Shooting that Paper Hanging Son-of-a-Bitch

Film: Patton
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television.

Is there anything more iconic than the first six minutes of Patton? Is there any pre-war speech short of the St. Crispin’s day speech from Henry V more prone to making a guy want to kick someone’s ass than Patton (George C. Scott) walking out onto that stage in front of that huge American flag and talking about murdering those “Hun bastards”? If there is, I haven’t come across it yet. Those six minutes set the stage for the next two hours and forty-five minutes of war, death, explosions, hell, and trouble. They also probably did more for Scott’s winning the Best Actor Oscar in 1970 than anything else in the film. It’s worth noting that most of what Scott says in that speech come from actual quotes said by Patton, and that many of them were watered down from what the man really said.

Patton, of course, is the story of General George S. Patton, one of the most successful and controversial personalities of World War II. The film does not cover his early life, his childhood, his education, or his early military career. Instead, it starts with Patton’s first command in northern Africa after the disastrous battle at Kasserine, following his battles through the war until its conclusion in Berlin.

In addition to being remembered as perhaps the greatest tank commander in American military history, Patton is best known for a couple of personality quirks. One is that he absolutely refused to retreat. His basic strategy was drive straight ahead at his opponent, grinding over them. He had no use for anyone he considered incompetent or a coward. He also firmly believed in reincarnation, and believed that he had lived many lifetimes previously, always as a soldier.

All of these aspects of Patton’s personality are brought out in the film. Most telling are his personality conflicts with British Field Marshal Montgomery (Michael Bates), who Patton considered a prima donna and less than competent. This comes to a head, at least initially, on Sicily in preparation for the invasion of Italy. Patton’s plan for a dual landing at Syracuse and Palermo was scrapped in favor of a plan that gave the potential for glory to Montgomery, leaving the American forces the bulk of the fighting.

Patton used the fact that Montgomery encountered stiff resistance to advance, cross the island, take Palermo anyway, and then rush along the coast to reach Messina before Montgomery. It was a huge personal victory for Patton, and the beginning of his personal war with Monty. It also caused friction between Patton and General Omar Bradley (Karl Malden). Bradley was forced to take his troops over mountain roads, and for Bradley, this tactic felt less about victory for the army and more about personal glory for Patton, an opinion further enhanced by Patton’s insistence on a risky amphibious landing to continue advancing.

The other iconic moment of Patton’s life and the movie is the slapping incident. While visiting a hospital during the battle on Sicily, Patton encounters a soldier suffering from what was called at the time shell shock. Unable to believe that combat fatigue/shell shock/PTSD was a real thing, Patton slapped the young soldier and called him a coward, and was forced to apologize for his actions. This happens right about at the mid-point of the film.

One thing I appreciate about this film is the fact that it doesn’t simply focus on Patton. We get both sides of the war here, frequently seeing briefings of the Afrikakorps. It is here that we get frequent insights into the nature and personality of Patton as well as those of Patton’s greatest historical enemy, Erwin Rommel (Karl Michael Vogler).

Patton is unquestionably a war film, and there’s a lot of war in it. If you don’t like watching tanks drive around artillery fire, there’s a lot of this film you won’t enjoy. However, as much as it is a film about war, it’s also a film about the man behind the Patton legend.

Assuming the film as relatively accurate in terms of Patton’s life and career, two things become evident in the watching. It is very easy to admire Patton the warrior and to look on him as something unique in the annals of warfare. It is also incredibly difficult to like the man. He’s a bastard, unrelenting and uncompromising. It’s far easier to like and respect a man like Bradley, who left personal glory aside and always had the best interests and lives of his men as his central focus.

Patton is a fascinating film with an equally fascinating history. I’m personally attracted to films on or about World War II mainly because I feel like it’s the last war we had a real reason to be in, the last one that felt entire justified on every possible level. Regardless of my personal convictions or your own, Patton is a tremendous film. While George C. Scott never claimed his Oscar, he earned it. Karl Malden earned one too, but wasn’t even nominated.

Why to watch Patton: They called Patton “Old Blood and Guts” for a reason.
Why not to watch: You’re a pacifist.

