A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #42: John Lurie’s Fish­ing With John.

As a fish­er­man, watch­ing Fish­ing with John was quite an expe­ri­ence. Wall­eye and pike are only men­tioned once, by Tom Waits; the rest of the time the fish­ing was much more exotic than what a Mid­west­erner like me is used to. How­ever, through­out most episodes, you’re lucky to see more than one [usu­ally tiny] fish. The enjoy­ment comes from the over the top nar­ra­tion and the con­founded aspects of John Lurie’s celebrity [read ‘bud­dies’] guests. A cou­ple of them [namely Waits and Willem Dafoe] actu­ally seem to know a thing or two about fishing.

Most of the rest of the time is devoted to hijinks of one sort or another, usu­ally at the expense of both the locals, Lurie & his cohorts. They send up the mys­tic man­ner­isms of the sea­soned fish­er­man by doing a fish dance and expe­ri­ence all man­ner of trou­ble actu­ally get­ting to where the fish are sup­posed to be, but I get the sense that, despite the put-upon bum­bling, every­one actu­ally enjoyed the fishing.

The way the locals from around the world are treated trou­bled me a bit, espe­cially because they don’t seem to know that they’re the butt of the jokes. I def­i­nitely got a “we’re idiot Amer­i­can tourist” vibe from the Lurie, Matt Dil­lon, et al. but I can’t tell whether even that is delib­er­ate or not. The episodes tread a few fine lines, scripted ver­sus impro­vi­sa­tional, with a dif­fi­cult blandly tan­gen­tial humor, and non-obviousness seems to be the goal of most of the episodes. It is easy to feel a bit of fremd­schä­men through­out the series. I wouldn’t say these episodes are for every­one. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have enjoyed them if I hadn’t had a fish­ing back­round (and famil­iar­ity with fish­ing shows). If you’re a fan of Jim Jar­mush, John Lurie, or Tom Waits, Fish­ing with John is prob­a­bly right up your alley though.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #116: Akira Kurosawa’s The Hid­den Fortress.

Well it has been 9 months since I last reviewed a Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion film. I sup­pose hav­ing a 7-month old will do that to you. I had a chance to sit down last night and watch The Hid­den Fortress. I might be a bit rusty, but this film didn’t seem as high-quality as most of Kurosawa’s out­put. The only char­ac­ter who exhibits any devel­op­ment is Princess Yuki, and although she’s the focus of all of the action, as a char­ac­ter she’s pretty sec­ondary. The two peas­ants, Tahei and Matak­ishi, are in the fore through­out the film, and their slap­stick kept the film from delv­ing into the deeper conun­drums that bound around in the wings.

Every­body is try­ing to find or save Princess Yuki, the last sur­viv­ing mem­ber of the Akizuki clan. Our two boors buf­fet about due to the tides of war and their own avarice, seek­ing either the Akizuki gold or Yuki Akizuki, as their whims dic­tate. Toshiro Mifune [play­ing Toshiro Mifune as Rotokura Mak­abe] ropes them into haul­ing the gold and the princess through, across, around [and var­i­ous other prepo­si­tions] enemy lines. Every plan Tahei and Matak­ishi ‘devise’ fails imme­di­ately, and they try to run off with the gold almost as much as they fight each other. There is one 10 minute Toshiro spear-fight show­case show­down in which Mr. Mifune’s whit­tled fore­arms are the main scene, but the rest of the film pretty much con­sists of folks bitch­ing up and down [and var­i­ous other prepo­si­tions] myr­iad roads.

This is not to say that the film is with­out value. Kurosawa’s eye for the right fram­ing and sub­tle phras­ing is as on the mark as it ever is; stop­ping at an inn for the evening we find out that with 5 pieces of sil­ver you can either buy a good horse or a pros­ti­tute [per­ma­nently]. The ham-fisted peas­ants live in sty-squalor and are herded about by porcine petty lords and their pig-headed vas­sals. The objec­tive eye indi­cates that all par­ties are a bit absurd in their human­ity. Every­one is happy with sta­tus quo except Princess Yuki, who gets her first taste of how the other 99.9% lives and gains the right­eous indig­na­tion on the behalf of her infe­ri­ors that hard-time-fallen nobil­ity always seem to exhibit in fic­tion. She does have nice legs, however.

I guess what sank the movie for me was the way the con­stant breaks for a bit of lev­ity under­cut the drama at the same time that Mifune’s fur­rowed dis­ap­proval killjoyed the clown­ing slap­stick [which I’m not really a fan of any­way]. Toss in a plot that isn’t all that com­pelling or orig­i­nal and 2D char­ac­ters with unchang­ing moti­va­tions and the result is that I might have enjoyed this movie if I had seen it before Star Wars [Lucas claims The Hid­den Fortress as an inspi­ra­tion for that uni­verse, but there are only very basic and tan­gen­tial rela­tions between the two]. The story prob­a­bly won’t keep you going, but the hope for the next excep­tional shot will.

I ran across a disc of the films I made in col­lege, so I fig­ured I’d upload them to YouTube. Now I just need to scrounge up that VHS of the stuff I made in high school and get it dig­i­tized so I can treat it similarly.

Cash Flow

This was a silent film assign­ment to get us acquainted with the equip­ment and basic storytelling.

Dia­logue Sequence

This film assign­ment was more con­cerned with writ­ing dia­logue and cam­er­a­work than the first one.

Don’t Be Curious

Shot on Super 8mm color film stock, we had a lim­ited amount of film, and had to plan and ration its use. The result is fairly dis­jointed since we ran out of film.

Vice Versa

Inter­me­di­ate film project on 16mm Black & White. These films only made it to the rough cut stage, as the pre-production and pro­duc­tion itself were the stressed items instead of post-production. Nei­ther of us were very happy with the out­come, we never really liked our story, and all the other ideas got turned down.

Ham­mer to Fall — 2002 Notre Dame Fenc­ing Video

I made this for my team­mates at the end of the 2002 sea­son. Not an assign­ment. I made this kind of thing fairly often in high school as well.

Pres­sure — 2003 Notre Dame National Cham­pi­onship Fenc­ing Video

Same deal for my senior year.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #420: Agnès Varda’s Le Bon­heur.

After quite a long hia­tus from watch­ing Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion films [and an abortive reen­try with Noah Baumbach’s Kick­ing and Scream­ing], I got back into the swing of things with this charm­ingly men­ac­ing film by Agnès Varda. Fore­most, the film is beau­ti­ful to watch, with shifts in color sig­nal­ing shifts in theme, and a sub­jec­tive cin­e­matog­ra­phy that fur­ther refines the viewer’s atten­tion to exactly the bits that Varda is inter­ested in us being inter­ested in. Often a series of zip cuts will alert us to a character’s state of mind by show­ing us at what they are look­ing. For the most part those swift bits of ephemera are exactly what the char­ac­ter isn’t pay­ing atten­tion to, like the first time François vis­its Emilie’s apart­ment, he looks at every­thing but her, though we know she’s the only thing on his mind. A sim­i­lar tac­tic with a dif­fer­ent result is used the first time they go on a date. He stares at her chest while all else is out of focus and she speaks to him, he is out of focus while talk­ing as she observes the cou­ple behind him.

But for all of the quick cuts and strange uses of focus, the film pro­ceeds at a stately pace and seems to cover much more diegetic time than one short sum­mer. I think much of this feel­ing is accom­plished through the edit­ing, short scenes that con­sist of long takes result in cuts that elide time only, leav­ing space to be filled by the moments on screen. At one point a series of extreme close-ups illus­trate the ping-pong pro­gres­sion of François from wife to mis­tress and back. The grace of the edit­ing is fur­ther enhanced by the use of still lives. shots are framed and held in such a way that the mise-en-scène becomes a char­ac­ter; a rum­pled bed, a kitchen win­dow, a flower arrange­ment, all are sig­ni­fiers for the true state of things. Lastly, an entire paper could be writ­ten on the use of Mozart; he isn’t a char­ac­ter in the film, but his music serves as nar­ra­tion and under­score for the emo­tional aspects of the sto­ry­line. I’ll leave it at that. It is bet­ter expe­ri­enced than described.

The story starts out in mun­dan­ity and con­tin­ues in this vein for the major­ity of the film. This focus on every­day activ­ity is the strongest emo­tive force; it sucks the viewer in with recog­ni­tion and betrays the viewer with the insid­i­ous same. It is a story about a happy fam­ily and the happy husband/father who hap­pily starts a happy affair because he is so filled with hap­pi­ness. It even­tu­ally all comes out in the wash, with fairly pre­dictable con­se­quences, but the final few bits of the film turn the mun­dane into a psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror show for the viewer [but not for the char­ac­ters]. This mas­ter­stroke acts some­thing like a warn­ing for those who are look­ing for one, but seems more akin to doc­u­men­tary than moral­ity play to me.

• Drought de Seigneur — by Car­loss James Chamberlin
• Ger­ald Peary inter­views Agnès Varda
• Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Data­base info
• Agnès Varda Euro­pean Grad­u­ate School Lec­ture [6 parts]

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #39: Sei­jun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter.

While this is another Sei­jun Suzuki gang­ster film, it is vastly dif­fer­ent from Branded to Kill on just about every point. Most notable is the use of bright swathes of sin­gle col­ors in dif­fer­ent scenes; the same set might be yel­low, then fuch­sia, then white at dif­fer­ent points in the film, and the color often changes in response to actions from the char­ac­ters. The film is less gritty and psy­cho­log­i­cally com­pelling than Branded to Kill, with more of a 1960s pop-culture vibe, com­plete with its own mawk­ish pop bal­lad that var­i­ous char­ac­ters sing through­out the film. Despite this much more light­hearted tone, there is still sig­nif­i­cant ten­sion sur­round­ing the main character’s role in a com­pli­cated gang war.

This film is a good data point for mak­ing an argu­ment that Yakuza films are just updated samu­rai flicks. The main char­ac­ter, Tet­suya, is the equiv­a­lent of a ronin, except that while he thinks he’s left his gang, he’s still being used by it as a light­ning rod to under­mine other gangs in places out­side of Tokyo. This is fairly super­fi­cial to the main focus of the film, which is Tetsuya’s process of self-actualization, but the twain meet in the final shootout. The film’s excel­lence is due to how stim­u­lat­ing each scene is, due in large part to the afore­men­tioned color schema, and fleshed out with the con­stant plot twists, musi­cal inter­ludes, styl­ized bat­tles and preter­nat­ural abil­i­ties of the var­i­ous gun­men in the film.

The com­pli­ca­tions of the plot are revealed in snip­pets much like manga or anime, the rapid changes and rever­sals are con­fus­ing, but slowly con­geal into an emo­tional tenor that reflects Tetsuya’s grow­ing cog­nizance and dis­gust with his sta­tus as a pawn of the crime lord he looked to as a father-figure. It gets a bit con­fus­ing at times, there is another assas­sin, who looks a bit like Tet­suya, named Tet­suzo [both of them are called Tetsu at var­i­ous times in the sub­ti­tles] which made me think that there was a weird mul­ti­ple per­son­al­ity sub­text going on. This film’s place in the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion fits a spe­cific niche of Japan­ese film­mak­ing that is usu­ally over­looked. It is easy to see how Suzuki drove his studio’s bat­shitin­sane, his styl­ized cre­ations are awe­some, but a def­i­nite trend away from the sure-shots that stu­dios usu­ally like best.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Manohla Dargis
• The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• KFCC Review
• Deep Focus Review
• Love HK Film Review

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #38: Sei­jun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill.

Watch­ing a Japan­ese B-movie was a great way to get back into the swing of Cri­te­rion reviews. This is the first Sei­jun Suzuki film I’ve seen, but it reminded me very much of Samuel Fuller, and it is even a bit like Shock Cor­ri­dor in its por­trayal of psy­cho­log­i­cal trauma. The pro­tag­o­nist is Hanada, the third best yakuza assas­sin, and the film sticks with his ironic dis­in­te­gra­tion into mad­ness through­out. At first the film is quite hard to fol­low, mainly because it is often dif­fi­cult to deter­mine whether we’re in his sub­jec­tive frame of mind or whether actual plot-oriented action is occur­ring. The irony kicks in because the assas­sin is con­vinced that he’s going to win and become Num­ber 1, though he obvi­ously becomes less and less sta­ble and capa­ble as the film pro­gresses. In ret­ro­spect, the washed-up assas­sin we meet in the begin­ning of the film is a fore­shad­ow­ing of Hanada’s fate.

Suzuki’s dra­matic cin­e­mato­graphic stylings offer pro­found and some­times star­tling char­ac­ter insights; often serv­ing as a reflec­tion or coun­ter­point to Hanada’s self-absorbed obliv­i­ous­ness. All of the other char­ac­ters have no exis­ten­tial qualms, they know exactly where they stand in rela­tion to the world they inhabit; so Hanada’s ambi­tion is almost aber­rant in this envi­ron­ment. The tepid screen­play dia­logue becomes pol­y­se­mous and intrigu­ing in this con­text, as no one seems to know what the other is truly say­ing. There is no trust and lit­tle under­stand­ing between the char­ac­ters, so every attempt at com­mu­ni­ca­tion is fraught. There is also a darkly comedic tone to the plot that alter­nates between being noticed by the char­ac­ters and com­pletely ignored by them. Num­ber 1 is the only char­ac­ter who truly knows exactly what is going, even unto meta-cognizance, as if he knows that he’s in a film and what the direc­tor is try­ing to do with it and him.

It seems that the film has lit­tle to say as an ulti­mate moral; there are no sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ters, so their deaths don’t mean much to the viewer, except in the afore­men­tioned darkly comedic man­ner. The envi­ron­ment in which they lived was too vio­lent and chaotic for any sort of sus­tain­abil­ity or con­ti­nu­ity, they’re all liv­ing on bor­rowed time. The fre­quent sala­cious and vio­lent power-struggle sex acts pro­vide another data point to strengthen this claim. It is cer­tainly a much more accu­rate Japan­ese film cul­tur­ally, instead of offer­ing styl­ized, cliché or stereo­typ­i­cal por­tray­als more in line with Hollywood’s MO, Branded to Kill is vul­gar in the word’s most lit­eral and com­pli­men­tary sense.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by John Zorn
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• Mid­night Eye Review
• YouTube Clips:
  • Clip 1
  • Clip 2
  • Clip 3
  • Clip 4

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #36: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear.

I no longer have any Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion films queued up at the library. After the inun­da­tion I’ve had with them over the last few weeks, I think it is time to take a bit of a break. Thank­fully, the last film before this sab­bat­i­cal was another sus­pense­ful mas­ter­piece by Henri-Georges Clouzot. The film is a hodge-podge of lan­guages, French, Eng­lish, Ital­ian, Span­ish and the odd Ger­man now and then; the poly­glot atmos­phere is one to be expected in a place where risky busi­ness pulls risk tak­ers in for a chance to make a for­tune. Like any boom town, Las Piedras has more bums than boomers, petty men too poor to leave, des­per­ate for any chance that will enable them to do so. The first hour of the film is a nec­es­sary expo­si­tion of this des­per­a­tion, in addi­tion to impor­tant per­son­al­ity quirks and rela­tion­ship estab­lish­ment that will amplify in the more sus­pense­ful nitro­glyc­erin trans­port scenes. We learn about the vaguely homo­erotic love tri­an­gle between Mario and Luigi [No, I am not kid­ding] that is bro­ken up by the appear­ance of Jo. Mario’s dis­dain for Linda [once again played by the knock­out Vera Clouzot, in more see-through cloth­ing] is prob­a­bly the great­est sign of his loss of per­spec­tive based on indo­lent disgruntlement.

That the men are stuck in this predica­ment is based mainly upon their lack of cit­i­zen­ship in an unnamed South Amer­i­can coun­try. The bul­ly­ing, morally bank­rupt pres­ence of an Amer­i­can oil com­pany doesn’t help mat­ters, and there are mul­ti­ple quotes that illus­trate just what Clouzot thinks about this sort of cor­po­rate shenani­gan. Where there is oil, Amer­i­cans are quick to fol­low. Liv­ing in the hell that is Las Piedras, the four afore­men­tioned men plus a Ger­man guy named Bimba make a deal with the devil [the South­ern Oil Com­pany] to drive two trucks full of hell­fire [nitro­glyc­erin] across hell to put out a fire. If they make it, they’ll get enough dough to leave Las Piedras far behind. The only prob­lem is the slight­est bump will explode the nitro. Obsta­cles include a 40 mile dash across some­thing called “the wash­board”; a hair­pin turn involv­ing a rot­ten bridge, blow­ing up a huge boul­der in the mid­dle of the road [and then piss­ing on the spot where it used to be], and dri­ving through a 3′ deep lake of petro­leum, which is all that is left of one of the trucks after it explodes. Like all deals with the devil, no one makes it out alive, no mat­ter how safe they might seem. Espe­cially once the dis­tor­tion of con­stant fear sets in and you start to feel safe in thumb­ing your nose [or John Thomas] at the devil.

