spray of gore. After a little while, it coalesces into the shape of its original host—it looks the same and sounds the same, but it is now an alien creature bent on occupying other creatures and propagating itself across the world.

This is a tense film, and for this reason is one of Carpenter’s best. Once it becomes evident exactly what is going on, everything devolves into paranoia. No one can be trusted, and anyone could be an alien menace looking to get someone else alone for a couple of minutes to enact a changeover. It has a lot of similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers in that respect.

Two things sell this film. First are the special effects. In 1982, this was as gruesome as a film got, rivaling such splatterfests as Dawn of the Dead for pure, gratuitous entrails. In one scene, for instance, a man’s chest opens up and forms jaws, biting off another man’s hands. When the creature is attacked with fire, the head splits off from the rest of the body, sprouts legs and antennae, and skitters away. It’s completely obscene and completely brilliant. Sadly, the effects aren’t as tremendous 30 years later, but they still work to an extent.

Second, the cast is fantastic. Heading things up is Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady, the helicopter pilot, and one of the few men who appears to be thinking. His friend and foil is Childs (the always underrated Keith David), whose self-preservationist paranoia is tinged with just enough menace to make him either a huge son of a bitch or one of the creatures from the very start. Wilford Brimley plays Blair, who quickly loses his shit, making Childs’s paranoia look like minor dyspepsia. Running the crew is Gary (James Cromwell lookalike Donald Moffat), who deals as well as he can with the world shattering around him and each man looking out for his own skin…or to get into the skins of the others. Rounding out the cast are the medical doctor, Copper (Richard Dysart); the dog handler, Clark (Richard Masur); the cook, Nauls (T.K. Carter), radioman Windows (Thomas G. Waites); stoner-grunt Palmer (David Clennon); and scientists Norris (Charles Hallahan), Fuchs (Joel Polis), and Bennings (Peter Maloney).

What really makes me the happiest about this film, though, is that the characters often do things that turn out to be huge mistakes, but they do them for the right reasons. Over and over again, they make decisions that look smart until they play out to their logical conclusion and prove to be terrible errors. I love that, because the characters act in a way that, on a first view, I’d like to think I would. And then I discover that, like them, I’d be alien fodder because of it.

I love this film, and bought in on DVD mainly because I wore out my VHS copy a few years ago. Few other films (Invasion of the Body Snatchers being one) create such an intense atmosphere of panic, paranoia, and fear. This is great stuff, and if the effects don’t hold up, every other aspect of the film does.

Why to watch Poltergeist: Proof that PG movies can scare the snot out of you.
Why not to watch: Nightmares.

Why to watch The Thing: It’s hardcore.
Why not to watch: The effects don’t hold up as well as you might like.

Super Silent Saturday

Films: Intolerance, The Thief of Bagdad
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

When D.W. Griffith filmed The Birth of a Nation, he simultaneously invented modern film and created a storm of controversy. In an effort to soften that criticism, he produced Intolerance, the biggest, longest, and most expensive film ever created, at least for its time. Intolerance weaves four stories of intolerant behavior—three from history and one from Griffith’s present day—to show the terrible damage cause by judging others harshly and, well, being intolerant. Should you sit down with this one, be prepared to be hammered with the world “intolerance” virtually every time the story switches from one era to the next.

What Griffith does, rather than run each story through from start to finish, is skip back and forth between the four, spending the most time in the present day and in the oldest story, which takes place in ancient Babylon. It’s likely that the first story had the most interest for people of the time and it’s absolutely true that the Babylonian story, with its massive sets, huge crop of extras, and live freakin’ elephants was the most expensive, and he wanted the most bang for his buck there. What this means is that each story essentially builds to a climax at the same time and resolves at the same time.

The four stories are:
Babylon, the siege of the city by Cyrus, aided and abetted by the disgruntled priest of Bel-Marduk, upset that worship has turned to Ishtar instead of his god.
Judea, Christ against the Pharisees and Christ’s eventual crucifixion.
France, and the persecution and destruction of the Huguenots under Catherine de Medici and Charles IX.
And Modern, unrest, strikes, and temperance, leading to moral outrage from moneyed individuals who hold themselves superior to the working class.

The three historical stories all show the terrible consequences of what can happen because of intolerant behavior, and links between the stories come in the form of Lillian Gish acting as a sort of universal mother rocking a cradle, undoubtedly the easiest payday she ever scored.

While this does contain four distinct stories, only two have any real meat on them. The Christ story is almost non-existent to the point where it becomes difficult to recall anything from it. The Pharisees hold themselves above the common masses of the people, Christ here is depicted as the sort of ultimately tolerant individual he was, and he is crucified for defying the wisdom and influence of his elders. Perhaps it’s safe to say that Griffith gave the story so little traction here because it was (and is) such a familiar story to his viewers. Similarly, the French story holds little more than Catholics getting pissed off and killing scads of Huguenots, and disrupting a wedding.