Month Six Status Report

Half a year in, and as of today, I've got 900 movies to go. At the current rate, I'll finish some time in 2013, which is a bit longer than I'd wanted to go.

The biggest issue I'm facing, aside from the 40 or so films I can't find, is that I still haven't watched any of the really long films. I've been making an effort lately to hit some of the longer ones, but the really long ones are still ahead rather than in the rear view mirror.

The goal is to get a good chunk of the 3+ hour films done this year. Look for some longish films in the coming week, as well as continued concentration on the three areas that are most difficult for me--silent films, musicals, and foreign films.

I'm curious to see where July goes. Ready or not, here we go.

The Wild Blue Yonder

Film: The Right Stuff
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

You watch enough films, you get jaded. Things start to get predictable when you’ve seen the same plot a couple of dozen times. This is even truer in situations in which the film in question is based on reality. The Right Stuff is very much based on reality, covering the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union through the 1950s and 1960s. If you don’t know your history, it’s a riveting tale filled with drama, danger, and excitement. If you do know your history…well, it’s really the same thing. Lots of drama, lots of danger, lots of excitement.

It’s difficult for me to remember sometimes that not everyone knows what I know, or grew up when I did. I remember the tail end of the space race and the origin of the space shuttle missions. Kids from my generation knew about astronauts and the push into space. So, since I grew up with it, it can be difficult to realize that there are plenty of people who don’t know the history, didn’t grow up with it, and never lived in a world where it was important.

The Right Stuff is the story of the seven Mercury astronauts, their wives, and the men who worked in the space program. We don’t start with Mercury, though. Instead, the film begins in the 1950s with the attempts to break the sound barrier, something that, like the four-minute mile, many experts said was impossible. So, for the first part of the film, we are dealing primarily with the great Chuck Yeager (played here by Sam Shepard).

If you’re unclear of the history and don’t know if the sound barrier was ever broken, you can rest easy. It’s broken in the film in the first half hour, and Yeager is the man who does it. We stay here, in the middle of the desert at Edwards Air Force Base, as pilots push the envelope further and further, with Yeager being the man to get airplanes past mach 2.5.

Everything changes when the Russians put Sputnik into orbit in the late 1950s. At this point, we switch over to the seven Mercury astronauts. We start with a larger group, and they are slowly pared down to the seven who made the cut—the seven with “the right stuff.” The seven are Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), Virgil “Gus” Grissom (Fred Ward), Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin), Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank), and Wally Schirra (Lance Henriksen). While we spend some time with all seven, the primary characters in the film are Shepard, Glenn, Cooper, and Grissom. Rounding out the cast as government agents are Harry Shearer and Jeff Goldblum.

This is essentially the entire movie. The seven men train, do a number of press tours, and risk their lives as they get closer and closer to taking a craft into space. While they quarrel at times—usually about some of the astronauts taking their new-found fame as an opportunity for extra-curricular activities—the seven also bond completely so that they can present a united front to the government and scientists.

Of the seven, John Glenn comes off as the true boy scout and as the aggressor when it comes to keeping the squeaky clean image of the Mercury astronauts. Cooper is depicted as the real player, and also as the one with the most significant marital problems.

What I find the most interesting is that the film does not give short shrift to the wives of the astronauts. There are several scenes where the women express their frustration and their worries as their husbands risk their lives essentially strapped to the front end of a missile. Most poignant is the relationship between Glenn and his wife, Annie (Mary Jo Deschanel). Annie suffers from a significant stutter, even when speaking with her husband, and is thus understandably not willing to go on national television. Glenn risks his own career to support her in that decision. It’s a sweet moment, made sweeter by the unification of the other six astronauts behind Glenn’s stand.

The most iconic moment of the film belongs not to the astronauts, but to Yeager. While Yeager’s fame as the first man to break the sound barrier faded as soon as the Mercury program began, he was left behind as unacceptable for the program due to his lack of a college education. It’s evident from the portrayal here that while Yeager puts on a front of not caring, he truly wishes to be flying the latest and greatest, those being the Mercury rockets. Near the end of the film, he takes an experimental plane as high as he can, pushing it to leave Earth’s atmosphere, only to fall back and crash at the end. There is no better moment in the film than Yeager walking stoically away from the wreck, his face half burned, the wreckage of a hugely expensive aircraft augered in behind him.