The wages of fear turn love to hate, uncover cow­ardice and pretty much ruin every­thing they can. As one man quotes ear­lier in the film:

You don’t know what fear is. But you’ll see. It’s catch­ing. It’s catch­ing like small­pox. And once you get it, it’s for life.

Most of the money quotes are in Den­nis Lehane’s essay, which says pretty much every­thing that one needs to say about this film. What struck me about it was how its implicit and explicit cul­tural cri­tiques are just as applic­a­ble fifty years after the film was made, espe­cially in regard to immi­grant labor issues and Amer­i­can cor­po­rate pol­icy [and, by proxy, Amer­i­can pol­icy as a whole] in regard to oil. And from an exis­ten­tial stand­point, the film is just as absurd and Camu­sian as Terry Gilliam’s Time Ban­dits. Clouzot knows we’re all doomed, and the only way to deal with the irony of risk­ing death for a uncer­tain future is to laugh all the way to the grave.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Den­nis Lehane
• Cul­ture Vul­ture review
• Roger Ebert Review
• Reelviews review
• Deep Focus review
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review
• Senses of Cin­ema on Clouzot
• YouTube: Trailer

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #35: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Dia­boliques.

This movie is amaz­ing. I’m not one for hor­ror movies, because I never get scared, but the end­ing sequence of this film even creeped me out. Pretty much any time you hear any­thing about this film there will be the inevitable com­par­isons with Hitch­cock and the state­ment that this film inspired him to make Psy­cho. Thank­fully I haven’t seen Psy­cho yet and am there­fore unqual­i­fied to talk about that. What I am qual­i­fied to talk about is the total awe­some­ness of this film. These two women, a wife and mis­tress, plot and kill the man who abuses them and rapes them and beats them. They’ve got a great alibi and all that, they dump the body into the dirty swim­ming pool of the board­ing school they run/work at. The pool gets drained and the body is nowhere to be found. Then peo­ple and things start hap­pen­ing that insin­u­ate that Mon­sieur de Las­salle is still alive and kick­ing. This must be impos­si­ble, since he was drugged, drowned and then held under­wa­ter all night by a big bronze statue.

Clouzot’s extreme film­mak­ing excel­lence is so effort­less that it is hard to feel the sus­pense creep­ing up on you until the money shot at the end. This shot was so good I had to watch it about a dozen times. You can see it in the YouTube clip linked at the end if you don’t mind spoil­ing the movie for your­self. Basi­cally what hap­pens [and this isn’t a spoiler] is that Mrs. de Las­salle thinks some­one is in the school at night and is creep­ing down the hall­way at night. She puts her back to a door which we know some­one is behind and look-listens her atten­tion down another hall­way. Then the cam­era pans away from her and slowly tracks around to reveal the extent of the hall­way. It doesn’t sound too spec­tac­u­lar but it works on so many lev­els that for me it is def­i­nitely the money shot of the film, no mat­ter what came after it.

The rea­son this shot is so spec­tac­u­lar is because on top of all the tra­di­tional weight of sus­pense embod­ied in the “what’s down the dark­ened hall­way” cliché we have the dra­matic irony of know­ing where fig­ure of sus­pense is located; right behind the hero­ine. When the cam­era moves away from her there is a tor­tur­ous fore­knowl­edge that some­thing hor­ri­ble is going to hap­pen to her, and that we won’t get to see it! The viewer, at the height of sus­pense and ten­sion in the movie, is essen­tially told that they will get no sat­is­fac­tion. Then the movie kicks back into gear and we even­tu­ally do get sat­is­fac­tion, but that pan and track would have made the movie worth watch­ing even if all the rest of it had sucked. Plus, Vera Clouzot, who played Mrs. de Las­salle is quite attrac­tive and wear­ing a see-through night­gown. Clouzot’s ref­er­ence to actors as “instru­ments” is not as insult­ing as it seems, for these instru­ments, it is an honor to be held in the hands of a master.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Danny Peary
• Salon arti­cle by Michael Sragow
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• YouTube Clips: Trailer, The Mur­der, Creepy as Shit Twist-ending Finale

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #30: Fritz Lang’s M.

Fritz Lang always blows my mind. The pre­cise craft­man­ship in all of his films, the exactly cor­rect fram­ing for a shot, the inspired, slight, under­stated cam­era move­ments, the chiaroscuro and beauty of the black and white would be worth watch­ing in a film with­out any­thing resem­bling a plot. But Lang is not merely good at one or two aspects of film­mak­ing. He is good at mak­ing films, com­plete worlds unto them­selves. M is a world of sus­pi­cion, where neigh­bors are encour­aged in para­noia and tale-bearing, where the innocu­ous becomes sin­is­ter, and a bud­ding fas­cist gov­ern­ment con­trols the pub­lic through its efforts to find and stop a face­less enemy. It was made in 1931, antic­i­pat­ing the Third Reich by a few years. That’s just the macro level. On the micro level, the psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait of a child-killer is imme­di­ately abhor­rent and under­stand­able, and the steps into Hans Beckert’s [played won­der­fully by Peter Lorre] mind are so well-written, por­trayed, apt and sur­pris­ingly potent that the film, which is largely run-of-the-mill police pro­ce­dural for the most part, cul­mi­nates in an unex­pected explo­sion of emo­tion that a viewer is left with some­thing approx­i­mat­ing a thousand-yard stare.

If we have to pick one word for this film to be about, it is likely repres­sion. The rea­son Beck­ert acts as he does, even though he knows he is mad and should not, is because he has no option in his soci­ety but to repress his rep­re­hen­si­ble desires. Even a ver­bal expres­sion of his desire to have sex with lit­tle girls and then mur­der them is so out­side the norm that it would likely cost him his life or at least a few teeth. Stuck as he was, forced to inter­nal­ize and cocoon him­self from the every­day of every­one else, it is unsur­pris­ing that he would essen­tially dis­ap­pear, so innocu­ous that no clues appear apart from his habit of whistling Peer Gynt as he seeks new prey. Sim­i­larly, his writ­ing of a let­ter to the police, and then the papers attests to his desire, no mat­ter how now mal­formed, to have com­mu­ni­ca­tion with soci­ety at large. This is all pos­si­ble to learn with­out actu­ally see­ing his face, or hear­ing him speak. Sound was a rel­a­tively new fea­ture in film at this time, and its ambi­ent use by Lang, its appro­pri­ate and height­en­ing omis­sions, and its laconic dia­logue make the final solil­o­quy by Beck­ert all the more effective.

The fact that even the crim­i­nals, soci­etal edge-cases them­selves, want to destroy Beck­ert with no qualms is telling to his extreme deviance. Yet, when he explains the moti­va­tions and guilt that drive and tor­ment him, heads nod even among the kan­ga­roo court. These are peo­ple who know what it is to sin, though for the most part they can con­trol it. The coda is so terse that it was either meant to be that way or some of the miss­ing footage belongs at the end of the film, but no mat­ter the rea­son, it attests simul­ta­ne­ously to the para­dox­i­cal eth­i­cal and rea­son­ing sat­is­fac­tion of the rule of law and the pas­sion­ate, emo­tional dis­sat­is­fac­tion of jus­tice not being served. The tale of ser­ial killer becomes anal­o­gous to the life of every per­son, only taken to an extreme; and the char­ac­ter sketch of a dou­bly fear-driven soci­ety adds another facet to Lang’s idea that vice and vicious­ness are all too eas­ily encour­aged with any person.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Stan­ley Kauffmann
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• Fritz Lang’s M
• ‘M’: Fritz Lang’s Dark Mas­ter­piece, Still Shock­ing After All These Years
• M (Mur­derer Among Us) a film by Fritz Lang [Plenty of Stills]
• ImagesJour­nal Review
• Jonathan Rosen­baum Review
• Senses of Cin­ema on Fritz Lang
• Bro­ken Pro­jec­tor Review
• Watch the whole movie on Google Video
• Watch and Down­load the whole movie from Archive.org

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #37: Terry Gilliam’s Time Ban­dits.

Woops. This movie totally didn’t do a damn thing for me. And usu­ally I really like Terry Gilliam. I would have pre­ferred some­thing like The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen as the Cri­te­rion pick, if they were going to go with a Gilliam kid’s movie, since that film is both enter­tain­ing, won­der­ful and well made. Time Ban­dits doesn’t seem like any of those to me, but I’m hop­ing that it was nec­es­sary prac­tice for Gilliam in order for him to pro­duce Mun­chausen. It is a pretty good children’s film, although the char­ac­ter­is­tic Gilliam dark­ness might focus the demo­graphic on older chil­dren. A younger one might not under­stand the whim­si­cal Napoleon, the tech­no­cratic decla­ma­tions of Evil or cope with the explo­sive end­ing of the par­ents. The film cer­tainly doesn’t strike me as some­thing funny. Silly, def­i­nitely, chil­dren will laugh at the danc­ing dwarves, but actual humor is rarely to be found. It is Monty Python with­out the punch.

The film­mak­ing is Gilliam™; a sort of steam­punkesque mag­i­cal real­ism, where things like knights break­ing through wardrobes in 20th cen­tury Britain seem plau­si­ble mainly because the sets are as banal as real life and the future already appears obso­lete. What I mean is that a viewer doesn’t have to sus­pend dis­be­lief to see and enter into a room that looks like what any boy’s room looked like in 1981, and when the magic occurs, it is the type of magic that a boy would imag­ine hap­pen­ing in his room. Gilliam never dives too deeply into the rich ter­ri­tory he presents. Instead the con­stant flit­ting about allows him to keep the film at a level that chil­dren can under­stand and that also appears to be a bit dream­like; set­ting up the “it was only a dream, or was it?” cliché ending.

It often seem like Gilliam keeps mak­ing movies in attempts to either elu­ci­date a com­pli­cated thought or pin down a spe­cific world­view that is his Truth. He’s ambi­tious, in the respect that his goal appears to be a uni­fied the­ory, whereas other direc­tors are con­tent with the expli­ca­tion of a small piece of truth. Gilliam is a philoso­pher who acci­den­tally became a film­maker and uses that medium as his the­sis vehi­cle. He cer­tainly seems to express a Camu­sian exis­ten­tial­ist absur­dity, focused less on the absur­dity of exis­tence period, and instead on the absur­dity of exis­tence now. And while this idea that humans waste their lives con­vinc­ing and dream­ing about bet­ter things pro­vides frus­tra­tion, the fact that these fan­tasy escapes are often bet­ter than actual life, and the fact that Gilliam is a cre­ator and pur­veyor of such fan­ci­fuls is an irony that I am cer­tain Gilliam is aware of.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Bruce Eder
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• Screenon­line Review [sub­scrip­tion required for clips and other goodies]
• Terry Gilliam at Senses of Cinema
• Fanzineish review at Sweat­pants Erection
• YouTube Trailer

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #43: Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies.

It is tough get­ting chil­dren to act well; just ask any­one who’s ever had to get chil­dren to act well. A vast major­ity of the cast in Lord of the Flies couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag, but thanks to Peter Brook’s care­ful plan­ning and chore­o­graph­ing of key scenes, and relaxed impro­vi­sa­tional allowance in oth­ers, the awk­ward act­ing abil­ity morphs into an appro­pri­ate skit­tish­ness for ado­les­cent maroons. This adap­ta­tion is well on the mark of the book, with an added inten­sity of vis­ceral imagery and psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare that only film can pro­vide so effec­tively. The main strength of the film is that it was shot entirely on loca­tion, apart from the open­ing mon­tage, and the real­ity of the island set­ting feeds into the real­ity of the char­ac­ters’ devel­op­ment. With­out the impos­ing hand of civ­i­liza­tion, regress­ing to a wild and sav­age state becomes easy.

Lord of the Flies is not only a tract about the impor­tance of civ­i­liza­tion, but also an inter­est­ing thought-experiment on the emer­gence of new cul­tural forms. In the film, this is notice­able fairly soon, as the polit­i­cal rifts between the two lead­ing boys, Jack and Ralph, are a micro­cosm of inter­na­tional polit­i­cal strife. Sim­i­larly, the cre­ation of rit­ual chants and activ­i­ties to ward off the beastie, and Jack’s clever manip­u­la­tion of their fear to main­tain con­trol have con­tem­po­rary par­al­lels in our own coun­try. This is no new trick, but its effi­cacy ensures its con­tin­ued use. The cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance and lin­guis­tic lacu­nae in their vocab­u­lary after the first mur­der takes place is also telling in terms of their fear. Sim­i­larly, the devel­op­ment of face-paint and lit­tle to no cloth­ing are marked changes from their ini­tial school-boy attire.

Still, there are sim­i­lar­i­ties between before and after. The choir­boys become the hunters and their dis­ci­pline, orga­ni­za­tion, and loy­alty as the lat­ter is due directly to their train­ing in the for­mer. They are also the ones who cre­ate and enforce the cul­tural pro­gres­sion of the tribe of boys, while Ralph and Piggy, who’ve main­tained their rea­son to some extent, are increas­ingly ostra­cized. All of this ter­ror comes through strongly through the use of lib­eral cut­ting and realign­ments in the edit­ing room, and the sheer amount of footage Brook had on hand to pick and choose from. The final scene is so abhor­rent , as Ralph flees the other youths on all fours, much like the pig they are con­vinc­ing them­selves he is, that the appear­ance of white socks and match­ing deck shoes of adult pro­por­tions, and the adult that is wear­ing them is a great relief. The mon­ster we’ve only caught glimpses of, the mon­ster that was about to appear in full and ter­ri­ble force, espe­cially because of its famil­iar­ity, is slain just like that.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Peter Brook
• Site ded­i­cated to the film
• Exhaus­tive Lord of the Flies site
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #46: Irv­ing Pichel, and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s The Most Dan­ger­ous Game.

As soon as this film kicked in, I real­ized that it was an adap­ta­tion of Richard Connell’s short story that I’d read years ago, loved and lost. So, I was excited to see how it would play out. The adap­ta­tion is fairly faith­ful, with the seem­ingly always nec­es­sary addi­tion of a love inter­est [Hur­rah Fay Wray!] to make it a bit more mass-appealing. The only down­sides to this addi­tive are the super-annoying brother and the overuse of poorly done soft focus any­time the cam­era got near Ms. Wray. Clock­ing in at 62 min­utes, the film is also a bit on the short side. After two British by British adap­ta­tions Lean on Dick­ens in Great Expec­ta­tions and Oliver Twist, the brash­ness and lack of sub­tlety in this Amer­i­can pro­duc­tion is quite a change. In the first 8 min­utes there are at least half a dozen inti­ma­tions of doom and some imme­di­ate cos­mic irony; a ship­wreck, explo­sion and a cou­ple of shark attacks. It is almost hilar­i­ous in its blatancy.

But, this is a hor­ror movie, from Hollywood’s Golden Age so we’re sup­posed to be scared. The pro­tag­o­nist is a famous big game hunter and author so we know he’s capa­ble of sur­viv­ing a ship­wreck on a small island in the South Pacific. Dude ends up at the fortress of a lunatic Kos­sack and his crazy cohorts, dis­cov­ers a herd of Great Danes that look like they were recy­cled [in cos­tume] 27 years later in The Killer Shrews and a drunk New Yorker that you want to be mur­dered about 2 min­utes after his intro­duc­tion. It is appar­ent right from the getgo that all the non-shipwrecked folks are blood­thirsty degen­er­ates, but Our Hero is so wooden and bad act­ing that he doesn’t buy any­thing until he sees the shriv­eled heads in the tro­phy room. This dis­cov­ery, and the wel­come mur­der of Annoy­ing Drunk Amer­i­can Guy, get dude booted out with a hunt­ing knife and Fay Wray to take care of in the harsh jun­gle. Fay Wray’s pres­ence is a bonus, because her dress gets skimpier and more falling-offier in every scene.

Dude wins and Kos­sack guy dies, of course. Fay Wray and hunter dude boat off into the sun­set. What is star­tling and ahead of its time for the film, is due mainly to the story. It is a fairly effec­tive argu­ment against big game hunt­ing and ani­mal cru­elty. By plac­ing a human in that same sit­u­a­tion, Our Hero real­izes that being hunted is not the same as being the hunter. This ends up mak­ing his final fight with Count Kos­sack more inter­est­ing than usual because he has a light in his eye like a wild ani­mal might have. So while his act­ing was pretty ter­ri­ble through­out, he mit­i­gates that to some extent at the end. If you can’t tell, I wasn’t too impressed with the film. The print Cri­te­rion got its hands on wasn’t that good, and the flaws in the film­mak­ing are con­sis­tent enough that it is obvi­ous that either Pichel or Schoed­sack didn’t really have a han­dle on movie-making. It would have been a great film with­out those hic­coughs [and 20 min­utes more plot to cud on].

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Bruce Kawin
• Read Richard Connell’s short story
• Some inter­est­ing pro­duc­tion tid­bits at The Curmudgeon
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #32: David Lean’s Oliver Twist.