The modern story concerns the destruction caused by the alleged good intentions of reformers, who actually do more to destroy people, tear apart families, and create crime than perform any positive service. This is shown by giving us the story of people who, through circumstances, are treated as emblematic of the problem in the eyes of the reformers, but who are essentially innocent of the crimes of which they are convicted. The intolerance of the reformers blinds them to anything but the necessity of getting their reforms across, whatever the cost, and no matter who is ground down in the wheels of their justice.

The big story, with the cast of thousands and the massive sets, is the Babylonian story, which probably could have (and perhaps should have) been the entire film. Here, religious intolerance leads to the complete destruction of Babylon, and lives are ground down under the wheels of an onrushing army, all because a priest was dissatisfied with the fact that his ruler and the people had turned away from his god.

In this story we get some of the most magnificent battle sequences ever filmed. The sets here are tremendous, and the cast is massive. Thousands of people throw rocks, get hit by arrows, and move massive siege towers into place against huge walls created for the film. There are some really fine bits here, with towers being knocked over and a couple of decapitations that certainly would have shocked people 100 years ago (although through modern eyes, the trick is an obvious one).

What’s really noteworthy here is that again, Griffith did things that no one had done before. We have huge crane shots over Babylon, crane shots with moving cameras that really look like modern camera work. And, even today, 95 years later, the sets are still staggering. It’s the spectacle that makes this worth watching.

What’s difficult for the modern viewer is the typical overacting and overreaction of silent film actors. The Mountain Girl, for instance, takes part in the battles in an effort to help protect her beloved Belshazzar. She launches an arrow, then points to it, and jumps up and down. Yes, you launched an arrow. Good for you. In the middle of battle at one point, she spots Belshazzar and moons over him while around her, people are dying. It’s the sort of thing that to a modern audience makes silent film difficult to take seriously. Her realization of the treachery of the Priest of Bel comes with so much eye-bulging and double taking that it becomes comic.

Doubtless Griffith wanted these characters to be iconic, which is why most of them don’t have names. The accused in the modern story is known only as “The Boy” and his wife is “The Dear One,” while the girl in the French story is called “Brown Eyes.” In general, the bad guys have names—they are specific, but our heroes are known only by what type they are.

Intolerance, for all its epic sweep and profound greatness, is a film without a time. When it was made, audiences reacted by staying away in droves, bankrupting Griffith’s production company. Today, the acting is too extreme, and everything too melodramatic to have any traction with a modern audience. This is a rough ride—watch only for study, and for the giant battle sequences. Otherwise, it’s a few hours of preaching, bad behavior, and overacting.

If you think that the actors in Intolerance overdo it, it’s only because you’ve never seen Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad. There isn’t a gesture here that can’t be made grander, or with a larger sweep of the arm. Seeing a dish of food he’d like, he smacks his lips and rubs his hand over his stomach from groin to chin.

Fairbanks, as might be determined from the previous paragraph, is the eponymous thief. The opening sequence shows him doing what he does. He filches purses by feigning sleep near a drinking spot, climbs walls and takes food, and steals a magic rope when its owner bows in prayer after being called by the muezzin. He also offers a speech to the clerics of Allah, saying that he looks for no reward in the next life. Instead, he takes what he wishes; this is a speech repeated a few minutes later by a Mongol prince, who has set his sights on Bagdad for his own.

To get it, he’ll try to win the hand of the Princess of Bagdad. To do so, the suitor must return with the rarest of treasures. The thief originally breaks into the palace of the Caliph of Bagdad to steal goods, but becomes so enamored of the princess that he decides that she is the true treasure. He first feigns being a prince himself, but is found out and flogged for his trouble. However, once he discovers what must be done to win the princess, he sets out on his own journey, fraught with peril, terrible monsters, and the treachery of his opponents for the princess’s hand.

At a touch longer than two-and-a-half hours, it would be nice to think that there’s more to the plot than this, but more really isn’t needed. Like the Babylonian scenes in Intolerance, the sell here is the spectacle on the screen. While the sets are huge and grand and a number of scenes have a large crop of extras, that’s not the focus. The focus is on the effects and on the talents and charm of Douglas Fairbanks.

Fairbanks is really something special. He was famous and a star back in the 1920s for the exact same reason that Jackie Chan is famous today—he looked like he could do anything, and made it look easy. In fact, while Chan often takes both a real and an apparent beating in his movies, Fairbanks does his stunts with a smile on his face. He is a tremendous acrobat, making everything he does look as simple as walking down a staircase. Naturally there were some tricks here—in one scene hidden trampolines aid his jumps, for instance. But many of these stunts were him and him alone. He moves with the natural grace of a dancer and the skill of a trained athlete. Few actors in history have had this natural gift, and fewer still used them so well and to such good effect.

As far as the special effects, it can be difficult to judge in this modern world of jaded viewers and films like Avatar and Inception. Still, for their time, they are ahead of the game, and while there’s no shock of how these effects were pulled off, several of them still look great and still work. What are the effects? Well, there’s a giant lizard monster, a bat creature, an undersea expedition complete with giant deep sea spider, and a winged horse that really looks great. The magic carpet is a nice effect, too. They all pale to the soldiers who appear from clouds of smoke, though. All in all, it’s impressive enough that it must have been cause for great discussion 85 years ago, and today is still good enough to be worth noting.

