Pacing

Film: Days of Heaven
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Terrence Malick has a reputation for making some of the most beautiful films around. I’m honestly not sure how much of that reputation really belongs to Malick and how much should belong to his cinematographers, but impossible to get away from. There is an undeniable beauty to Malick’s films. Of all of them, Days of Heaven may well be the most visually striking. It may have been eclipsed by The Tree of Life, but even that is a matter of opinion. There’s no denying that Days of Heaven is a film of surpassing cinematic beauty.

Make no mistake; that is precisely where the focus is in this film, because it’s certainly not on the depth of the story. In truth, the story tends to be the biggest complaint about Days of Heaven. It’s one of those films that can be summed up in a couple of sentences. Around the 1920s, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) are a couple, but Bill insists on telling people that they are brother and sister to avoid dealing with questions about their marital status. As the film opens, Bill accidentally kills his foreman in a steel mill, and Bill, Abby, and Bill’s younger sister Linda (Linda Manz) travel to the Texas Panhandle to work on a wheat farm.

The Unkindest Cut

Film: Moolaade
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

When I heard what Moolaade was about, it became the newest List addition that I least wanted to see. This film is about female genital mutilation, which is a subject I find difficult to even contemplate. I try not to shy away from things that are important, and don’t get me wrong—this is important. It just gives me the willies. Sembene’s film is, thankfully, wholly against the practice. Part of Moolaade’s purpose is doubtless to raise awareness of the topic. I’m all for that. It just happens that this topic is horribly icky.

A group of young girls escapes from this ritual exercise and rush back to their village, asking for the protection of Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly), a woman who refused to have her daughter undergo the same ritual some years earlier. To enact her protection, she places a colored band of rope across the entrance to her house. This protection, called “Moolaade,” prevents anyone from coming into the house to harm the girls. This all becomes more relevant because Colle’s “unpurified” daughter Amasatou (Salimata Traore) is promised to one of the powerful village elders. This elder flatly refused to have his son marry an impure woman as is demanded by this particular Islamic sect.

Consequences

Film: Hana-bi (Fireworks)
Format: DVD from Western Illinois University through WorldCat on laptop.

I was introduced to “Beat” Takeshi Kitano with the film Gohatto. He was my favorite part of the film. That boded well for Hana-bi (Fireworks), a film that was written by him, directed by him, and stars him. There’s a gravitas to him that few actors can equal, although I’m reminded of David Gulpilil in terms of his on-screen weight. He manages to at once be solemn, brutal, and tragic. I guess in that respect, he also reminds me of Ulrich Muhe, while at other times he reminds me of a Japanese De Niro. In Hana-bi, he plays an ex-cop plagued by a series of problems that see him slowly spiraling into deeper and deeper problems.

Yoshitaka Nishi (Kitano) is a cop who has had a terrible string of luck. First, before the start of the film, his young daughter dies tragically. Next, his wife Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto) is stricken with leukemia and the prognosis is less than favorable. Third, and this is the straw that finally does him in, Nishi’s partner Horibe (Ren Ohsugi) is paralyzed when he is shot by a criminal while Nishi is visiting his wife in the hospital. With the injury to Horibe, Nishi retires to spend time with his ailing wife. The lack of income forces him to borrow money from the Yakuza—money he can’t pay back.

I Have Reservations

Film: The Exiles
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

The Exiles is one of those films that I dread when it comes to the review. Doing a lot of films I knew relatively well early on put me in the particular corner of writing to a general length on these, and I’ve been consistent. I can’t, now that I’m two dozen or so films away from finishing, change the formula now. Okay, I could, but it would feel like cheating. The issue with The Exiles is that nothing really happens. Director Kent MacKenzie follows a group of people around for a night and films the nothing that happens. Roll credits.

Okay, it’s a little more than that but not much more. The main thing I left out is that the people we follow around are all Native Americans who have left the reservation and fled to Los Angeles in search of something better/more/different. While there is a group of people we spend time with, the bulk of the running time of the film concerns Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, and Tommy Reynolds.

Watching Oscar: The Truman Show

Film: The Truman Show
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I really love The Truman Show. It represents a particular example of what I think makes a film truly great and meaningful. First, it’s a great story, one that is engaging all the way through. It’s a unique spin on a story that I think everyone has had the feeling of at one point or another—that somehow everything is literally about us. It’s a masterpiece of solipsism, deceit, and paranoia. I love the way it works and I love the way it ends. While not perfect, it’s pretty damn close.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has lived his entire life inside a television show. Literally. An unwanted child at birth, he was legally adopted by a corporation and placed inside the single-largest physical structure in the world, a massive enclosed studio with its own weather system, series of lights representing the stars, sun and moon, and ocean. Inside this massive structure is Seahaven, a small island community stuck in a vague memory of the 1950s. His life is broadcast 24/7 to the world at large. All of this is done completely without Truman’s knowledge. I think Seahaven is alleged to be in California (after all, the sun sets over the ocean), but every time I watch this, it has the feel of a town situated in Massachusetts. There’s something about it that feels like it belongs near Cape Cod.

Watching Oscar: Going My Way

Film: Going My Way
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

This is a film I vaguely remember as a kid. The local Chicago station (WGN, channel 9) would run family movies on Sundays, and Going My Way was a part of its regular rotation. I have fond memories of many of those movies. I don’t have particularly fond memories of Going My Way. That’s not really fair; the truth is that while I know this is a film I’d seen before, my memories of it are limited pretty much to the song “Swingin’ on a Star” and Der Bingle wearing a priest’s collar.

So I knew heading in that Going My Way was going to be a rough ride for me. There’s a lot in this film that was going to make things difficult for me. First and foremost, it’s a musical, and a musical of the traditional style, starring Bing Crosby, no less. Second, good ol’ Bing plays a priest, which means it’s going to be filled to bursting with God, Jesus, and all the saints. My suspicions were confirmed in the opening couple of minutes when our ultra-Irish main character, Father O’Malley (Crosby) wanders into his new ultra-Irish parish and encounters an angry atheist. Big damn sigh.

Welcome to the Machine

Film: The Man with the Golden Arm
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I’m kind of fascinated by Frank Sinatra as an actor. He was fine in a musical or light comedy, but he was surprisingly effective as a dramatic actor. The Manchurian Candidate is my favorite of his films, but I genuinely haven’t seen a dramatic film he was in that I don’t at least like. From Here to Eternity is certainly his most acclaimed, The Manchurian Candidate is his most complicated, but The Man with the Golden Arm is the most aggressive, at least that I have seen. I knew going in this was a film that dealt with heroin addiction. I didn’t expect it to be a film noir with heroin as the bad guy.

Frankie Machine (Sinatra) is out after a short stint in prison. He was busted for running an illegal poker game, taking the rap for his boss Schwiefka (Robert Strauss). While in the joint, a couple of important things happened to Frankie. First and foremost, he kicked his heroin habit. Six months cold turkey will do that to a man. Second, he learned to play the drums. Now finally clean, Frankie is looking to stay clean, wanting nothing more than to hook up with a band to play for, allowing him to take care of his wife Zosch (Eleanor Parker). Zosch has waited patiently for Frankie to be released.