Two years after David Lean’s Great Expec­ta­tions, Alec Guin­ness is back in another Dick­ens adap­ta­tion. This time he’s very aged through makeup and a giant pros­thetic nose [that got the film denounced as anti-Semitic], but his por­trayal of Fagin really shows off his par­tic­u­lar act­ing chops. His struck posed eccen­tric­ity steals the show in every scene he’s in, although some­times the beau­ti­ful Nancy gives him a run for his money. I’m only famil­iar with the Oliver Twist tale in terms of mod­ern cul­tural ref­er­ences, like Chef Boyardee com­mer­cials. Yet it seems as if the same [albeit small] issues that were found in Great Expec­ta­tions are here as well. Namely, the incon­sis­tent use of inter­ti­tles as nar­ra­tive cues, and obvi­ous plot exci­sions to remain true to the core story. Where this film astounds is in the cin­e­matog­ra­phy. Much more var­ied than Great Expec­ta­tions, dutch angles, sub­jec­tive camera-work and amaz­ing approx­i­ma­tions of nat­ural light make the film beau­ti­ful to watch even when the action gets a bit bor­ing and predictable.

The artistry that I claimed hard to find in most of Lean’s work is always evi­dent here. From the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist rem­i­nis­cent Lon­don exte­ri­ors, to metaphor­i­cal shots that reflect pain or vio­lence, like the open­ing scene’s shot of thorned branches cut to a woman in labor pains, to a later scene where a woman’s mur­der hap­pens off­screen while a dog scrab­bles and yelps to run out of the room. Where Great Expec­ta­tions was psy­cho­log­i­cally charged, Oliver Twist is more con­cerned with phys­i­cal abuse. Although the film is quite vio­lent, how­ever, it never really seems as though Oliver has it that badly off. Espe­cially since we know how tired the trope of down-on-his-luck makes good is. This isn’t the fault of the movie, but a nec­es­sary expec­ta­tion derived from the legacy of Dickens’s influ­ence on Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture and story-telling as a whole.

The con­tro­versy engen­dered by this film was mostly con­cerned with the anti-Semitism implicit in Fagin’s char­ac­ter. There really isn’t any way to soften it more than Alec Guinness’s por­trayal man­aged. Fagin isn’t so much a bad char­ac­ter as one to be pitied; his obvi­ous care for his pick­pocket charges is just twisted by avarice. The fact that he is Jew­ish is inci­den­tal to this, but unfor­tu­nate since it does play to cer­tain stereo­types. Com­ing as quickly as it did on the heels of World War II [dis­trib­uted in 1948], the tim­ing for the release of the film could cer­tainly have been a bit more tact­ful. Nev­er­the­less, the classic-status of Oliver Twist as a novel and its trickle-down to this film in par­tic­u­lar will leave these thorny prob­lems to crop up each time some­one decides to make a great adap­ta­tion of the work.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Sragow
• YouTube Trailer
• Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist in an easy-to-read HTML format
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #31: David Lean’s Great Expec­ta­tions.

Upon see­ing this ver­sion of Great Expec­ta­tions, I’m fairly sure that I’ve seen it pre­vi­ously. As book-to-movie adap­ta­tions go, it suf­fers from the nor­mal malaise of trun­ca­tion, but not so much as other sto­ries, since the ver­bose Dick­ens is involved. Alec Guin­ness has a sup­port­ing role, his first screen per­for­mance of any note, and is so bloody young that one’s mind is bog­gled. My gen­er­a­tion was intro­duced to Sir Alec via Star Wars, near the end of his act­ing career, so it is dou­bly sur­pris­ing for me to see him at the begin­ning of it. David Lean is a direc­tor with which I have some trou­ble dis­cov­er­ing auteuris­tics, those tricks of the trade that become attribu­tive of style to each great one. David Lean cer­tainly is a great one, but his film­mak­ing strengths come not from his depar­tures from con­ven­tional film­mak­ing, but his fidelity to them. His films are so good because they immerse you into the story, make you for­get about the fic­tion of the sil­ver screen so wholly that the full force of the nar­ra­tive can be felt.

The nar­ra­tive of Great Expec­ta­tions rang with much more psy­cho­log­i­cal ter­ror and abuse than when I saw it at a less expe­ri­enced age. The vicious­ness of Estella and the unwit­ting infat­u­a­tion of Pip are like vine­gar and bak­ing soda, they can’t help but react together. The many strings and sub-plots weave such com­plex­ity that it is almost sec­ond nature to feel that audi­ences of the day were likely bet­ter able to appre­ci­ate that depth of film­mak­ing, which is a rare com­mod­ity com­ing out of Hol­ly­wood these days. It was prob­a­bly rare then as well, but the post-modern ambigu­ous end­ing that would cul­mi­nate a sim­i­lar film today is no where to be found. In Dick­ens day, peo­ple wanted every­thing ship­shape when they closed their book. Lean is his name­sake and well-done at that, in this instance. He has excised enough mate­r­ial to make the film intel­li­gi­ble and not bor­ing, while retain­ing just enough to guide the viewer to where he should linger.

There are, of course, stum­bles in this effort. Often the tran­si­tions from skin-crawly creepy scene to light-hearted indo­lence are jar­ring, and the moti­va­tions and his­tory of a few char­ac­ters are woe­fully but nec­es­sar­ily shunted aside. Some of the clichés of adaptation-cinema are present as well, although incon­sis­tently. The open-book at the begin­ning, exactly quoted pas­sages from the book, and voice-over nar­ra­tion are present, but incon­sis­tent. The film­mak­ing is excel­lent how­ever, and the approx­i­ma­tion of candle-light is a tes­ta­ment to the excel­lence of the light­ing crew Lean put together. It is pos­si­ble to sense some­thing like frus­tra­tion on Lean’s part; it seems as if he knows he could get more pathos out of the same mate­r­ial if he wasn’t bound to the task of adapt­ing a novel, some­thing that is dif­fi­cult at best, and impos­si­ble at worst. Like try­ing to film Don Quixote, for instance. I have three more adap­ta­tions to watch in the box set that came from the library, so it is time to get started on those, already.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Adrian Turner
• Great Expec­ta­tions in Film and Tele­vi­sion 1918 to 1998
• Senses of Cin­ema article
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review
• YouTube clip of the open­ing sequence

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #34: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev.

For a film named after and about a sin­gle man, Rublev is remark­ably absent. Instead Tarkovsky exposes and lingers on spe­cific events that inter­twine and illu­mi­nate the life of Russia’s most famous icon painter. A chance encounter with a jester, the obser­va­tion and unwit­ting par­tic­i­pa­tion of a pagan rit­ual, the cast­ing of a bell — all are sig­nif­i­cant moments in the intel­lec­tual, spir­i­tual and moral devel­op­ment of Rublev; and right along with this, the hand of Tarkovsky adds sim­ple, per­fect, brush­stroke moments to empha­size the les­son that Rublev is about to learn. The wide aspect ratio [2.35:1] does less to stretch the shot arrange­ments and acts more as a focus, mainly because the long takes and extended pans and tilts Tarkovsky was so fond of make it seem as if the film was mat­ted in post pro­duc­tion. The extrem­i­ties of dis­tance that appear in shot after shot, and the sur­pris­ing intro­duc­tions and rev­e­la­tions this tech­nique allows, often give the film a dis­turbingly oneiric feel. There are times when the viewer might be watch­ing Rublev’s imag­i­na­tion, but tran­si­tions to and from the actual and the flash­back are so smooth as to be nonex­is­tent, and a viewer is left filled with the same sense of doubt that con­sumes the protagonist.

In a sim­i­lar fash­ion to Rublev’s phys­i­cal absence, we never see him do the paint­ing he is so famous for. Mostly we are treated to dis­cus­sions on aes­thet­ics that would appear super­fi­cial to any­one who isn’t con­cerned with the effect their art will have on the immor­tal souls of all who view it, or the most spir­i­tu­ally accu­rate ways to por­tray a saint or Bib­li­cal anec­dote. The film ends before Rublev makes his way to Trin­ity monastery, as an old man, to com­plete his most famous work. The fact that Tarkovsky delib­er­ately ignores the most well-known fact of Rublev’s life in favor of appar­ently tan­gen­tial notes actu­ally makes the appre­ci­a­tion of the Rublev oeu­vre more refined. Rublev becomes a man who is tor­tured by the very gift that makes him famous and allows his best effort to glo­rify God. He sins, ter­ri­bly, in his own eyes, and gives up speech and paint­ing for decades as penance. Only when he encoun­ters him­self in a gifted young man does he real­ize that his tal­ent and its accom­pa­ny­ing ter­rors belong together, and that by deny­ing them he denies God. Really, only then, do we see him relax, or real­ize that through­out the film, no mat­ter when we’ve seen Rublev, he has been taut as piano wire.

Polit­i­cally and his­tor­i­cally, the film was imme­di­ately banned in the USSR upon release. This kind of thing always inter­ests me in an aggra­vat­ing way. It is hard for me to under­stand how so much of Russia’s artis­tic pro­duc­tion that was antag­o­nis­tic to the Soviet cause got made in the first place, likely with state-funding. And how their mak­ers often didn’t get into trou­ble. Andrei Rublev doesn’t seem like a par­tic­u­larly polit­i­cally offen­sive film; although it seems to indi­cate what has held through the cen­turies, Rus­sians peas­ants are dirt-poor and crushed beneath the petty squab­bles of the nobil­ity. To jump to the wrong con­ti­nent for a tren­chant phrase: “When two ele­phants are fight­ing, the grass is what suf­fers.” Which is cer­tainly true in this film. Whether the vio­lence and bick­er­ing of the Princes, to the Tatar inva­sions, the poor can’t win for los­ing. Tarkovsky works hard to make this vio­lence and its every­day cal­lous expec­ta­tion come through, and it does effec­tively, mostly through the aus­pices of ani­mal cru­elty. In such a world as Rublev lived in, it is not sur­pris­ing he was so con­flicted in the exe­ge­sis of his work. This is a fab­u­lous movie.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by J. Hoberman
• Senses of Cin­ema article
• Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Chron­i­cle review with stills
• Decent Films Review
• Andrei Rublev: Reli­gious Epiphany in Art
• Deep Focus Review
• Com­pre­hen­sive Tarkovsky at Nostalghia.com
  • Tarkovsky on Rublev
  • Unpub­lished inter­view with Tarkovsky on Rublev
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• 20 YouTube Clips

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #26: John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Fri­day.

The Long Good Fri­day stars Bob Hoskins and con­tains a Gay­ish Pierce Bros­nan. It was made before I was born, but hav­ing seen it, I believe that Guy Ritchie loves this movie. Maybe because the film is argot­ful of the Lon­don under­ground, and films like Lock, Stock and Two Smok­ing Bar­rels and Snatch, and char­ac­ters like Don Chea­dle plays in the Ocean’s fran­chise echo so strongly with the nat­ural cadence, of bob [Hoskins] and weave. It is a gang­ster film only loosely, and even 27 years after it was made, the polit­i­cal sub­text involv­ing the IRA and hands-dirty polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion is what is most obvi­ous. We don’t find out that it is the Irish caus­ing Harold [Hoskins] to have such a long Good Fri­day, but we do dis­cover a sin­cere respect for the effec­tive tac­tics of the IRA, if not quite an out­right endorse­ment of them.

Hoskins is meant to be the hero, as much as a crime-lord can be; so we have to find some­thing even more despi­ca­ble to attach the ran­cor toward. Betrayal is the motive which allows this to hap­pen, and when it turns out that betrayal was only appar­ent and acci­den­tal the cliff ahead seems inevitable. Harold has ruled Lon­don, in peace, for ten years, but in a lit­tle over 24 hours ends up so far out of his ele­ment that we have almost as com­plete a rever­sal as pos­si­ble. Notwith­stand­ing the afore­men­tioned Gay Pierce Bros­nan, there is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of homo­sex­ual sub­text to the film as well. The always excel­lent Helen Mir­ren is the only female char­ac­ter of any sub­stance in and entire film of gun-wielding gang­sters tak­ing show­ers, hug­ging each other, tak­ing more show­ers, being stabbed by Gay Pierce Bros­nan while tak­ing show­ers, etc. Pierce Brosnan’s char­ac­ter isn’t actu­ally gay, he just acts like it in order to stab the left-hand man and bosom-military-buddy of Harold, who actu­ally is gay, at least in the movie. Fol­low me, didja?

The Amer­i­can Mafia is present in the form of a lawyer and some dude who is going to help fund Hoskins in his real-estate ven­ture to make a mint buy­ing prop­erty for the Olympic Sta­dium before it is built, or some­thing. The details aren’t ever crys­tal, and don’t need to be. What also isn’t crys­tal is whether the Mafia is in cahoots, or at least con­tact, with the IRA who are destroy­ing Harold’s empire. So this gang­ster film also raises some hairy for­eign pol­icy ques­tions. There’s plenty of the deca­dence that char­ac­ter­ized 1980s cul­ture, sans the cocaine, since Harold “never got into nar­cotics.” I kept expect­ing a Goodfellas-esque unsanc­tioned drug ring after that, but it never mate­ri­al­ized. That’s what the film excels at, the imma­te­r­ial expec­ta­tion, there are shad­ows in the Lon­don fog, but noth­ing clearer, even for those used to walk­ing its streets, innit?

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Sragow
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• MQRE Review Roundup
• Tons of YouTube Clips
  • Clip 1
  • Clip 2
  • Clip 3
  • Clip 4
  • 11 Helen Mir­ren Clips

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #29: Peter Weir’s Pic­nic at Hang­ing Rock.

Despite the fact that Ghe­o­rghe Zam­fir smears his pan­flute are all over the the score for this film, it isn’t a bad movie. It seems to be Weir’s Aus­tralian inter­pre­ta­tion of the Lady of the Wood mythos, with lib­eral doses of var­i­ous other fairy tales, most notice­ably a swan-princess motif that is per­fectly sat­u­rated through­out. I wish other films were so restrained in its use, it was a per­fect accent. The film is also an autopsy of the Victorian-era, not nec­es­sar­ily a cri­tique of it, but a chance to explore repres­sion in a time where repres­sion was con­sid­ered a good thing. The first por­tion of the film is extremely, inno­cently sen­sual; such a good approx­i­ma­tion of the Vic­to­rian era that some of its com­mon­place items would seem shock­ing in our more cyn­i­cal time, such as the ease and aban­don of love and long­ing looks that the school­girls give to each other. Before their repres­sion becomes complete.

The flip side of the coin comes from the adults; con­stantly wor­ry­ing about the intact­ness of hymens and the pres­ence of corsets and pants, and whether or not to men­tion such things to the cops inves­ti­gat­ing the dis­ap­pear­ance of a few school­girls [the swan-princess being one of them]. There is also a bit of class-critique going on, one of the girls at the App­le­yard Col­lege is from an orphan­age, she’s lost her brother, who hap­pens to be work­ing for some gen­try not too far away. They don’t know about each other and never meet, but the dif­fer­ences and def­er­ences they show when they are com­fort­able opposed to when they are in the pres­ence of author­ity offer star­tling insights. Sara, for instance, barely talks at the school because she has such a low-class accent.

The dis­ap­pear­ance of the girls, the recov­ery of one of them, the mys­tery enhanced by the Zam­firoc­ity of the pan­flute cre­ate an out­let for the repressed desires of every char­ac­ter in the film. It is almost as if the vir­gins were assumed into heaven. I wouldn’t even hes­i­tate to call this a science-fiction film, for it is appar­ent that there is some preter­nat­ural force at Hang­ing Rock that affects the mind. Although there is no answer to the mys­tery of the girls’ dis­ap­pear­ance, the gap they leave in the lives of com­plete strangers and the yearn­ing instilled in every heart hints at the actual mean­ing that Weir aimed for. Inno­cence is always lost.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Vin­cent Canby
• Roger Ebert Review
• Review with trailer and inter­view information
• Exten­sive Fansite
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• Tons of Screencaps
• YouTubage

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #24: Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.

Almost the entire first hour of High and Low takes place in one room, but there is no lack of activ­ity despite this fact. Just syn­chro­niz­ing the block­ing must have taken a ton of work. The room is spa­cious because it belongs to Gondo, a wealthy indus­tri­al­ist [played by Toshiro Mifune] who is mak­ing a bid to take over his shoe com­pany. Right after kick­ing out the other exec­u­tive and just as he is about to send his assis­tant off to Osaka with 50 mil­lion dol­lars to com­plete the takeover, he gets a call from a man who has kid­napped his child and demands a $30 mil­lion ran­som. Well it turns out it isn’t his kid that was kid­napped, but the chauffeur’s. The kid­nap­per demands the $30 mil­lion any­way. No police, unmarked bills, the usual deal. The police show up in a shoe deliv­ery van, dressed as shoe deliv­ery men and get to work. So we’ve got a stan­dard police pro­ce­dural, but we’re also deal­ing with Kurosawa.