Sure, this film is overacted and melodramatic. And? It’s also a great deal of fun, filled with adventure and entertainment. If Douglas Fairbanks makes too much show of everything he does, who really cares? This is really the first non-comedy silent film I can say I have truly been entertained by, and that’s worth the price of admission.

Why to watch Intolerance: It’s grand in a way few films have ever been.
Why not to watch: Being hit over the head with message/message/message is never pleasant.

Why to watch The Thief of Bagdad: Stunts you won’t believe aren’t trick photography, and some of the greatest early effects ever made.
Why not to watch: Crazy, crazy melodrama.

Turn On, Tune In, Surf's Up!

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

If you are human and have a job, at one point or another you have gotten to the place where in your head it’s a good idea to chuck everything, give up all ideas of material possession, and go live on a beach somewhere. That dream, living without commitments and without obligations has a real place in the psyche of anyone who has ever spent a day getting yelled at by a boss or slaved over a task that could be accomplished by a poorly-trained chimp. Surfwise is the story of a family that really did this, and made it work for not just a little while, but decades.

At the center of this world is Dorian Paskowitz, a doctor with a Stanford medical degree. After two failed marriages and disappointment in making money off of sick people, he went to Israel for a year. At the end of his year, he attempted to join the Israeli military, but they wouldn’t have him, so he returned to the U.S. to look for the woman he could make happy. In his world, this meant finding someone who would put up with what would become his ultimate Bohemian-on-the-surface lifestyle, would be willing to churn out children like a factory, and would want hot monkey sex every day. He found the right person when he met Juliette.

For the next couple of decades, the Paskowitzes drove around the world in their beaten down camper, looking for places to surf and producing a brood of eight boys and one lone girl. So imagine this—eleven people in a camper, not on vacation, but permanently. Doc Paskowitz raised his children by his own principles, which included the idea that formal schooling was worse than no schooling and that being healthy involved surfing every single day. So the Paskowitz clan surfed, drove, ate fish that they caught from the ocean, and made money by running surfing camps and by having Doc taking doctoring jobs in remote locations.

The first half of the film or so is an idyll. Here we learn all of the positive things that happened from this strange lifestyle. The kids, naturally, became world champion surfers from all of the constant practice, and starting getting endorsement deals. Their lifestyle was incredibly healthy and positive, and it’s evident that there was a great deal of love.

Not all was sunshine and roses, though. We also learn of the terrible cost of this lifestyle. The kids, as successful as they were in the surfing world, also came out of this experience with absolutely no idea of how to function in modern-day society. They have, as a rule, no formal education, having instead the wisdom that they were taught as children, which sounds great but looks like hell on a resume.

This doesn’t begin to address the other, perhaps more subtle but certainly just as deep scars that the life left on the entire family. Any break from what Dorian wanted was considered as betrayal. Any desire for a normal life or anything traditional was against the family code. Just as disturbing, Doc and Juliette never seemed to quell their appetite for relentless, constant sex, which means that every night, the kids got to listen to Mom and Dad going at it in the same small camper that all eleven of them slept in. Certainly, every one of them has multiple “I caught Mom and Dad having sex” stories, and from all accounts, it appears that all of them have about five of those for every week of their life.

Any extreme thing like this particular lifestyle can’t last forever, and as the kids started to get older, the cracks started to show. It started as competition between the older brothers, which became increasingly vicious as surfing competitions became more competitive and more important. Eventually, the family splintered, less with factions and more with people simply walking away from their extreme existence and trying to find something like normality. It’s telling that of the nine children, only one claims he has plans to raise his own children in anything like the same way as he was raised.

Doc himself is very much extreme in the same way. Because of this, he’s a divisive figure—he is both intriguing because of his ideas and his putting those ideas into practice and terrifying for the same reason. Much of what he says makes a good amount of sense, but much of what he says feels so wrong that it’s like coming around a corner and finding a dead animal. There’s an immediate pull back reaction. Any good lightning rod has the same effect.

If Surfwise fails in any way of creating this both compelling and repellant portrait, it fails at the end, when the family reunites. This Paskowitz family gather feels like a made-for-the-film event, a “let’s all put aside our differences for the sake of the camera” moment that wouldn’t happen if it hadn’t been for the film crew.

It’s impossible to watch this film and not feel twinges. On the one hand, it’s natural to look at that lifestyle and see a carefree, idyllic existence, the kind that would be possible if it weren’t for a mortgage, a job, a car payment, and an inherent need to keep up with the Joneses. On the other hand, there is a comfort in knowing that I’ll probably never have to eat fish heads to survive, and have never forced my children to walk around bare-assed naked because we couldn’t afford clothing for them.

Why to watch Surfwise: Your mind will be blown that they made this work for so long.
Why not to watch: The mixture of jealousy for the lifestyle and disgust at the lifestyle.