I knew the history, or at least some of it, going in. It doesn’t matter when the story is this compelling and the movie is this well acted.

Why to watch The Right Stuff: Fact-based true tales of real American heroes.
Why not to watch: If you know your history, you know how it ends.

Thought Crime

Film: Alphaville: Une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

A note: Typically, I refer to foreign films by their foreign language title in my write-ups. Today, however, since the first word of the English title is precisely the same as the French title, and because the French title is so long, it is easier to simply call the film by its English name.

I was recently asked by a co-1001 Movies blogger if I had watched any Godard yet. I hadn’t at the time, but assured him that I would undoubtedly dip my toes into the Godard pond this week, thus Alphaville in the spinner tonight. It’s hardly a stretch to say that in this day and age, Godard is no longer the most culturally relevant Jean-Luc for most people. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, only a true thing. I’m guilty of the same. Say “Jean-Luc” to me, and I’ll respond “Picard” long before I’ll say “Godard.”

Before we delve to heavily into this film, it’s worth getting a few things out of the way. Lemmy Caution is the creation of British pulp writer Peter Cheyney. Eddie Constantine, who plays Caution in this film, played the same role a number of times before this film was made. Caution is, therefore, the British equivalent of Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade.

Similarities to other Lemmy Caution films ends here. In true existential fashion, Alphaville takes place in a sort of no-time and no-place. Certainly with some of the events and ideas here, the film is absolutely science fiction. However, the film also quite evidently takes place in the mid-20th century (Caution refers to himself as a Guadalcanal veteran). In terms of place, all that matters is that we are in Alphaville, and that everything is run by Alpha 60.

So what is Alpha 60? It’s the computer that runs Alphaville with an iron processor. Alpha 60 has made emotion illegal within the city limits of Alphaville. It is a sentient machine that has determined that the only way to have the city run efficiently is to eliminate anything that does not make perfectly logical sense. In short, love, art, poetry, and emotion are all illegal within the city. Failure to comply means a brutal interrogation followed by execution, even for the smallest infractions, like displaying grief at the death of a spouse.

Essentially, this film falls in terms of ideal between Orwell’s 1984 and George Lucas’s THX1138. Like Orwell’s work, the society is highly dystopic and rigidly controlled by an overwhelming, implacable force. Resistance is essentially futile because it is impossible to organize any resistance. Like Big Brother, the computer is everywhere and is always looking for any slip or sign of weakness to eliminate anything that stands in the way of its complete power. Like Lucas’s film that follows this one, there is no love or emotion, and expressing either is a crime of the highest order.

Caution’s task here is to initially find an operative named Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) who has not reported back for a long time. Caution finds the man, who speaks rather cryptically, dallies a bit with a local prostitute, and then dies, telling Caution that Alpha 60 must be destroyed. Coincidentally, Caution is also charged with locating and either bringing back or eliminating a man named von Braun, who created Apha 60.

Caution meets von Braun’s daughter Natasha (Anna Karina), who claims to have never met her father, nor stepped foot outside of Alphaville into the Outlands. Similarly, and predictably considering the city she was raised in, Natasha has no concept of love or morality or conscience.

Like any good noir, Caution is tempted by the devil, in this case von Braun. As Caution digs further into the city, he discovers that Alpha 60 is sending potential dissidents out to other places, other worlds, to foment revolution, hopefully bringing about more Alpha 60-style societies throughout the universe. And so, as befits many films from the mid-‘60s, there is a strong anti-communist sense to this film as well.

Ultimately, the idea here is about sense of self and individualism. Just as Orwell feared the destruction of the unique person in the service to the state, Godard fears the loss of self and emotion as being the loss of that which makes us human. It’s a nice metaphor, and it works pretty well throughout.

Eddie Constantine does look very much like a traditional noir private dick. In his fedora and trench coat, he looks the part, and his craggy, weathered face that looks chiseled out of granite fits the part as well. His complete lack of emotion throughout actually works well here, too. The anti-heroes in noirs often tend to be emotionless, even when dealing out violence, something that Caution does frequently here.