The rub comes with the money. If Gondo doesn’t pay the ran­som, the kid gets killed. If he does pay the ran­som, he’ll be unable to takeover the com­pany, and will be unable to repay all of the money he has bor­rowed in order to do so. There are sev­eral tense scenes where var­i­ous par­ties strug­gle to ratio­nal­ize this conun­drum, but it really isn’t ever in doubt that he’ll fork over the cash. Not to do so would be dis­hon­or­able. Any­way, the whole frig­gin’ police force seems to get in on the inves­ti­ga­tion, mainly because of Gondo’s altru­ism. We’re talk­ing around 100 cops work­ing on this one case. Some­how I don’t think that would ever hap­pen in the USA, but though this film was meant for a con­tem­po­rary Japan, there are strong echoes of the clan loy­alty we see in many samu­rai films. These echoes are delib­er­ate and help high­light the social cri­tique that is actu­ally at the heart of the film.

The kid­nap­per lives in the slum below the cliff estate of Gondo and comes to hate the man for his afflu­ence. This is his motive. Even the cops, as they track the move­ments of the crim­i­nal, note that the estate looms over the town in a patron­iz­ing fash­ion. The fact that Gondo worked hard to make it where he was is of no con­se­quence. The strug­gle is emblem­atic of the adolescent-stage tran­si­tion of Japan to a more West­ern­ized econ­omy and cul­ture. The kid­nap­per is not to be con­sid­ered sym­pa­thetic, but it is cer­tainly pos­si­ble to empathize with his uncom­pre­hend­ing hatred of newly emerg­ing class bound­aries with Gondo as its sym­bol. Even in the lat­ter third of the film, which con­tains an extremely marked change in style, sub­stance and act­ing, the kid­nap­per hides behind mir­rored glasses when he enters into the bustling, and very West­ern nightlife in search of some heroin. While Gondo can adapt, and con­tin­ues to do so no mat­ter how bad things get, the kid­nap­per can only react neg­a­tively to his envi­ron­ment Thus, at the end, when he says he does not fear death, he speaks the truth. Death would be wel­comed by him. His ensu­ing break­down I attribute to an inabil­ity to cope with the new face of Japan.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Chuck Stephens
• MRQE Review List
• Senses of Cin­ema Review
• MovieMar­tyr Review
• Movie Stills
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• YouTube clip

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #25: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphav­ille.

Watch­ing this film, one of the first things I real­ized is that Jean-Luc Godard has no idea how to make con­vinc­ing sci­ence fic­tion. The next thing I real­ized was that Godard was merely using enough of the sci­ence fic­tion idiom to dis­play and enact his dialec­tic bat­tle between love and logic. From this point of view, the incon­sis­ten­cies and patho­log­i­cal inabil­ity to fully sus­pend dis­be­lief are of sec­ondary con­se­quence to observ­ing philo­soph­i­cal gym­nas­tics that only the French are capa­ble of. Alphav­ille is a city con­trolled by a com­puter called Alpha 60, whose goal is to remake human­ity in his own image, purely log­i­cal and with­out even the slight­est abil­ity to express emo­tion. Alpha 60 also sounds like you’d expect a guy who smokes through a stoma to talk. Thank God the Inter­galac­tic Secret Agent Lemmy Cau­tion has been sent from the Out­lands to do a lit­tle recon, kill a man and destroy Alpha 60 if he can. As a bonus he gets to sleep with Anna Karina.

Since this was shot in the 60s it feels pretty dated, because the sci-fi is cul­tural, it becomes anachro­nis­tic in its set­ting; whereas some­thing like The Day The Earth Stood Still brings in all the sci­ence fic­tion from an extra-terrestrial source, and while dated, remains believ­able. Alphav­ille is more on the order of Philip K. Dick­ian, psy­cho­log­i­cal trauma fraught with para­noia. Alpha 60’s omnipres­ence facil­i­tates cul­tural com­par­isons to Orwell’s 1984 and David Bowie’s song Sav­iour Machine. At the same time, the 60s were the per­fect time to find visual cog­nates to reflect the tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment of soci­ety. You’ve got to think in that frame of mind to rec­og­nize build­ings that look like punch-cards though. Much like sci-fi from that period couldn’t pre­dict per­sonal com­puter or the dig­i­tal age, and you end up with space­men using slide-rules.

At one point Lemmy is inter­ro­gated by Alpha 60 to deter­mine whether he can be suc­cess­fully assim­i­lated or whether he should be exe­cuted. He man­ages to present the com­puter with a conun­drum that even­tu­ally short cir­cuits the thing, simul­ta­ne­ously free­ing and destroy­ing most of the inhab­i­tants of Alphav­ille. The ones who had become fully log­i­cal and emo­tion­less, who had for­got­ten words like weep­ing and red­breast, went mad and died when the lights went out. Only those with some emo­tional bear­ing left to them had the abil­ity to sur­vive the death of logic in the face of uni­ver­sal poetry wielded by the ugly crag of a man called Lemmy Cau­tion. Light is both safety net and the yoke of logic in Alphav­ille, and it is only in the dark recesses of inter­galac­tic space, and in the human heart that emo­tion can find the strength to triumph.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Andrew Sarris
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• Cin­e­matic Reflec­tions Review
• Strictly Film School Review
• Epis­te­mol­ogy in Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville
• PIF Mag­a­zine Review
• Video:
  • Watch the Trailer
  • Watch a Clip
  • Watch the Whole Movie

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #21: David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.

Dead Ringers is based on a true story about iden­ti­cal twin gyne­col­o­gist drug addicts; both played by Jeremy Irons. The film is a psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller deeply con­cerned with obses­sion, sex­u­al­ity and co-dependence. Cro­nen­berg doesn’t overdo the shots that con­tain both Man­tle broth­ers, but the most effec­tive aspect of the film is also the sub­tlest, there are vir­tu­ally no exte­rior shots apart from the begin­ning and end. So the entire film occu­pies a claus­tro­pho­bic inter­nal space both phys­i­cally and psy­cho­log­i­cally, and these spaces tend to reflect each other as the plot devel­ops. The twins are Elliot and Bev­erly, both male, Elliot the old­est and extro­verted, the busi­ness­man and mar­keter of the two; Bev­erly younger and reserved, the med­ical genius. They share every­thing, includ­ing patients, includ­ing bang­ing patients. In par­tic­u­lar, an actress with a tri­fur­cated uterus named Claire Niveau. Jesus Christ, you’ve gotta love Cronenberg.

Bev­erly becomes attached to Claire and vice versa, until she learns that she banged Elliot ini­tially. They break up but get back together. Beverly’s love of Claire begins to sep­a­rate him from Elliot and their rela­tion­ship changes in small ways at first, but when Bev starts pill-popping his per­son­al­ity begins to degrade rapidly. His nadir results in his attempts to oper­ate on a using “gynae­co­log­i­cal instru­ments for oper­at­ing on mutant women”. Elliot has his own psy­cho­log­i­cal eccen­tric­i­ties asso­ci­ated with his twin­ship [at one point he gets twin escorts and has one of them call him Elliot and the other Bev­erly]. He also attempts to score a three­some with his brother and his girl­friend. When detox­ing Bev­erly fails, Elliot decides that he needs to start tak­ing drugs as well to get back on the same wave­length, so they can get off the drugs together. They deserve a Dar­win Award for that idea.

There is no easy res­o­lu­tion to the myr­iad ques­tions about gen­der, abnor­mal phys­i­ol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy, sex­ual deviance and rela­tion­ships that are raised in this film. The res­o­lu­tion instead comes in the form of an abhorred pity for the Man­tle broth­ers and a feel­ing of relief that such trou­bled souls find their rest. Mean­while, the casual viewer is left with the need to exam­ine his or her own pre­dis­po­si­tions about the nature of human rela­tion­ship and cul­tural con­for­ma­tion. In this sense, this film owes a debt to Tod Browning’s Freaks. The ref­er­ences to the first set of con­joined twins is also rel­e­vant in this con­text, and the moral of the film, if there is one, is that deviance from the norm has dis­as­trous con­se­quences, even if the deviant par­ties are inno­cent in and of them­selves. Or per­haps, that the heavy pres­sure to con­form has dis­as­trous con­se­quences to offer another side of the same coin.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Chris Rodley
• 30 reviews at MQRE
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review
• Psy­cho­log­i­cal Deter­min­ism in Dead Ringers by Dan Shaw
• Cro­nen­berg on Cronenberg
• Inter­view with Cro­nen­berg in 4 parts:
  1. Part 1
  2. Part 2
  3. Part 3
  4. Part 4
• Trailer

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #360: William Greaves’s Sym­biopsy­chotax­i­plasm.

Sym­biopsy­chotax­i­plasm is most inter­est­ing to me because it is a exper­i­ment in which, for the most part, the peo­ple in the film know they are being exper­i­mented upon and then become par­tic­i­pants in the exper­i­ment them­selves. It is uncon­trolled metafilm­mak­ing that defies anal­ogy by its sheer com­plex­ity. It is dif­fi­cult to tell who is being authen­tic, who is act­ing, and just where the line between doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion stands. My favorite film pro­fes­sor prob­a­bly loves this movie. Filmed in the sev­en­ties, it used egre­gious amounts of film, sev­eral simultaneously-filming cam­eras and a bunch of crappy actors con­stantly retak­ing an overblown, lurid and poorly writ­ten psychodrama.

Whether this is all delib­er­ate or not is, ini­tially, unknown. In fact, whether or not the whole film is scripted is or not is unknown. It might just be an excel­lent faux-documentary. Sus­pi­cions of this are con­stantly raised, espe­cially when one of the crew mem­bers says some­thing along these very lines, that the audi­ence has no way of telling whether they are legit­i­mately secret­ing them­selves as an act of defi­ance, or if Greaves is just off screen direct­ing them. The sin­cer­ity of Greaves on-screen per­sona is also called into ques­tion by the crew, it is said that he doesn’t act they way we see when the cam­eras are not rolling. One of the crew­men says that he hasn’t read the con­cept so many times, and is nonethe­less so per­spi­ca­cious that he must be lying. The crew scenes are the best parts of the film and it is cer­tainly early reality-TV, and a bit like Project Green­light, albeit unguided and decid­edly inde­pen­dent. The film being filmed is sup­posed to be about sex, but in the crew dis­cus­sions becomes more about what con­sti­tutes believ­able screenwriting.

So I guess it is no sur­prise that when some­one with Hol­ly­wood clout like Steve Buscemi saw the thing and won­dered where the promised Take Two was, that a new film got made. This is very very bad. Take One existed in a her­metic envi­ron­ment, no one knew more about the film, no one knew the truth. The result­ing Take Two and a Half is utterly dis­ap­point­ing. Made with the help of Soder­bergh, it is shot with DV cam­eras, has Steve Buscemi in it, and lacks all of the punch of the orig­i­nal and also takes away from the original’s mys­tery. There is a bit of ten­sion at the end when a mimic act­ing coach shows up, but it was obvi­ously staged, and while it is another exam­ple of metafilm­mak­ing, at the same time it is like see­ing the same card trick over again. Even though Buscemi meant well, Take Two and Half should have never been made. I rec­om­mend watch­ing the first one and not the sequel, that way it will remain mind­blow­ingly in need of analysis.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Amy Taubin
• William Greaves Site
• Reel.com overview
• Meta­critic links to 4 reviews
• MRQE review list
• YouTube clip

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #22: David Lean’s Sum­mer­time.

I didn’t like this movie. Sure, David Lean, sure Katharine Hep­burn, sure Tech­ni­color, sure bor­ing. I think this is one of those films that doesn’t age well in terms of its acces­si­bil­ity to audi­ences. It plays pitch-perfect to pre-sexual rev­o­lu­tion moral­ity for the vast major­ity of the film; at times there are star­tling moments. The word sex is said! In 1955! And the lais­sez faire extra-marital affair is also a bit strik­ing for the time. Per­haps there is a bit of pre­science to the film in this regard. How­ever, Hepburn’s char­ac­ter, Jane Hud­son is a probably-virginal spin­ster in her late 40s who has come to Venice, some­what sub­con­sciously, look­ing for a fling. She finds one, but her Akron, Ohio bred pru­dity, repres­sion of desire, and defen­sive­ness keep her from giv­ing in for quite a while. The first 40 min­utes or so of the film are filled with her look­ing alter­na­tively wist­ful and fright­ened. There really isn’t much plot apart from the sought-after golden year’s sex romp, although there is a tiny bit of pathos at the end when she must leave her Venet­ian shop­keeper while she still can.

Lean’s direc­tion appears to illus­trate an inde­ci­sion in regard to what kind of film he is mak­ing. Much of the film func­tions as a trav­el­ogue, almost too touristy, and some of the shots are delib­er­ately filmed to reflect what Hep­burn is chron­i­cling on her lit­tle 8mm [that appar­ently works in Tech­ni­color!]. Then there are bits of slap­stick with Hepburn’s char­ac­ter, she’s not good at com­edy, her mishaps all seem con­trived to be more about Hep­burn doing com­edy excla­ma­tion point, than inte­gral parts of the film. The romance seems to have the most focus, but apart from one awe­some scene where the Ital­ian dude scolds Hep­burn for being prude, it isn’t very roman­tic. It prob­a­bly seems so very roman­tic for Hepburn’s char­ac­ter though, since she’s so inex­pe­ri­enced. The dra­matic episodes are pretty facile, too. All in all it seems like the whole pro­duc­tion was just hav­ing a good time film­ing in Venice and wasn’t too con­cerned with film­ing in Venice. The film is extra­or­di­nary in this regard. Tech­ni­color was well suited as an homage to the city of Venice. Too bad the story itself wasn’t.

• Cri­te­rion essay by David Denby.
• Not­com­ing review with some good behind-the-scenes info.
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #18: Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss.

Sam Fuller is widely regarded as a very mas­cu­line film­maker; his works asso­ci­ated with vio­lence, bravado, exploita­tion, prim­i­tive­ness and vul­gar­ity. And while those asso­ci­a­tions are cor­rect, the mas­cu­line label is mis­placed. A film like The Naked Kiss illus­trates Fuller’s claim to focus on undi­luted emo­tion, emphat­i­cally ungen­dered. The char­ac­ter Kelly is cen­tral to the story in this film, and she essen­tially plays the role of the arche­typal female. Maybe in Wicca [some­thing I’m only tan­gen­tially famil­iar with] she would be the embod­i­ment of the God­dess. Another way to look at it would be to com­bine all of the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of Greek god­desses into her form. She’s by turns wan­ton, venge­ful, moth­erly, sis­terly, house­wifely. She is every­thing that any­one has ever thought about a woman. This type of embod­i­ment trans­lates eas­ily into a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Kelly as power. She is what the film is about, and her uncon­scious inabil­ity to be pigeon­holed by other char­ac­ters is indica­tive of the “moral tract” that Michael Dare men­tions in his Cri­te­rion essay.

Despite this read­ing, the film has moments of weak­ness in its por­trayal of Kelly. Her pros­ti­tu­tion is equated as a sex­ual per­ver­sion akin to pedophilia. It is obvi­ous that Kelly isn’t a sex­ual deviant, but there is a brief moment that gives the film its name when she says she can tell when a man is a per­vert by the way his kiss tastes. A naked kiss, pros­ti­tutes call it. This sort of sixth sense is noth­ing but hokey. Even in the 1960s I sus­pect. Despite and because of Kelly’s mul­ti­fac­eted char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, she’s the least acces­si­ble char­ac­ter in the film. Illim­itable. It helps that the set­ting and other char­ac­ters are so purely one-dimensional. Grantville could be Leave it to Beaver’s May­field, except it is even more idyllic.

Of course, the lurid plot is exactly right for exploita­tion cin­ema: pros­ti­tutes, pedophiles, small town Amer­ica. Date­line could learn a lot from Sam Fuller. Kelly, though a hooker with a heart of gold, has an extremely vio­lent streak that appears when she must defend virtue and jus­tice; an odd trait for a pros­ti­tute, but fully in keep­ing with the com­plex and imper­fect char­ac­ters that are trade­marks of a Fuller film. There is a scene where she shoves money into the mouth of a cathouse madam, and the fact that the madam looks like Kelly might in 15 years is star­tling. The fram­ing of each shot through­out the film is as tight and claus­tro­pho­bic as pos­si­ble, not until the end do we get a sense of free­dom and release, as Kelly leaves town to make her way else­where. The Naked Kiss isn’t Fuller’s best film, but it is cer­tainly a stand­out in com­par­i­son to his other works and the schol­ar­ship that has been done in rela­tion to his defin­ing auteur char­ac­ter­is­tics. If you’re a fan of any­thing Fuller though, you’ll enjoy this film.

Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Dare.
Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review.
San Fran­cisco Gate arti­cle.
Dan Schnei­der essay.
YouTube Clips: Clip 1, Clip 2, Clip 3.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #133: George Sluizer’s The Van­ish­ing.

The Van­ish­ing is a very 80s movie with a very 80s score. It is a pretty good thriller/horror, espe­cially because of its unortho­dox method­ol­ogy. Much of the film is spent with detailed views of a sociopath’s life; the man who kid­naps the main character’s girl­friend and dri­ves Rex into obses­sive search mode for the next three years. There ensues a game of cat and mouse that con­cludes with dire con­se­quences. The film is engross­ing from a psy­cho­log­i­cal stand­point, mainly for the fact that the ser­ial killer is the most sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter and the pro­tag­o­nist is a fairly large jack­ass. This jux­ta­po­si­tion also takes the place usu­ally occu­pied by sus­pense, some­thing the film largely does with­out. I guess one could argue that won­der­ing what hap­pens to the vic­tims is sus­pense­ful, but I hon­estly didn’t care so much about how they died as much as I won­dered how Rex would destroy his life next.

What I found most inter­est­ing about the film were its pro­duc­tion val­ues. The char­ac­ters don’t have makeup crews and per­fect cloth­ing, the cars are sim­i­lar to what any­one would drive. It is almost like a Dogme 95 film in these respects. Mostly because this was a Euro­pean co-production and they didn’t have tons of bud­get to blow on mise-en-scene. Instead, the qual­ity of the film comes with the cin­e­matog­ra­phy. Noth­ing par­tic­u­larly flashy, but some­times the deci­sion whether to make a rack focus or not has pow­er­ful effects. An exam­ple of this occurs when the killer sends Rex a post­card telling him to show up at a cer­tain café to meet. Rex arrives with his new girl­friend and as they con­ver­sate, the killer sits at a table behind them, very out of focus, but obvi­ously him. Rex and his skirt take off and the cam­era lingers on the killer, but remains out of focus. This is basi­cally the cin­e­matic equiv­a­lent of the unful­filled expec­ta­tions that the nar­ra­tive pro­vides. The Van­ish­ing is a well put-together film, but not a life-changing expe­ri­ence. I will say that if Hol­ly­wood put as much care into its screen­plays as went into this one, many of its releases would improve dramatically.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Kim Newman
• Links to tons of reviews
• Steven Jay Schnei­der essay
• kamera.co.uk review
• Roger Ebert review
• Qnet­work review
• Pop­mat­ters review

THIS POST CONTAINS A PICTURE OF AN EVISCERATED CORPSE, IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE IT, DON’T READ THIS POST.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #184: Stan­ley Brakhage’s By Brakhage: an anthol­ogy.

I’d for­got­ten how good Stan Brakhage is at the avant-garde film­mak­ing gig. It has been 5 years since my brief obses­sion with avant-garde film; I should really get back into it. There is a lot of talk [linked below] about rela­tional spec­ta­tor­ship, sub­jec­tiv­ity, decon­struc­tion and any num­ber of other the­o­ries that attempt to parse out what Brakhage was try­ing to do with his numer­ous films. This col­lec­tion of 26 works by Brakhage, and know­ing a bit about the man from the sup­ple­men­tary com­men­tary on the discs, leads me to believe that the fun­da­men­tal goal of a Brakhage film is to be devoid of all sub­jec­tiv­ity and objec­tiv­ity; some­thing merely exists to be shown. His paint-films seem to approx­i­mate synaes­the­sia, and while I can see some merit in the asser­tions that Brakhage wants his view­ers to see light, I think there is a more gen­eral goal here; Brakhage wants us to see things that we take for granted, or never see in the first place. I like the man more than his films, which is say­ing a lot. He seemed like a man with a good heart and an earnest­ness about him that com­pletely threw away any pre­ten­tion. He wasn’t doing avant-garde stuff to be edgy, but because it suited him.

So watch­ing a film like The Act of See­ing With One’s Own Eyes, that shows graphic visions of autop­sies, is a chance to see a dead body before it is all maked-up for view­ing. Sure we hear about death and dead bod­ies all the time and see them on TV, but how often do we actu­ally get to see a dead body with­out all the fuss we put around it. The only thing that could be closer than this film is to actu­ally go to a morgue. Dog Star Man is his ear­li­est mas­ter­piece, and is the visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of man’s place in the uni­verse with a bit of our ulti­mate futil­ity thrown in for good mea­sure. This is the least happy of his films, in my opin­ion. Tons of footage of Brakhage run­ning up a snowy moun­tain car­ry­ing an axe. Tough work, two for­ward one back, his deter­mi­na­tion becomes admirable, but his final fail­ure hurts just as badly. Win­dow Water Baby Mov­ing is an amaz­ing doc­u­ment of the birth of his first child, and I was root­ing on Jane Brakhage and then baby Myrrena through the whole thing. It is quite graphic too, but like his autopsy film, how often does the aver­age per­son get the chance to wit­ness a birth?

The older he got, the more refined and exper­i­men­tal he became. The col­laged detri­tus of Moth­light is beau­ti­ful, and it looks as if it were made of the stuff that you pull out of the ceil­ing lamp shade. The Wold Shadow is a hor­ror film, or at least ridicu­lously creepy, and con­sists of shot of a wood­land over var­i­ous times and has Brakhage paint­ing or tweak­ing the plate or the film in such a way that it looks as if there is some­thing mov­ing in the wood. He says it is his homage to the God in the Wood, and it cer­tainly should be. Much of the rest con­sists of paint on film, each indi­vid­ual frame painted by Brakhage and many of them could be con­sid­ered great abstract art; when they’re ani­mated and mod­i­fied, the effect is wholly engross­ing. This is what synapse fir­ing would look like. The Dante Quar­tet is prob­a­bly the most eas­ily acces­si­ble of the paint-films, and Black Ice the most evoca­tive. There is a later film with his grand­chil­dren that is state­lier and more med­i­ta­tive, it seems more about ana­lyz­ing time than light. All in all, this anthol­ogy was extremely enjoy­able, and although I wouldn’t rec­om­mend watch­ing the autopsy film over break­fast [as I did], of all the films that he made, that one affected me the most. We miss you, Stan.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Fred Camper
• Fred Camper’s Brakhage site
• Senses of Cin­ema on Brakhage
• Inter­view: Brakhage at Sixty
• Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion col­lec­tion of links to essays on Brakhage
• Stan Brakhage on Ubu
• YouTube Mad­ness
  • The Dante Quartet
  • Dog Star Man, Part 2
  • Desist­film
  • The Gar­den of Earthly Delights
  • Del­i­ca­cies of Molten Hor­ror Synapse
  • Black Ice
  • Rage Net

Hol­lowed, the body upon a table; no verbs for
the inan­i­mate, a cicada shell.

And men in long coats have removed them;
peeled flesh — skull over face -
sawn through bone
crack­ing wal­nuts for the meat inside;

each soft and hid­den part apprised;
the inside of your breast, the open boat
of your body sprayed clean of gris­tle;
blood pool­ing, numbered.

Those sullen limbs have
lost integrity to knife, hose,
microphone.

But who else holds the bod­ies of the dead;
thumbs the clayed flesh of your father;
that last and longest intimacy?

No bet­ter lover has had
such indif­fer­ent hands, no other
judge such objec­tive compassion.

Look.
It demands only,
the act of see­ing with one’s eyes.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #379: Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp.

The Burmese Harp seems less the anti-war film it is often billed as, and more of a post-war re-evaluation of Japan­ese nation­al­ism. For prac­ti­cal pur­poses there are two char­ac­ters in this film, the deserter Mizushima and the rest of his bat­tal­ion. After the Japan­ese sur­ren­der, both char­ac­ters find them­selves bereft and in search of a new direc­tion now that their ide­ol­ogy of Impe­r­ial Japan no longer exists. This loss is com­pounded by their expa­tri­a­tion in Burma and British cap­tiv­ity; they are orphaned in a for­eign land and unable to return to their home for heal­ing. Because of this it is not sur­pris­ing that they cling to one another; when Mizushima goes miss­ing after an attempt to save the lives of some stal­wart Japan­ese hold­outs, the rest of the bat­tal­ion spends the film con­cerned with his dis­cov­er­ing his where­abouts and then con­vinc­ing him to come home with them.

Mizushima’s fail­ure to con­vince the Japan­ese at Tri­an­gle Moun­tain to sur­ren­der, and their result­ing destruc­tion in his pres­ence [and his wound­ing], are life-changing events. He is nursed by a Bud­dhist monk and con­vinced to rid him­self of the past and take vows. Yet, for a man who has sworn to start anew, he has a tor­tur­ous time com­ing to grips with this. On his jour­neys he repeat­edly stum­bles across the unburied and unmourned corpses of Japan­ese sol­diers. The emo­tional toll this takes on him doesn’t reach its peak until he arrives in Mudon and watches the bur­ial of a British sol­dier with full honor. Dis­traught, he heads back into the wilder­ness to bury his dead broth­ers at arms, by hand. This vaguely pen­i­ten­tial pur­pose brings him great respect all over Burma; instead of inflict­ing suf­fer­ing as a solider, he endures his own to ease that of others.

I’ve not yet men­tioned the role that music plays in this film, and it is an impor­tant one. The bat­tal­ion cap­tain is a trained choir­mas­ter and in the rough times in the Burmese jun­gle trains his men in the ways of choral singing. Mizushima plays the role of accom­pa­nist with his Burmese harp. The music through­out the film is out­stand­ing, and it even saves the Japan­ese lives on the night of their sur­ren­der, as the tune they sing is well-known to the British. At the very begin­ning of the film, the cap­tain says that the ease of singing is meant for times of suf­fer­ing, and there seems to be a direct cor­re­la­tion between his battalion’s rea­son­able­ness and ratio­nal­ity in con­tem­plat­ing sur­ren­der and their love of music. The con­trast to this is the resis­tant honor-unto-death atti­tude of the Japan­ese at Tri­an­gle Moun­tain. Thus, Mizushima’s spir­i­tual jour­ney con­tains a com­po­nent of ten­sion between these two atti­tudes as well.

In the end the bat­tal­ion and Mizushima take inevitable sep­a­rate paths toward the same goal. The bat­tal­ion is eager to con­tinue in its com­po­nent lives back in Japan, and Mizushima is focused on putting to rest all of his dead com­rades. Every­one is mov­ing on and com­ing to terms with their new lives. Mizushima’s monas­tic life inter­sected the battalion’s in a way that made him truly seem dead to the past, a silent ghost, except for the music of the Burmese harp; a reminder that there are ties that bind between cul­ture, dis­tance, reli­gion and even death. This is a beau­ti­ful, wretched movie, def­i­nitely the kind of film meant for the Cri­te­rion Collection.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Tony Rayns.
• Sty­lus Mag­a­zine review.
• Strictly Film School review.
• Kon Ichikawa Inter­view Part 1; Part 2
• Rentaro Mikuni Inter­view Part 1; Part 2

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #380: Jules Dassin’s The Naked City.

Even with­out the ridicu­lously annoy­ing nar­ra­tor, The Naked City would still be a mediocre film. It is basi­cally an episode of CSI with­out any of the tech­nol­ogy. A police pro­ce­dure film about the mur­der of a young model that takes place in New York. Not exactly orig­i­nal. Of course, this film is pretty old, and that is where its main value lies; as an arti­fact and his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of what Hol­ly­wood was doing right after World War II. The film has a dis­tinct beat, melo­drama, inves­ti­ga­tion, humor, repeat; and its ini­tial claim to be some­thing of a doc­u­men­tary is laugh­able when you con­sider the care­fully arranged sets, shots and soft-focus close ups of dames. And, of course, the film has Barry Fitzger­ald, a char­ac­ter actor of such cal­iber that any film he’s in auto­mat­i­cally becomes stereo­typ­i­cal [cf. The Quiet Man].

Despite the over­bear­ing, smarmy nar­ra­tor, and the lep­rechaun in the main role, the film con­tin­u­ally dis­graces itself by pro­vid­ing a com­pletely pre­dictable plot lib­er­ally sauced with com­pel­tely trans­par­ent attempts at tit­il­la­tion [cf. the bare midriff of Halloran’s wife]. Instead of sus­pense being cre­ated by hav­ing the viewer know that some­one is lying but unable to tell who, the film exceeds itself in cun­ning by mak­ing it obvi­ous that every­one is lying. Key breaks in the case always come when every­thing seems lost, and rou­tine pro­ce­dure always wins out over intu­ition. It is hard to make an excit­ing film when mun­dan­ity is the topic.

It also never ceases to amaze me that Hol­ly­wood rarely relies on obvi­ous Gothamists to play the impor­tant parts. The film is lit­tered with bit part wise-guy New York­ers, but the main roles are played by an Irish­man and a Mid­west­erner. This is a bit like how most national news anchors have a Mid­west­ern accent, more appeal­ing to every­one across the nation. But stu­pid. The film is ground­break­ing for the fact that it did much of the shoot­ing on loca­tion, instead of on a lot some­where, and at the time this was prob­a­bly a new and inter­est­ing tech­nique. That’s def­i­nitely some­thing that has been lost over the years and the film suf­fers for it. Any­way, it has been awhile since I’ve had the chance to really lay into a film. This felt good. The Naked City isn’t a bad film, and your time won’t be wasted in watch­ing it, but you should prob­a­bly multi-task while doing it.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Luc Sante
• YouTube Clip 1, Clip 2

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #384: Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine.

This film was much more graphic than I expected it to be. It also has some great sex scenes. I’ll get into what I mean by great a bit later. The film is based around an actual Japan­ese ser­ial killer whose early life and strict Catholic upbring­ing seem to be the main motives that drive him to his wild­ness. The Catholic aspects aren’t promi­nent, but are still quite impor­tant. Their uniquely Japan­ese expo­si­tion was a bit rem­i­nis­cent of Shusaku Endo’s Silence, but that might be con­fir­ma­tion bias since those are the only two things I know about that are Japan­ese and Catholic. Basi­cally what I mean by “uniquely Japan­ese expo­si­tion” is that their Catholi­cism is more Bud­dhist than in the West. This might seem obvi­ous, but it is this com­bi­na­tion that enables the ser­ial killer Iwao Enokizu’s father to accept the suf­fer­ing that he goes through so readily.

This accep­tance, at least from the film’s point of view, is what gives Iwao an early rebel­lious­ness to what he sees as his father’s cow­ardice. The film’s con­ti­nu­ity con­tin­u­ally shifts between the past, the fur­ther past and the present to con­struct a tale instead of the more doc­u­men­tary feel that a lin­ear plot would have exhib­ited. Ima­mura seems to have been metic­u­lous in his arrange­ments; we learn of Iwao’s crim­i­nal abil­i­ties over and over again before we finally see them inac­tion, yet they are still star­tling even then. Iwao’s mon­stros­ity high­lights the dark desires in all of the other char­ac­ters as well. The result is the filmic equiv­a­lent of a mass Con­fes­sion, all sins exposed, but with a bit­ter [Bud­dhist] lack of abso­lu­tion. There are attempts at atone­ment, but no forgiveness.

The sex scenes are the best exam­ple of the dark desires, and the film is full of them. There are two par­tic­u­larly hot ones: the first between Iwao’s father and Iwao’s wife in a hot spring dur­ing the rain [they basi­cally just grope each other before guilt over­whelms] and the sec­ond between Iwao and his last lover; he talks about his mur­ders while they get it on, and that really turns on his lover. I say these scenes are hot because their obvi­ous pas­sions have a dan­ger­ous emo­tional gris­tle; a hint at the dark thing that sits next to each of their souls.

Iwao’s cru­elty is so fun­da­men­tal that even the tiny strug­gles of his good nature become twisted by cun­ning and mal­ice. At times he impro­vises excel­lent haiku that are extremely sur­pris­ing in their con­text. There are reaf­fir­ma­tions that he loves his mother through­out his crim­i­nal life, and at times he makes small ges­tures to a sick old woman who reminds him of her. But, he uses these ges­tures to get into the pants of the woman’s daugh­ter, and mus­cles into their lives. It turns out that the old woman killed her hus­band many years ago, so she becomes an inter­est­ing men­tor to Iwao. Through her ques­tion­ing, we learn that Iwao hasn’t killed the per­son he wants to, and it is fairly easy to guess that this is his father. The fore­shad­ow­ing and guilt-wearing res­ig­na­tion comes hard and fast toward the end of the film, for all par­ties. There is lit­tle, if any­thing, light about this film, but for those who like to take unflinch­ing looks at their own weak­ness and where it could lead, it is a great resource.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Atkinson
• Movie Mar­tyr Review
• Mid­night Eye review
• DVD Times review [good stills]
• Jasper Sharp review
• Shohei Ima­mura inter­viewed about the film: Part 1, Part 2.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #357: Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol.

Carol Reed and Gra­ham Greene, what a combo. I think a large part of the rea­son I don’t read much mod­ern fic­tion is that Gra­ham Greene’s work is so fully sat­is­fy­ing that I can’t fathom a rea­son to try any­thing else. Carol Reed as well, though much of his career was spent in labor mak­ing obscure locally-aimed pieces, man­aged, with Greene, to make films that are exactly as sat­is­fy­ing as a Greene book. The Fallen Idol, despite its film noir echo­ing title, is full of Reed’s char­ac­ter­is­tic finesse and Greene’s sub­tlety. It is a story about adult shame, lying, betrayal and imma­tu­rity seen through the eyes of a young boy, who is greatly changed through his appar­ently tan­gen­tial inter­ac­tion with the involved adult parties.