The film is disturbingly weird. Most bothersome here is the soundtrack, which seems to play nothing but the same Baaaaaahm-Bamp! Buuuuuuuuhm-Bamp! over and over. It gets oppressive quickly. Just as disturbing is the narrator-like role of Alpha 60, which speaks in a deep, throaty croak that sounds like a man with a cold trying desperately to make himself belch.

And yet, I like the ultimate conclusion. For such a strange film, it’s almost uplifting at the end, despite the sudden violence, croaking voice, and lack of expressions.

Why to watch Alphaville: Une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution: Existentialism that lifts rather than depresses.
Why not to watch: Croaky, belchy French.

Missing Persons

Film: Picnic at Hanging Rock, L’Avventura (The Adventure)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television (both films).

I’m not prone to gushing about products in general. Something has to be truly exceptional for me to get all mushy-headed about it. If I’m getting exactly what I’m paying for, that’s not really worth laudatory praise. I’m close to giddy with what I’m getting from NetFlix, though. Not only can I get about 80% of the remaining list on NetFlix, I can get a bunch of them instantly on the laptop or through our Wii. Even better, if the movie I want doesn’t appear on the queue for the Wii, I can place it in the queue on the laptop, then watch it through the Wii. Technology is great when it works. Many of the streaming movies feel like odd choices, which is great. It’s not just the newest and biggest—there are plenty of obscure gems on the streaming list. Yesterday, for instance, I watched pretty much all of the Firefly television series, followed by Serenity. This is why I did not update yesterday.

Seeing Picnic at Hanging Rock on the queue was a pleasant surprise. I queued it up while pairing socks, and after a time, I forgot about pairing the socks and instead concentrated on the film. This film is both a great example of a period piece as well as a disturbing mystery. The whole thing centers on the Hanging Rock of the title. This is a massive outcropping of stone vaulting several hundred craggy feet into the air in Australia.

At the turn of the last century, the students and some of the faculty at a British all-girls’ school in Australia plans a day out to visit the rock. They are warned not to get too near it as there are poisonous snakes about as well as nasty ants. Most of the girls go, but Sara (Margaret Nelson) stays at home under the guidance of the school’s owner and mistress, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts). It becomes evident that several things are at work here. Sara is opposed to authority, punished because she refused to memorize a particular poem. Sara might be (read: is) rebelling against Mrs. Appleyard’s authority. It’s also quickly evident that Mrs. Appleyard dislikes the young orphan. It’s also quickly evident that Mrs. Appleyard dislikes the young orphan. The reason why is a little trickier.

It’s hinted in the beginning that Sara may be having a lesbian relationship with another girl at the school. This other girl, Miranda (Anne Lambert), is the school treasure, loved by one and all. While Sara sits punished at home and dreaming of her dear Miranda, Miranda and a trio of other girls—Irma (Karen Robson), Marion (Jane Vallis), and Edith (Christine Schuler)—go trekking up the rock, eventually followed by a teacher. Only Edith returns.

This sequence is to my mind the most puzzling as well as the prettiest in the film. The three disappearing girls—Irma, Marion, and Miranda—are all beautiful and depicted as ethereal, almost unearthly. All four of the girls fall into a swoon, but it is the three who, socks and shoes removed, wander away, leaving the pudgy, homely Edith to sit and scream after them.

What happens next is difficult to explain. Two young men who saw the girls walk by are questioned, and their answers feel suspicious, almost forced and badly memorized. One of these young men in particular is obsessed with finding the girls, notably Miranda. It’s notable that he walks off from his friend when the girls go past. Did he follow them? Did he molest them and/or kill them? These questions aren’t answered. Irma shows up a week later, in shock and dehydrated, but otherwise fine. She has no memory of the past week, has no idea how she got where she was found, and cannot recall what happened to the other girls.

What’s hushed up at the school is the fact that Irma returned without her corset, implying strongly that it was removed, further implying the possibility of molestation. Did the young man remove it? Did the other two girls?

The school begins to fall apart at this point. Not only are the girls missing, but many of the parents of the other girls have stated that their children will not be coming back after the end of the term. As her school crumbles around her, Mrs. Appleyard takes out her frustrations on Sara, first claiming that her tuition has not been paid, meaning she can no longer take classes like dance lessons. Second, she says that if the bill is not paid, Sara will be returned to the orphanage, a place that Sara speaks of only in hushed tones.