This angle allows a pro­found access to lay­ers of fal­sity that per­me­ate the adult world, a marked con­trast to the boy Phile’s wide-eyed adsorp­tion of the same. We observe his inno­cence dis­in­te­grate first-hand as a result of the self­ish and petty love tri­an­gle whirling around him. The but­ler did it. Mr. Baines is Phile’s hero, regal­ing him with tales out of Africa and assist­ing him in small mis­chiefs. Mrs. Baines is Phile’s neme­sis, a woman who has tasked her­self as acting-mother while Phile’s real mother is in the hos­pi­tal, but at the same time, a woman who has no idea how to relate to a child other than in terms of total­i­tar­ian con­trol. When Baines enlists Phile to help him cover up the truth about his affair, the plot thick­ens at an alarm­ing rate.

We learn that a per­son can be good with chil­dren but bad at every­thing else, we learn just how much adult behav­ior can affect a child who trusts the peo­ple in charge of him and we learn how offhand­edly that trust can be betrayed. The ulti­mate moral of the story is that one should always tell the truth despite the con­se­quences, this comes from the mouth of the har­ri­dan Mrs. Baines early in the film, but by the end has become almost com­pletely empa­thetic. I should admit right here that I watched this film twice. The sec­ond time through there are clues lit­tered through­out, both visual and ver­bal, that add a dis­tinctly Hitch­cock­ian feel to the film. Reed’s gen­er­ous use of dutch-angle, restricted fields of view and cer­tain emphatic shot fram­ings [a slammed cafe door that makes a Closed sign sway in punc­tu­a­tion, and the above shot of an impor­tant open win­dow] turn the psy­cho­log­i­cal tur­moil into envi­ron­men­tal. This is a film that hits on all cylin­ders throughout.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Geof­frey O’Brien.
• Screenon­line review with posters and stills. Video clips too, but only for cer­tain edu­ca­tional estab­lish­ments.
• Film Forum page with audio of Geof­frey O’Brien talk­ing about the film.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #100: Beastie Boys Video Anthol­ogy.

I have a dis­tinct mem­ory of danc­ing Inter­galac­tic stop-motion style at some dance or other with my high school bud­dies senior year. I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan, though I cer­tainly got down to their music. For a per­son my age, it is pretty much impos­si­ble to quan­tify the many ways their impres­sive career has affected the pop­u­lar cul­ture I was exposed to in my teen years. That’s pretty much Criterion’s rea­son for putting this col­lec­tion together. The main sell­ing point for the Cri­te­rion edi­tion is the wealth of extras that come with it, mul­ti­ple angles, remixes, spin­offs and other accu­mu­la­tions of music video loose ends are all gath­ered here for a Beastie feast.

The videos them­selves sort of run the gamut, from pure stock footage to height of their power pro­duc­tions to hand­held base­ment hijinks. The trade­mark low-angle fish­eye fronting is present in just about every video, and it is this, cou­pled with the fre­quent home-movie aspect of many of the videos, that defines the tech­ni­cal side of their video con­ceits. This is a good thing, since the rough-cut feel makes the Beastie’s seem like your friendly neigh­bor­hood MCs. Even their videos with higher pro­duc­tion val­ues have an air of delib­er­ate whim­si­cal­ity to them. I’d never actu­ally seen the video to Body Movin’ so it was with great delight that I pegged it as a spoof of the ultra-campy 60s spy flick Dia­bo­lik! which is prob­a­bly one of my favorite Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000 episodes as well. The hand-painted ani­ma­tion of Shadrach was also a sur­prise, and reminded me of Gondry’s Lego-animated White Stripes video.

My favorite video of the col­lec­tion was Three MCs and One DJ, mainly because of its effec­tive sim­plic­ity, it is a bit goofy, of course, but also prob­a­bly their most inti­mate as well, and you really get to see Mix Mas­ter Mike go nuts. I don’t really have a lot more to say about their videos, but the two-disc anthol­ogy is a choose-your-own-adventure romp through Beastie cul­ture that is worth any audiophile’s time and money. Check out the links below, espe­cially the Paul’s Bou­tique one and their anno­tated lyrics. And don’t sleep ’til B-lyn.

• Paul’s Bou­tique Sam­ples and Ref­er­ences List.
• Offi­cial Site.
• Beastie Museum.
• Beastie Mania.
• Mic to Mic weblog.
• Anno­tated Beastie Boys lyrics.
• Beastie Boys YouTube Group.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #164: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.

My Dos­to­evsky pro­fes­sor once said that Rus­sians are more Ori­en­tal than Occi­den­tal in tem­pera­ment, and the con­tem­pla­tive pac­ing and con­stant impor­tance of the unim­por­tant through­out Tarkovsky’s Solaris seems to sup­port this asser­tion fairly well. For those used to Stanis­law Lem’s whim­si­cal cyber­netic sci­ence fic­tion, Solaris is more rem­i­nis­cent of Philip K. Dick, espe­cially with its psy­cho­log­i­cal bent and hal­lu­cino­genic atmos­phere. These par­tic­u­lar aspects give the work and the film both sig­nif­i­cant stay­ing power; the fic­tion is phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal instead of tech­no­log­i­cal. East­ern Euro­peans and Asi­at­ics always seem to pull off pen­sive mad­ness with much more believ­abil­ity than less thought­ful cul­tures. So Kris, Kelvin can stag­ger around Solaris Sta­tion in naught but his box­ers, eyes inward, but when he begins to talk about con­science and con­scious­ness and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, his out­ward dis­or­der is merely the sign of a com­plete inter­nal focus on more impor­tant problems.

Kelvin becomes a reflec­tion of Solaris Sta­tion, an utter ruin itself; both igno­rant to the means and effects of the Solaris Ocean which they are study­ing. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion seems to be the theme of this film. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the self as man­i­fested by the appear­ance of Hari, Kelvin’s long-deceased wife, the planet’s attempt at com­mu­ni­ca­tion by proxy through the man­i­fes­ta­tion of Hari, tête-a-tête com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the sci­en­tists and the sci­en­tists attempts to com­mu­ni­cate with the planet via radi­a­tion. On a meta-level we also have Tarkovsky’s attempt to com­mu­ni­cate the dif­fi­cul­ties of these processes to his view­ers. In the end it becomes eas­ier to toss the dice and hope that expla­na­tion through evo­ca­tion and imagery will suffice.

Kelvin seems admirably suited to his job as con­sul­tant for the con­tin­u­a­tion of the Solaris project. He is not so much objec­tive as com­pletely recep­tive and instead of sit­ting in indif­fer­ence, he explores in accep­tance. Because of this, he becomes, unwill­ingly, the first per­son to suc­cess­fully com­mu­ni­cate with the sen­tient ocean. After this occurs, the hal­lu­ci­na­tions cease, but the reap­pear­ance of Hari has exhumed his old skele­tons, and his is dis­qui­eted. At this point, Tarkovsky’s sub­tle mas­tery finally reveals itself, the small peace­ful nat­ural clues we’ve received through­out the film, flow­ing water, sway­ing plants, swirling vis­tas and obscu­rant clouds become visual rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Kelvin’s pri­vate thought processes, and the Solaris Ocean offers him full com­mu­nion with them. A form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that we all only wish for.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Philip Lopate.
• Andrei Tarkovsky on Solaris.
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle by the Strictly Film School guy.
• Movie Mar­tyr review with stills.
• Offi­cial site of Stanis­law Lem.
• Exhaus­tive site about the film and the book.
• Roger Ebert Review.
• YouTube Clips: 1, 2, 3, 4.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #374: Vit­to­rio De Sica’s Bicy­cle Thieves.

Bicy­cle Thieves is one of those films that ends up on every Film His­tory syl­labus. It shouldn’t be avoided, but I think that it appre­ci­ates to a viewer who has actu­ally had to live and scrounge to make ends meet in the real world. It cer­tainly has done so for me and will prob­a­bly do so again when I have chil­dren of my own. In post-war Italy, times are tough and jobs are non-existent. Ricci, the main char­ac­ter, some­how man­ages to get a job post­ing bills. The only require­ment is that he needs a bike for trans­porta­tion. Cur­rently his bike is sit­ting in a pawn shop. His wife decides to pawn their sheets so that they can get the bike back and Ricci can take the job. On his first day, his Fides gets stolen by a gang of thieves. Thank­fully it is the week­end, so Ricci can spend the rest of the movie look­ing for one bike and one thief among thou­sands in all of Rome. If this brief sketch isn’t hard­core enough for you, the rest of the film, and its atten­dant details should do the trick. At every step of the way De Sica makes sure that Ricci gets the merda end of the stick.

This Pas­sion is made all the more pow­er­ful by the actors play­ing the parts. Lam­berto Mag­gio­rani [who plays Ricci] and Jim Caviezel bear an eerie resem­b­lence to each other, both have long-suffering but stoic faces. Enzo Staiola [who plays Ricci’s son Bruno] is per­haps the cutest and most feisty lit­tle guy in any film ever. As they travel together through­out Rome, search­ing for the bicy­cle, Ricci must con­tin­u­ally put on a brave face to main­tain the hope in his son, even as his own des­per­a­tion grows. They search the bike mar­ket to no avail, and Bruno attracts a child moles­ter while Ricci accosts a bike mechanic. Noth­ing bad hap­pens to Bruno, but it is obvi­ous that Ricci is being dri­ven to dis­trac­tion by the loss of his Fides. Later, he even dis­rupts a prayer ser­vice [for a Roman Roman Catholic to dis­rupt a Catholic ser­vice in Rome…] as he tries to track down the boy who stole his bike. Even when he suc­ceeds at this, the boy turns out to be epilep­tic and an entire neigh­bor­hood turns against Ricci. In the end, he attempts to steal a bike in front of his ter­ri­fied son, and even fails at this. Only at the mercy of the vic­tim is Ricci set free. Ricci and Bruno, both cry­ing, walk into the crowd.

It is def­i­nitely the small things that turn this film into a mas­ter­piece of destruc­tion. Ricci, the man of the fam­ily, has no job — although his wife and even Bruno are employed. He is com­pletely emas­cu­lated through no fault of his own, and in the end, his young son is the only one who can offer him love and sup­port. Bruno doesn’t under­stand why his father would have done some­thing so hor­ri­ble as steal a bike, but he real­izes that papa is in seri­ous pain and offers the only thing he has to give, his hand. When Ricci’s con­trol finally breaks, the viewer is sit­ting right at the bot­tom of the bar­rel with him. It all sounds a bit mawk­ish in my descrip­tion, but the film isn’t melo­dra­matic at all. It is heartrend­ing because of its real­ism; and the ded­i­cated, exact­ing devel­op­ment of the plot. The small things add up to some­thing that no man can face alone; a soci­ety with no use and no pity for him, in that order.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by God­frey Cheshire.
• Movie Diva review.
• Strictly Film School syn­op­sis.
• Inter­view with Suso Cec­chi d’Amico, screen­writer.
• Trailer on YouTube.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #312: Masahiro Shinoda’s Samu­rai Spy.

Like any good spy movie, most of the time in Samu­rai Spy the viewer doesn’t know who is who, who is what and who is where. This is good. The film also has a bit of an Ian Flem­ing flair to the whole affair; spies bang­ing other spies for infor­ma­tion, for exam­ple. The film also reminded me very much of manga; it appears that Shin­oda used tele­photo lenses quite often, result­ing in shots that feel com­pressed almost to two-dimensionality. The cam­era crew must’ve been sim­ply amaz­ing though, because there are many shots that require exact adjust­ments of focus nearly instan­ta­neously, and just as many long-takes which start out in a com­pressed long shot, but end in close-up. The cam­era isn’t mov­ing, just the actors. The film is beau­ti­ful and worth watch­ing sim­ply for the shot-framing, cin­e­matog­ra­phy, and cam­era work. A mas­ter­piece of technique.

I think this film is also the first old Japan­ese film I’ve seen that uses spe­cial effect tech­niques that films like Crouch­ing Tiger Hid­den Dragon owe a strong debt to. When they want to, samu­rai and ninja move absolutely silently, thanks to a lack of sound track and the tac­ti­cal use of Foley to ren­der other ambi­ent sounds. This works at all points, except once, where Sasuke jumps onto a roof and we see the tiles shake and dust arise, but hear noth­ing. Pretty much all of the char­ac­ters have a super­nat­ural jump­ing abil­ity that goes along with their stealth. These stunts are ridicu­lously cool, even 40+ years after their film­ing; thanks in part, to more care­ful work with shot selec­tion and editing.

The story is more sat­is­fy­ing than many spy films as well. The per­se­cu­tion of Japan­ese Chris­tians plays a small but impor­tant role through­out the film; and Sasuke’s sta­tus as a third-party samu­rai rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a rel­a­tively neu­tral clan, is a new and wel­come angle on the often over­played Toyotomi/Tokugawa rivalry. I’ve con­sis­tently referred to this film as a spy film, and not a samu­rai film, mainly because it is so dif­fer­ent than most samu­rai films. There is no focus on honor, forth­right­ness and fair play that are typ­i­cal virtues of a samu­rai film. In Samu­rai Spy, although it is a period piece, the unscrupu­lous nature of every spy [Sasuke excepted] gives it a dis­tinctly mod­ern feel. Sasuke him­self isn’t a typ­i­cal hero, his cyn­i­cism regard­ing the “pre­car­i­ous peace” he has lived with for half his life also pro­vides a cer­tain per­spec­tive unbound by clan loy­alty. Because of this, he is able to suc­cess­fully nav­i­gate his way to safety, leav­ing a trail of dead on both sides behind him. For a man who feels that vio­lence should be avoided, this might seems strange, until you real­ize that those that die on his sword did so of their own choice.

• Cri­te­rion essay by Alain Sil­ver.
• Cri­te­rion essay by Chris D.
• Kung Fu Cin­ema Review with stills.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #57: Stan­ley Donen’s Cha­rade.

What struck me most about Cha­rade was the way in which it could show cal­lous and some­times vicious mur­ders in such a care­free way that you felt free to not care about the dead schmucks. That is a feel­ing that lasts through­out the film, but appro­pri­ately so. The film is a rom-com thriller which is a del­i­cate trail to tread if a direc­tor intends each aspect to tit­il­late in its own unique way. In this sort of pro­duc­tion it is essen­tial, even more so than in other films, that the entire cast and crew are on the same page in terms of its intent. Good actors are essen­tial as well, and all of this is present in Cha­rade, even apart from the pres­ence of Cary Grant and Audrey Hep­burn. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Wal­ter Matthau was already middle-aged when he made this film in 1963. James Coburn and George Kennedy too.

The sheer num­ber of twists, both small and large, keep the three card monte game going for the entire film. The fact that there are addi­tional plot twists after the cli­mac­tic one pro­vide an effec­tive leap into the absurd which helps bridge the strange gap between rom-com and thriller. While Hepburn’s char­ac­ter is the focus of the film, Grant’s act­ing is what car­ries it. His good nature appears so gen­uine that even after we dis­cover that he has lied again, much like Hepburn’s char­ac­ter, we for­give and for­get. That’s some charisma.

None of the char­ac­ters in the film are par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing as char­ac­ters. They ful­fill their spe­cific roles most excel­lently, but there really isn’t much to be ana­lyzed that won’t ulti­mately take away from the film’s enter­tain­ment intent. Even 44 years after release it is a guffaw-along slice of 60s Hol­ly­wood, and is likely a clas­sic for its reliance on ever-effective storytelling.

From a tech­ni­cal stand­point the films suc­ceeds fairly well. Unfor­tu­nately there are a fair num­ber of rather obvi­ous con­ti­nu­ity errors, but the over­all color palette and the excel­lent loca­tion choices more than make up for this. Besides, only film geeks care about con­ti­nu­ity errors.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Bruce Eder.
• Watch the whole movie in ser­ial for­mat.
• Film Sum­mary by Stan­ley Donen.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #263: Ing­mar Bergman’s Fanny och Alexan­der [The­atri­cal Version].

Although I’ve yet to see the five hour tele­vi­sion ver­sion of this film, Fanny and Alexan­der seems an odd title for a film in which Fanny is lit­tle more than an after­thought foil to her brother Alexan­der. There are hints through­out the film, how­ever, that shots that appear to be objec­tive might actu­ally be first-person point of view. The film does its best to cap­ture the cin­e­matic equiv­a­lent atmos­phere of the lim­i­nal stage of an ado­les­cent rite of pas­sage. While this is typ­i­cally brief, the grad­ual emer­gence of an ado­les­cent cul­ture has length­ened this event to a years long trans­for­ma­tion. Alexan­der is ahead of his time in this regard. The film takes place at the turn of the 19th cen­tury, and while Alexander’s adult fam­ily mem­bers are com­fort­able in their lifestyles, his alter­nat­ing pas­sive defi­ance and defeatism seems to presage the Mod­ern hor­rors of the 20th century.

Basi­cally he’s caught between the worst of the old and the worst of the new. After his father dies piti­fully, there is a Ham­let ref­er­en­tial space in which his mother remar­ries a Calvin­ist bishop whose unwel­come overly-familiar touch not only makes Alexander’s skin crawl, but the viewer’s as well. This author­i­tar­ian enforces a dis­ci­pline that is markedly dif­fer­ent than the lib­eral atmos­phere of the Ekdahl matri­archy. In an envi­ron­ment that is proud of the fact that it has remained aus­terely unchanged for hun­dreds of years, Alexan­der begins to learn to use his par­tic­u­lar tal­ent for imag­i­na­tion and guile as a potent weapon. It is inevitable that he will have a show­down with the bishop. Alexander’s mouth is just as smart as mine was, when he decides to use it.

Despite his antag­o­nism, both he and his mother lack the strength to escape. A friend of the fam­ily devises a strat­a­gem to res­cue the chil­dren, and it is only at this point, the cli­max of the film that it loses me. There are some delib­er­ate con­ti­nu­ity shifts that throw the whole cre­ated real­ity of the film into ques­tion. Since this occurs in such a key spot, it is hard to decide just what Alexan­der is, and where we are in rela­tion to him. The film set­tles down again after this moment, and in the house of Uncle Isak, Alexan­der comes face to face with his future, in the per­son of the wild Ismael. Again the real­ity of the film is called into ques­tion, until even­tu­ally the only guides left come from the mono­logues of the Ekdahl men and the clos­ing quote from August Strind­berg. More on that when I review the tele­vi­sion ver­sion. [As a note to myself.]

• Cri­te­rion Review by Rick Moody.
• Deep Focus review.
• 1983 Roger Ebert review.
• 2004 Roger Ebert review.
• Alter­na­tive Film Guide review.
• YouTube clip.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #82: Lau­rence Olivier’s Ham­let.

Lau­rence Olivier did remark­ably well in his trans­plant of Ham­let to the sil­ver screen. Although the trans­plant involved a gas­tric bypass of much of the play’s text, Olivier mit­i­gated this omis­sion by inspired cam­er­a­work. Ter­rence Rafferty’s Cri­te­rion essay sug­gest that the cam­era is God’s eye view of the action, and while this is on the right track, I think it is slightly more com­pli­cated; I posit that the cam­er­a­work in just about every scene is dri­ven by the char­ac­ter whose will dom­i­nates. Thus, a slight pan to reveal an empty chair tells the viewer that Ophe­lia is think­ing about Ham­let, and a spi­ral­ing track-out cul­mi­nates inside of Hamlet’s head as he begins his most famous soliloquy.

This review isn’t going to be about the act­ing, or the play itself, but the strengths of the adap­ta­tion. The film allows inter­pre­ta­tions and effects that were not pos­si­ble in the­atri­cal releases. Hamlet’s solil­o­quys often begin inter­nally, through voice-over, and only emerge into diegetic vocal­iza­tion as his ten­sion mounts. Then there are the visual effects, like the open­ing sequence that shows a skull on the cas­tle, that, as the cam­era zooms in, is revealed to be the king’s bed­room, and the eerie phan­tom of the dead king him­self. To be sure, the film’s adap­ta­tion is not per­fect. When Shake­speare gets self-reflexive and mocks his con­tem­po­rary theatre-goers, the groundlings, the anachro­nism is jar­ring, more so even than it would be in mod­ern the­atri­cal performances.

Much more could be done with set pieces as well, where film-theater-pastoral-tragic-comical pro­duc­tions like Busby Berkeley’s are noto­ri­ous for the impos­si­ble POV shots that the chore­o­graphed sequences are filmed in, Olivier’s use of deep-focus and spare but pow­er­ful cam­era move­ment do more to empha­size the dis­tance between the char­ac­ters, cre­ate dom­i­nant lines of sight like cross­fire and reveal hid­den dan­gers in every cup, torch and stair­case. The crys­tal clar­ity of many of the shots that are dri­ven by Hamlet’s will nearly con­vinced me that he truly was a mad­man. It isn’t sur­pris­ing that this film won 4 Acad­emy Awards.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Ter­rence Raf­ferty.
• Roy Lisker review with com­par­isons to Branagh’s ver­sion.
• Bright Lights Film Jour­nal review.
• Wikipedia arti­cle on the film [with more screen­shots].
• YouTube clips: 1 and 2.
• Ham­let­Works: Every­thing you’d ever want to know about Ham­let.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #382: Stu­art Cooper’s Over­lord.

I was con­tacted by a NYC mar­ket­ing firm to review Over­lord, which was released on the 17th. So hey, free DVD. This is the sec­ond time that some­one has hap­pened along my movie reviews and asked me to do one for them. I must be doing some­thing right. Inci­den­tally, this film will be shown at the Cleve­land Cin­e­math­eque in Octo­ber. Catch it if you can.

Overlord has an interesting cinematic niche. It is composed, in significant amounts, of World War II stock footage [mostly from the Imperial War Museum]. This footage has been seamed together with plot-oriented shots that were deliberately cinematographed to look like stock footage. John Alcott [Kubrick's regular choice for cinematographer] was in charge of this, so quality is expected and delivered. The story follows a young British man who is dutifully making his way toward the war, culminating in D-Day. I don't think I've ever seen a film that does such a good job putting its main character in context with the events in the world around him.

The film has an objec­tiv­ity and a sub­jec­tiv­ity that rub against each other like flint and tin­der. The objec­tive vec­tor con­cerns the mind-bogglingly vast resources and activ­i­ties asso­ci­ated with the war effort; from civil­ians fight­ing fires after air raids to dive bombers going after bat­tle­ships and destroy­ers, to the mus­ter­ing and trans­porta­tion of troops troops troops. It is like an 80 minute ver­sion of a Frank Capra “Why We Fight” minus the forced jovial voice-over and edi­to­r­ial pro­pa­ganda. The film is book­ended with long, word­less sequences of this action; in the begin­ning it immerses the viewer, but by the end it has a com­pletely dif­fer­ent flavor.

This whole ele­ment is so dense that with­out the sub­jec­tive angle to bal­ance, a viewer could eas­ily become over­whelmed. Tom Bed­dows adds the human ele­ment. He begins the film as a man with regard for the act of defend­ing his coun­try that has likely been passed down by Tom Bed­dows, Sr. who fought in the First World War. By the end, this regard has been steadily degraded through dis­gruntle­ment and cyn­i­cism; Bed­dows becomes com­pletely nihilis­tic [burn­ing his let­ters to home]—all before he’s left Britain. This cor­re­lates with the inter­cut objec­tive stock footage ele­ments. The dehu­man­ized war machine dehu­man­izes. It is a bit rem­i­nis­cent of Dou­glas Adams’ Total Per­spec­tive Vor­tex, sans humor.

I should clarify what I mean when I use the word objective. The clips themselves are documents, with only the most vestigial resonances of propaganda. The way they are used by Cooper is not objective, they are meant to wind the internal springs of Beddows to their breaking point. Cooper's motivation is a product of the Vietnam era; looking at World War II from this perspective is quite interesting. The training sequences, and Beddows transformation into near roboticism become a bit sinister; almost as if someone of complete indifference has planned each element in the dehumanization process. In the end even Tom Beddows dreams are tinged with an indifferent regard to the death he knows is coming. It's not surprising that the war gets to him before he gets to it.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Kent Jones.
• Cri­te­rion Press Release with links to many reviews and other press infor­ma­tion in a .zip file.
• Clips: 1 and 2.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #371: Oscar Micheaux’s Body & Soul and Ken­neth MacPherson’s Bor­der­line.

Body & Soul

Paul Robe­son and Oscar Micheaux are leg­endary, so I was eager to see what they could do in col­lab­o­ra­tion. Body & Soul is Robeson’s first screen appear­ance, and quite an open­ing act. The story is about a arche­typal hus­tler who’s hus­tle hap­pens to involve being an arche­typal black preacher. There’s hypocrisy, drunk­en­ness, rape, and mur­der; just from the preacher! The film is strong through­out, but passes the strength between Robeson’s com­plete trans­for­ma­tion into a Jekyll & Hyde char­ac­ter and Micheaux’s facil­ity with shot selec­tion, cin­e­matog­ra­phy and edit­ing. Body & Soul are typ­i­cally bound together in mutu­ally pos­i­tive terms [e.g. Good for body & soul.] but in this film they are oppos­ing forces. An easy anal­ogy can also be made: Robe­son as Body; his phys­i­cal pres­ence com­pletely mag­netic. This leaves Soul for Micheaux, who is able to inti­mate vio­lence with a shot of shoes walk­ing through a door, or an inter-title that sim­ply says “Later.”

The film only fails at the fin­ish line. The dénoue­ment seemed like a grand cop-out to me. For the major­ity of the film, the drama plays out as an explicit crit­i­cism of min­istry and an implicit cri­tique of cul­tural lar­ceny in gen­eral. The fact that Micheaux felt the need to end with a “just playin’ y’all” doesn’t indi­cate a fail­ure of ide­al­ism to me, but likely a prac­ti­cal under­stand­ing of the recep­tion the film would have got­ten with a less fairy-tale con­clu­sion. Nev­er­the­less, I feel like it is fairly well neutered by the last ten min­utes, much like Campion’s The Piano was spayed in the same way.

The jazz score for the Cri­te­rion release is mag­nif­i­cent. There’s some smooth jazz, acid jazz, chain-ganging, and gospel echoes through­out, many times mar­velously jux­ta­posed to empha­size sub­text that an audi­ence used to talkies might typ­i­cally miss.

• Oscar Micheaux’s Body & Soul: Visual Rep­re­sen­ta­tion and Social Con­struc­tion of African-American Iden­tity
• Com­pre­hen­sive Oscar Micheaux
• Arti­cle about the jazz score for the new print.
• YouTube clip of Body & Soul.

Bor­der­line

Bor­der­line is a very dif­fer­ent film from Body & Soul. It’s a British avant-garde film about an inter-racial love tri­an­gle. Robeson’s role in this film is much less sub­stan­tive, but no less effec­tive. This effort­less effi­cacy is enabled by the sto­ry­line and its inevitable racially-charged con­fronta­tion. This film is fairly sophis­ti­cated, it uses mon­tage lib­er­ally, but in a very refined man­ner. I’ve never seen a film where com­pletely motion­less fig­ures can make a scene feel unut­ter­ably vio­lent. When the storm actu­ally comes, it is almost a relief; the sub­con­scious clues sup­plied by the montage-foreshadowing turn the screen ten­sion into real ten­sion held by the viewer. MacPherson’s use of mon­tage often blends with the action instead of stand­ing sep­a­rately as a sort of para­ble like some­thing out of Ver­tov. Thus, the pop of a cham­pagne cork and the dark stain it leaves on the wall sug­gests a gun­shot and blood­stain, and a woman trim­ming a hat with shears implies the thoughts of the man play­ing with a knife in the shot that pre­cedes it.

The jazz score for this film is also very good, but even with­out it the amount of sound present in the action of this silent film is astound­ing. Unfor­tu­nately the tech­ni­cal aspects of the film are its great­est strength. The plot is prob­a­bly a bit too com­pli­cated to be effec­tively por­trayed in a silent film, and while Robeson’s role is actu­al­ized through a sin­gle punch, the abrupt end­ing and nearly non-existent moral would be bet­ter suited to a doc­u­men­tary and not a drama. Per­haps this Mod­ern, ambigu­ous end­ing was pre­cisely the point, but if there is no par­tic­u­lar point to be made, why make a movie that so des­per­ately seems to need one?

• Screenon­line syn­op­sis and mul­ti­me­dia. Unfor­tu­nately the clips are only avail­able to cer­tain Brits.
• Lux­on­line His­tory.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #358: G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

I said I’d fin­ished watch­ing all of the films that I’d seen before, but Pandora’s Box showed up at the Library recently, and I’ve cur­rently got Bicy­cle Thieves in the queue. Watch­ing Pandora’s Box this time around was much more ful­fill­ing than the first time I saw it. I’m a big fan of Weimar-era films and Ger­man Expres­sion­ism in gen­eral, so an excuse to rewatch this was quite wel­come. The Cri­te­rion folks had four sep­a­rate musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment choices to join with the film, I switched through all of them dur­ing my screen­ing, and have to say that I liked the piano impro­vi­sa­tion one the best.

Pandora’s Box is one of those films that film buffs con­sis­tently praise and place on a pedestal. For its time it was quite frank and racy, and its non-judgmental aspect is some­thing that would become sorely lack­ing in Amer­i­can cin­ema once the Hays code went into effect. This film is a Ger­man prod­uct, though the main char­ac­ter is played by Kansan Louise Brooks, whose act­ing was pitch per­fect for the tone that Pabst was aim­ing for in his ren­di­tion of Franz Wedekind’s Lulu saga.

Lulu is the arche­typal whore with a heart of gold, a woman whose free sex­u­al­ity ulti­mately ruins her entire world. This part gets men­tioned in just about every review of the film, but what inter­ests me the most is how ahead of its time her char­ac­ter and its por­trayal appear to be. From one angle Lulu appears to be a misogynist’s dream/nightmare, a woman that affirms the stan­dard anti-woman talk­ing points with no regard to the effects her aber­rant behav­ior has on oth­er­wise “good” peo­ple. The vam­piric shot of Lulu and Dr. Schön is prob­a­bly the ulti­mate expres­sion of this. At the same time, she’s an excel­lent exam­ple of a lib­er­ated woman, defined by her sex­u­al­ity instead of repressed by it. Count­ess Geschwitz is con­sid­ered to be the first obvi­ous les­bian char­ac­ter in film history.

Male char­ac­ters are all neg­a­tive, com­pletely con­trolled by their own libidos, which are expressed through an obses­sion with Lulu. Because none of the char­ac­ters [except Lulu] retain any shred of inno­cence, there is lit­tle sym­pa­thy for them as they destroy them­selves. The strength of Pandora’s Box lies in this real­is­tic, Mod­ern treat­ment of love and lust. Despite the silence of the film, the act­ing and screen­play ensure that the film will remain tren­chant as long as all is fair in love.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by J. Hober­man.
• YouTube clips [1, 2].
• Some screen­shots.
• Guardian Arti­cle.
• Louise Brooks Soci­ety.
• Louise Brooks Gallery.
• Wedekind play Erdgeist [in Ger­man] at Project Guten­berg.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #67: Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of A Poet.

At first, this film seemed impen­e­tra­ble to me. It only clocks in at 50 min­utes, but the film is so filled with a need for inter­pre­ta­tion that “preg­nant” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Jean Cocteau explic­itly states that the film is an alle­gory [or sev­eral of them] about the the mean­ing of art both time­lessly and in the age of mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion. I’ve very delib­er­ately not read any­thing about this film [I will once I’ve fin­ished this review, you­betcha] but I sus­pect that Cocteau was wrestling with his own artis­tic thought-demons and upon com­ple­tion, he decided to express them per­son­ally, and ulti­mately fatal­is­ti­cally in this film.

A few inter­ti­tles set the stage early on, as an artist is work­ing on a draw­ing of a statue in his room. The mouth of the draw­ing comes to life and ends up get­ting attached to his hand and pos­sess­ing it. It demands air, makes out with him, fon­dles his body and prob­a­bly gives him a blowjob [a cut makes this part merely implied, at least to me]. Even­tu­ally the artist/poet ends up going through the looking-glass and into his own [and since he stands for Cocteau, Cocteau’s] mind. His mind hap­pens to be a hotel hall­way and as he peeks through the key­holes he glimpses styl­ized and dis­turb­ing things.

The film is quite vio­lent, much of which is expressed with the char­ac­ter­is­tic Cocteau inven­tive­ness. He was cer­tainly a spe­cial effects genius. Since much of this vio­lence appears to be an inter­nal­ized man­i­fes­ta­tion of the artist’s mind, it shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that there is an equal amount of deviant sex­ual behav­ior as well, a child dressed in bells is whipped, an opium den is viewed in sil­hou­ette, a her­maph­ro­dite gives a peep-show, not to men­tion the afore­men­tioned hand/blowjob.

The statue’s con­trol of the artist/poet sug­gests that it rep­re­sents a Muse, but a rene­gade one who doesn’t play by the rules. She is out to teach a les­son; though art may pos­sess and pro­vide grandiose and won­der­ful and world-changing pos­si­bil­ity to the artist, some­thing of extreme solem­nity; to oth­ers it will likely be just friv­o­lous enter­tain­ment. And, ulti­mately, the impor­tance of the art will not mat­ter, it will be destroyed, ignored, dis­in­te­grated, or for­got­ten. Cocteau even indi­cates that immor­tal­ity is not to be desired… “the mor­tal tedium of immortality.”

Effec­tu­ally, the film is an attempt to ren­der poetic words unto images, and to me it seems to be more doc­u­ment than fable, Cocteau offers no easy solu­tions. Espe­cially since the artist/poet com­mits sui­cide twice dur­ing the film. Stars, wire­frames, pas­sages, voyeuris­tic glory ever­last­ing, denial, lar­ceny and pow­er­less­ness all inter­twine to present a two-fold mean­ing [at least] for the Blood of a Poet. The blood is his art, and art demands a poet’s blood.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Jean Cocteau.
• Brief review at Net­co­muk [and much more Cocteau].
• Senses of Cin­ema review.
• MovieMar­tyr review.
• YouTube clip of a good trick shot.