The end result of all this, in something that has seemed like a theme for what I’ve been watching lately, is a movie that presents a great number of questions and answers none of them. However, unlike those films that present dilemmas that can be discussed and social problems that must be solved, Picnic at Hanging Rock’s questions are simply about itself. Those things left unanswered are the unanswered questions of the mystery surrounding the disappearances. Like so much of real life, there is no resolution here, and the story doesn’t so much end as stop.

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

Miranda, Marion, and their chaperone are never found. Mrs. Appleyard decides that Sara must go back to the orphanage, and on hearing the news, Sara throws herself out a high window into the greenhouse below, killing herself. Mrs. Appleyard claims that the girl’s guardian came for her, but when told of the girl’s death, she is already clad in mourning attire. The film ends with a voiceover stating that Mrs. Appleyard’s body was found a few days later at the foot of Hanging Rock, with the determination that she slipped while climbing it. Did she? Or did she jump? Or was she pushed by the spirits (or reality) of the missing girls?

*** END SPOILERS ***

Ultimately, this is a film that is beautiful, but also frustrating.

We stick with a similar theme with Antonini’s L’Avventura (The Adventure). Two women are going on a five-day boat cruise with a group of people. Anna (Lea Massari) is meeting her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), who she hasn’t seen for a month. Her friend is Claudia (Monica Vitti), who is going along for the ride.

Anna’s and Sandro’s relationship is troubled, mostly because of their month-long separation. Anna wants very much to be with him, but complains that she also wants to be alone and without him. Being apart for a month has gotten her used to being alone. In short, she’s confused and doesn’t know what she wants.

On the boat, the group goes for a swim, but one of their number spots a shark. Everyone makes it to an island. After a siesta, the group discovers that Anna is missing without a trace. They scour the island for her, but to no avail. It is as if she has simply disappeared completely.

What happens next is that Claudia and Sandro become intrigued with each other. While they both search for Anna, they discover a mutual attraction that both excites them and fills them with guilt. Claudia attempts to get away from Sandro, but they keep ending up at the same places with the same wealthy, banal people, and eventually, nature simply takes its course. Claudia spends the film happy and guilt-ridden, excited by Sandro and disgusted by his womanizing. She’s guilty not because Anna is missing, but because she is secretly pleased that now Sandro can be hers. At one point, she whispers “Mine…mine…mine…” in his ear as they roll about on the ground.

The biggest knock on this film is that honestly, not that much happens. Anna disappears, Sandro and Claudia attempt to find something together (and may by film’s end), and that’s pretty much it. This emptiness of plot seems to symbolize quite a bit, though, and was certainly intentional by Antonini. For a film that stretches nearly two-and-a-half hours, very little of import seems to happen.

However, this is symbolic of the lives of the people here. While they are all wealthy and seemingly happy, they are also all empty. All, including Anna, Sandro, and Claudia, are burdened with shallow, unfulfilling relationships. All of them appear willing, able, and ready to cheat at the drop of a hat or a skirt. On the surface, it appears like hedonism, but beneath, it doesn’t rise to that level. It’s more like they are all trying to fill up the emptiness of their lives with anything and anyone they can get their hands on. Anna’s disappearance, in fact, doesn’t give them much to live for, either. While Sandro and Claudia appear to be searching diligently for her, this doesn’t stop them from trysts at virtually every possible opportunity.

In short, Anna disappears, and the world of these characters is unchanged. The world would similarly be unchanged if any of these people similarly vanished and were never heard from again. Slow paced, but interesting almost in spite of itself.

Why to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock: Trancey, dream-like qualities and a great story.
Why not to watch: So many untied threads.

Why to watch L’Avventura: Metaphors abound
Why not to watch: Not much happens.

The Angels Want to Wear Elvis Costello's

Film: The Red Shoes
Format: VHS from Putnam County Public Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

I went into The Red Shoes believing it to be a musical, and that really is the easiest way to classify it. It is not, however, a musical at all, but a dance movie in the classic sense. In fact, it is even more of a dance movie than the classic Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelly films of the same era. While those films frequently turned on dance numbers, there were just as frequently singing parts and much of the plot hinged on what people sang at each other. Not so with The Red Shoes. There is no singing here (except to demonstrate other parts of an orchestration), and ballet takes center stage, both literally and figuratively.

The film takes its name from a story of the same name by Hans Christian Anderson. In the fairy tale, a young girl encounters a pair of magical red shoes. She puts them on, and the shoes make her dance. At first, she enjoys herself, dancing herself silly. At the end of the evening, when she is tired, the shoes refuse to stop dancing; they are never tired. She dances and dances until, finally exhausted and unable to do anything else, she cuts off the shoes (and her feet still in them) and dies horribly. Sorta warms the cockles of your heart, doesn’t it? So cheery.

Fortunately, there is no foot removal in this film. We start instead at the performance of a new ballet being attended by a group of students. One of these is Julian Craster (Marius Goring), a young composer, who discovers as the show begins that the music is quite familiar. It appears that the music of the ballet, ostensibly written by his instructor, is actually his own work. He goes the next day to see the man who runs the company, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who hires Craster as an assistant.

Lermontov also takes on a young woman who claims that for her, dancing is like living—she isn’t sure why she must do it, but she must. This is Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), who despite her wealthy upbringing is no dilettante. Lermontov recognizes that beneath her still untrained exterior there lurks a true dance prodigy, someone who can set the dance world on its ear. When the star of Lermontov’s company gets married, it is Victoria who becomes the new prima ballerina.

Her first major triumph is an adaptation of “The Red Shoes,” with a score written by Craster. She puts everything into the performance and the rehearsals, and while Lermontov believes she has a long way to go until she is truly great, she is well received. He promises her the dance world, with shows in every major city in Europe and America. Sadly for Lermontov, Craster has promised her something else—a lifetime of love and his devotion. And thus we come to the point of the film. Will Victoria leave the dream of becoming a truly great dancer for a life with Craster, or will she devote herself to the stage, shunning everything else to become the greatest dancer the world has ever seen?

The film is surprisingly effective at times, and surprisingly ineffective at times. The romance between Victoria and Julian, for instance, just seems to happen because it’s supposed to. There’s no build up, or at least not much of one, and it feels short changed, if not flat out cheap. On the other hand, Victoria’s relationship with Lermontov is nicely established. Lermontov is a true Svengali, and a terribly wicked man determined only to get exactly what he wants when he wants it. He stops at nothing to get Victoria to stay with him, stooping even to true cruelty.

Much of the film is the stage production of the ballet of the title. Here, the film both hits and misses for me. It’s absolutely a stunner, and Moira Shearer is a hell of a dancer. She made her living mostly on the stage, and while I understand that, it’s also very much a shame that there’s not a lot of footage of her in films of this sort. She’s absolutely incredible as a dancer, and despite the fact that she made only a half dozen films or so—and many of those without dancing parts—she’s one of the best to ever star in a film.

The ballet itself, though, is surreal. Much of what is happening on stage simply couldn’t be staged the way it is, and so I find that for me, much of it doesn’t work. For instance, when she puts on the red shoes, she simply appears in them, and they tie instantly. My kids are both in ballet, and I’ve seen people put on pointe shoes—it isn’t instant. The stage shifts into bizarre landscapes and backdrops, yet is always a stage. In fact, the only way the sequence makes sense (aside from people appearing and disappearing instantly and the whole “instant shoes” thing) is to understand that much of the scenery at least is taking place in Victoria’s head. There’s precedent for this—Craster tells her that she’ll be able to see what he wants her to with his music. For me, that’s the only way this ballet makes sense as both a cinematic piece and a piece being performed in front of an audience on a stage.

Beyond this, I’m not totally thrilled with how simplistic the story really is. Victoria’s decision doesn’t happen until the very tail end of the film, and it doesn’t even become obvious that she has a decision to make until just before that. It works here slightly better than it might otherwise because so much of the focus is on the dancing itself, which is really how it should be with this movie.

In short, don’t watch The Red Shoes for the plot or the acting. Watch instead for dance performances that are rightly considered some of the best in the history of musical cinema.

Why to watch The Red Shoes: Truly epic dance sequences.
Why not to watch: Simplistic plot.

Fight the Power

Film: Do the Right Thing
Format: DVD from Rasmussen College Library on itty bitty bedroom television.

There are many people, many of them critics, who like to discuss particular films as being a part of one country’s cinematic tradition or another. There’s some validity to that, because there are films that could really only be made by the people of a particular nationality. To my mind, French cinema is often distinctly French, for instance. American cinema, though, is sort of the mutt of film styles, much like the country proclaims itself a melting pot. American cinema is all styles. Yet, there are some films that are distinctly American, deal with specific American problems, and could only be made by Americans in America.

One such film is Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. It tells the story of a single day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York. It also happens to be the hottest day of the summer, and everyone is on edge. What starts as a typical day in the summer quickly and inexorably escalates into chaos, rioting, and disaster. Is it the heat? Is it racial tension? Is it something else? Is it everything at once?

Few of the people on the block go by their real names. Our protagonist, or at least as close as we really have to one, is Mookie (Spike Lee). Mookie delivers pizzas for Sal (Danny Aiello) of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, which stands at the heart of the predominantly African-American Bed-Stuy block. Sal is assisted by his two sons, Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson). Pino, the older of the two, hates the neighborhood, hates the pizzeria and more than anything, hates the customers who come in. Vito is less aggressive and more attuned to the neighborhood, and is more likely to stick up for Mookie than anyone else.

Mookie, while he delivers the pizzas, isn’t a very hard worker. He frequently takes breaks from deliveries and talks to the other people on the block. Most important for him are his sister, Jade (Joie Lee) and his girlfriend and mother of his child, Tina (Rosie Perez). Also on the block are Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), the stuttering Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith) and a cast of dozens, including small roles for Martin Lawrence, Frankie Faison, and Robin Harris, who plays the awesomely named Sweet Dick Willie. All of this is overseen by Mister Senor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), the local DJ.

The bulk of the film is the people on the block dealing with the heat and each other. There’s an undercurrent of racial tension throughout the neighborhood. When a white man accidentally scuffs Buggin’ Out’s new Air Jordans, a riot nearly ensues. The bulk of the neighborhood verbally attacks, upset that the man owns a brownstone in the area, and further upset when he claims to have been born in Brooklyn rather than a white stronghold like Massachusetts. There is equal tension over the local Korean grocery store.

Most of the ire is reserved for Sal, though. Sal likes the neighborhood even though Pino wants to leave it. In a long speech, Sal comments that he’s proud to be a part of the neighborhood, and proud the that locals have grown up eating his food. Pino hears none of it, though, and can’t repress his anger at being forced to spend time in a part of the city he feels is beneath him.

Things start to come to a head when Buggin’ Out notices that the Wall of Fame in Sal’s only has pictures of Italian-Americans on it. Since they are in a predominantly black neighborhood, Buggin’ Out wants, as he says, some brothers on the wall. Things get more tense when Radio Raheem, his gigantic boombox blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” asks for a couple of slices, but refuses to turn off the music.

Slowly, inch by inch, the tension gets ratcheted up until it finally reaches a breaking point. The end of the film, while perhaps predictable, is predictable only because it is also inevitable. The tragedy here is not that the story essentially ends with a riot, but that like happens so often, things escalate into insanity from such a simple, mundane, banal beginning.

There are no answers here, only questions—the mark in my mind of a great film. The questions are made more difficult by one simple fact: Mookie, the one person who lives in both worlds (and in meta-thinking, the guy who wrote, directed, and produced the film), is also the one who causes the incident inciting the riot at end film’s climax. Mookie is the one who touches off the crowd despite his allegiance to Sal and the pizzeria.

Who’s right here? Doesn’t Sal have the right to hang what he wants on the walls of his own place? Does Buggin’ Out have a point that he should be more attuned to his customers if he wants to be a part of the neighborhood?

This is a film that demands not only to be watched, but to be discussed, at length, and with a mind toward frankness and openness on all sides. Put bluntly, this is Spike Lee’s best and most thought-provoking film. If the 1001 list were reduced to 10% of its size, I’d argue for this film to stay on it. It’s that good, and it’s that important.

Why to watch Do the Right Thing: The conversation is worth having.
Why not to watch: The conversation easily slides into argument.