On Sat­ur­day I saw 1.5 films at the 31st Cleve­land Film Fes­ti­val. The first was called A Map for Sat­ur­day and was a self-doc about a guy who quit his job to spend a year back­pack­ing around the world. It was inter­est­ing to see, since he is about my age, and it wasn’t really a doc­u­men­tary with the intent to Teach You Some­thing. It did tend to glam­or­ize the process a bit too much and sort of implied that any­one can do this if they want to. The $20k he spent on travel in that year says oth­er­wise though.

The sec­ond film was called Bamako and it sucked. It would have been good as a mag­a­zine arti­cle or an in-depth piece of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism, but as a drama and film it was awful. The half-assed plot is com­pletely sub­sumed by “ordi­nary cit­i­zen” wit­nesses who speak like expert econ­o­mists and/or Marx­ists [not that they are Marx­ists, but it wouldn’t be sur­pris­ing if they started toss­ing out terms like dialec­tic and util­ity.] to a court that rep­re­sents the World Bank or IMF. What the film really is about is how the West has destroyed and con­tin­ues to destroy Africa. About the only thing I got out of the film was that the ordi­nary peo­ple of Africa don’t have much of a voice in world affairs. Unfor­tu­nately they didn’t have it in this film either. Pep­per­mint and I left after about an hour of the blah-bliddy-blah.

Also, the guy in A Map for Sat­ur­day didn’t visit Africa on his world tour.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #176: Robert Siodmak’s The Killers; Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Killers; Don Siegal’s The Killers.

Here’s another exam­ple where The Cri­te­rion folks are in a posi­tion to pro­vide a unique cin­e­matic expe­ri­ence. In addi­tion to Robert Siodmak’s clas­sic noir, they’ve also pro­vided Andrei Tarkovsky’s first stu­dent film and Don Siegal’s made-for-TV but never aired adap­ta­tion; all of the Ernest Hem­ing­way short story The Killers.

Siodmak’s treat­ment is still the best of the three. The dia­logue is sharper, the pro­duc­tion val­ues less over-wrought, the act­ing of a higher qual­ity than any­thing Don Sie­gal might got­ten in his remake. Even the non-Hemingway por­tions of the film [most of it] are held to a higher stan­dard and are a bit more palat­able than Siegal’s made-for-TV 60s candy-corn. That’s not to say that Siegal’s ver­sion is a com­plete loss, but with­out Clu Gulager as a hit­man and about two inter­est­ing shots it would have been absolutely terrible.

Tarkovsky’s short is almost word-for-word to the Hem­ing­way story and it has early sparks of his dis­tinct style. The much slower pace of this short gives a much richer taste to the sce­nario and much more space for thought about the impulses which have made this story so res­o­nant to so many folks. As great as Siodmak’s adap­ta­tion is, the post-Hemingway dia­logue lacks the punch of the diner’s hit­men jar­gon. While Siegal’s film is the same in essen­tials, the dif­fer­ent par­tic­u­lars make it a bit more bleak since we fol­low the action through the sub­jec­tiv­ity of the hit­men through­out. Since they’re evil of course they can’t be allowed to make it through the film alive. An inevitabil­ity obvi­ous from the start. I haven’t said much about the con­tent of the films them­selves, so I’ll just leave it at say­ing, watch the Siod­mak ver­sion and if you like Clu Gulager, you’ll prob­a­bly be able to sit through Siegal’s.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Jonathan Lethem [1946]
• The Killers [1946] Film Site review.
• YouTube Trailer of The Killers [1946]
• Alexan­der Gor­don on The Killers [1958] [He worked on the film as a fel­low stu­dent with Tarkovsky]
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Geof­frey O’Brien [1964]
• YouTube Trailer of The Killers [1964]
• The Hem­ing­way short story.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #174: Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part.

Bande à part is only loosely a gang­ster film, only loosely a noir, and a very uncon­ven­tional film in just about all other respects. It is also one of the most influ­en­tial of the French New Wave and is still near the cut­ting edge 43 years after its release. What makes this work so strik­ing is Godard’s pro­cliv­ity to mess with the 4th wall, to address the viewer in as many ways as pos­si­ble while pro­vid­ing enough of a story for the film to remain sat­is­fy­ing as a piece of enter­tain­ment as well as an experiment.

There is an incon­sis­tent use of match-on-action, sev­eral times when the char­ac­ters address the cam­era itself [and there­fore the viewer] and a lot of self-conscious per­for­mance that indi­cates a cer­tain aware­ness on the part of the char­ac­ters; they know they’re in a film. In addi­tion, Godard’s char­ac­ter­is­tic play­ful­ness results in a sharp humor that grad­u­ally changes into gallow’s as the planned crime dis­in­te­grates into chaos.

In a film filled with cin­e­matic incon­sis­tency, the incon­sis­ten­cies of the human heart play an equally strong role. Odile’s moti­va­tions are the most obvi­ously con­flict­ing, but Arthur’s reck­less and inten­tion­ally self-destructive behav­ior is almost equally per­ti­nent as an illus­tra­tion of the Nou­velle Vague ethos. Less obvi­ous, but per­haps even more impor­tant is Franz’s pas­sive and philo­soph­i­cal res­ig­na­tion as third wheel. His unlikely advance into agency and Odile’s easy slide into girl­friend mode after Arthur’s anti­cli­mac­tic shoot-out is just as unex­pected as any­thing in the real world, but with Godard in con­trol they come into a dif­fer­ent sort of relief.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Joshua Clover.
• YouTube clips [1, 2, 3]

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #70: Mar­tin Scorsese’s The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ.

Ever since I first saw this movie, I’ve loved it. There was a con­tro­ver­sial screen­ing of it at Notre Dame when I was an under­grad. But instead of talk­ing about how every­thing that dif­fers from dogma is con­tro­ver­sial at Notre Dame, I’ll sim­ply men­tion that there was shirt­less snow-wrestling after we left the the­ater. The rea­son I love this movie is because it sub­verts the most pow­er­ful sym­bol of our time, not for subversion’s sake, but to help peo­ple rec­og­nize their own strug­gles between body and spirit. I think it sub­verts the sym­bol of Jesus, but actu­ally exem­pli­fies his spirit.

Jesus is not the con­fi­dent, calm and per­fect incar­na­tion of God that we’re used to see­ing in film. Instead of focus­ing on the Godly aspects of the hypo­sta­tic union; Scors­ese, using Kazantzakis’s book as a primer, exam­ines the human aspects of Christ and por­trays Christ in a way that he sees godly pow­ers through a thor­oughly human sub­jec­tiv­ity. This is the main rea­son, as far as I can tell, for all of the con­tro­versy. Most Chris­tians don’t like to think that Jesus could have had faults, made mis­takes, or been human. I think the trou­ble is one of tax­on­omy. Does The Incar­na­tion mean that Christ became sub­ject to the desires of his body, or was he only clothed in flesh?

The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ assumes that since Jesus had a body, he was sub­jected to its needs and desires, but not sub­ject to them. He is por­trayed as angry, pride­ful, cow­ardly, fear­ful, lust­ful, hate­ful, trai­tor­ous, obsessed, lunatic, naïve; just about any of the darker human emo­tions you could care to name. At the start of the movie he’s a car­pen­ter, but one that makes cru­ci­fixes for the Romans to nail his brother Jews to. Despite and because of all this, Jesus is a sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter instead of a holy relic; his teach­ings and demands seem much more attain­able when we can see that he went through the same twist­ings of desire and duty that all humans face.

The power of the film is in Jesus’s tri­umph of spirit over the body. Though the last temp­ta­tion is merely a day­dream, the godly spirit of Jesus doesn’t fail. The impor­tance of this sequence is a recog­ni­tion by Jesus that we weaker human ves­sels find this strug­gle a bit harder. By liv­ing as fully human in a dream but repent­ing and crawl­ing back to God, we are shown a Jesus that has walked a mile in our shoes; a God that knows that our ways are not his ways but who will show us a path nonetheless.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by David Ehren­stein.
• Roger Ebert Review.
• Essay by Steven D. Grey­danus.
• Images Jour­nal arti­cle with stills.
• Behind the Scenes YouTube footage of the film. [The com­ments imme­di­ately devolve into a flamewar.]

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #108: Michael Bay’s The Rock.

Oh God. I can’t really believe that The Rock [and Armaged­don] are on the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion list. But then, Michael Bay has a con­tract with them. Any­way, their eccen­tric­ity as films on this list is a good oppor­tu­nity to apply crit­i­cal analy­sis to a main­stream block­buster, some­thing I rarely do. The last movie I reviewed was Down By Law, and you’d be hard pressed to find a movie that is more dis­sim­i­lar to it than The Rock.

For starters, it is a film about break­ing into a prison instead of out of one. Sec­ondly, it has all of the fire­power of the Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion colos­sus behind it. I’m going to split the review into two por­tions, the first about the cul­tural com­po­nents of the film, and the sec­ond about its mechan­ics and how they tie together. This will prob­a­bly be a long review.

The Rock, and many films like it, was designed to appeal to directly to an Amer­i­can male’s sub­con­scious under­stand­ing of what it means to be an Amer­i­can male. It sort of grabs for a boy­hood idea of play­ing sol­dier while simul­ta­ne­ously offer­ing a more sophis­ti­cated under­stand­ing of the mil­i­tary com­plex. The film, again like many films like it, is also nec­es­sar­ily con­ser­v­a­tive [in a polit­i­cal sense] in its por­trayal of the mil­i­tary use of vio­lence. This is a tough path to tread, but it works well enough to a cur­sory glance [which, as I’ll argue, is all you ever have time to do in a film like this]. Nicholas Cage’s char­ac­ter, Stan­ley Good­speed, acts as a mag­net for the sub­con­scious pro­jec­tion of boy­hood mil­i­tary fan­tasy. Although he is a chem­i­cal weapons spe­cial­ist, he’s also just some dude with a desk job, and one unused to vio­lence. Yet he ends up equipped with all kinds of fancy fight­ing gear and goes along with a Navy SEAL team and a British SAS agent to infil­trate an island fortress held by rogue mil­i­tants. This sat­is­fies the id’s desire to act out repressed fan­tasies [Freud is use­ful here, but maybe not exact]. We’ve still got the super-ego to think about, and cul­tural taboos as well.

Enter the vil­lains. Ed Harris’s char­ac­ter is a gen­eral, a leg­end among the mil­i­tary com­mu­nity, and now he’s gone a bit rogue because he is dis­sat­is­fied with his country’s behav­ior regard­ing Force Recon sol­diers aban­doned in enemy ter­ri­tory dur­ing his tenure as a black oper­a­tive. He steals some crazy nasty poi­son and holes up on Alca­traz with 81 hostages, threat­en­ing to kill most of San Fran­cisco unless the gov­ern­ment agrees to pay repa­ra­tions to the fam­i­lies of 83 of his lost broth­ers in arms. A noble cause it seems, but we’ve got a few hun­dred thou­sand inno­cent civil­ians to think about. This adds the tough deci­sion of duty to the free­wheel­ing adven­ture that I’ve already described. So this can’t be just a sim­ple blow’em up and God’ll sort’em out film, the vil­lain is one of our own and must be under­stood first, and stopped with­out vio­lence if possible.

There are addi­tional moti­va­tions to think about, Good­speed has a knocked up girl­friend, Sean Connery’s James Mason wants to get to know his daugh­ter, and FBI direc­tor Wom­ack wants Mason sent back to prison for life, but the key to this film is not in the care­ful con­struc­tion of the sto­ry­line, but in its visual appli­ca­tion on the screen. The key, as I men­tioned above, is to not give the viewer time to process the story, but enough time to hold it all on a super­fi­cial level. I sup­pose an appro­pri­ate anal­ogy would be between ROM and RAM; the viewer can’t really store infor­ma­tion for retrieval at a later time, but must keep it in the RAM of their mind for the entire movie.

In order to accom­plish this, Bay, Bruck­heimer and com­pany rely on fast-cutting, extremely shal­low depth-of-field, and a pre­pon­der­ance of close-up and dra­matic camera-work to keep a viewer stim­u­lated like a lab mouse that keeps hit­ting the crack but­ton. Except in this case they film hits it for us. On the rare times we get a long shot, it is usu­ally an extreme long shot, from a heli­copter or some­such, it is almost as if the dis­tance between a plain Amer­i­cain and an ELS doesn’t exist. That’s why I put the shot of Con­nery and For­lani up above; as far as I could tell, it was the only stan­dard long shot in the entire film. The Rock is per­fect for the atten­tion deficit dis­or­dered, and those who can process images quickly, almost sub­lim­i­nally. While as movies go, it isn’t any­thing spec­tac­u­lar, the care­ful con­struc­tion of every aspect, the obvi­ous weigh­ing of each and every cog, wid­get, sprocket-hole and facial expres­sion is almost mind-bogglingly impres­sive. Cer­tainly some­thing you’d only expect Hol­ly­wood to be capa­ble of.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Roger Ebert.
• National Park Ser­vice site on Alca­traz.
• Alca­traz History

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #166: Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law.

Jim Jar­musch knows how to shoot in black and white. I always for­get this until I rewatch some­thing of his. I own Dead Man, and I should prob­a­bly get my hands on this film as well. Shot in New Orleans, over twenty years ago, its cen­tral moti­va­tors are time­less. I’m start­ing to notice this about Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion films, for the most part the prob­lems that are cen­tral to the plots in these films are all of the afore­men­tioned time­less vari­ety. The aspects that qual­ify the film for their treat­ment and give vari­ety to the col­lec­tion [which is slightly humor­ous con­sid­er­ing the amount of samu­rai flicks that are present] are the dis­tinct spins that are given to some­thing as appar­ently straight­for­ward as a prison escape film.

JJ man­ages this by devot­ing a rel­a­tively large amount of the film’s time to the ris­ing action, before the three main char­ac­ters even arrive in jail. Sim­i­larly inspired is his deci­sion to leave out many parts of the story that are either unnec­es­sary or can be fig­ured out by the viewer. Nor­mally the result of this would be a terse film, but Jar­musch uses the result­ing breath­ing room to exam­ine the pri­vate sides of his characters.

This is eas­ier said than done, since John Lurie and Tom Waits pull off sullen ret­i­cence as if it were nat­ural to them. Roberto Benigni acts as a foil to their mis­an­thropy, but also poses a dif­fer­ent sort of char­ac­ter­i­za­tion prob­lem. Jack [Lurie] and Zack [Waits] are too sim­i­lar in per­son­al­ity but dif­fer­ent in appli­ca­tion to get along with each other, but the uncer­tainty that they hide even when alone comes through in their con­stant fid­get­ing, day-dreaming and bick­er­ing until they even­tu­ally rec­og­nize their kin­dred spirit. Benigni’s char­ac­ter Roberto uses his extro­ver­sion in the same defen­sive way that the Jack and Zack use their intro­ver­sion; by attempt­ing to make friends with every­one and be as expan­sive as pos­si­ble, he tries to hide his unease with Amer­i­can cul­ture. All he really does, just like Jack and Zack is make it obvi­ous that he has no idea what is going on in his life.

Their met­tles are tem­pered through the tri­als of their impris­on­ment and escape, and while they never become close, the under­stand­ing they gain from one another about life and com­pan­ion­ship results in a new pur­pose for each of them. The viewer might not know what that pur­pose is, but the mes­sage is clearly and wryly brought home. We’re all tough enough to get out of what­ever trou­ble we man­age to get our­selves into.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Luc Sante.
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle on Jim Jar­musch.
• Images Jour­nal review with screen­shots.
• YouTube Clips [1, 2, 3].

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #158: Anthony Asquith’s The Impor­tance of Being Earnest.

I have a queer affec­tion for this film. It isn’t my type of film at all, in fact. But it is so delib­er­ately smarmy and the dia­logue so witty and refresh­ing that I quickly for­get that I’d want to beat the shit out of these peo­ple in real life. Oscar Wilde’s play loses noth­ing in the hands of Anthony Asquith and his stel­lar roundup of actors; Michael Red­grave in par­tic­u­lar gives a stel­lar per­for­mance. I’m try­ing to step a bit away from aca­d­e­mic analy­sis in these reviews, but I will say that the film is some­what of a meta-dialogue since it con­tains actors play­ing actors play­ing char­ac­ters who are actors. This affec­ta­tion, and the numer­ous clever plot twists keep the pace fresh in what are inter­minably long scenes for film.

In fact, the plot devices, twists and devel­op­ment are so well inte­grated into the char­ac­ters’ behav­ior and Asquith’s por­trayal of such, that the end of the film becomes even more star­tling for its nearly friv­o­lous cli­max and its appro­pri­ately impu­dent pun. It only comes as an after­thought that such a work was prob­a­bly a tren­chant satire at the time it was writ­ten, fol­low­ing in the best tra­di­tions of pop­u­lar Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture. There is much that would have been humor­ous for its shock value over 100 years ago that has a dif­fer­ent sort of humor­ous applic­a­bil­ity in con­tem­po­rary times. So while the film has a dated feel in terms of con­tent and cin­e­matic style, its fun­da­men­tals are strong enough for it to rightly deserve the title of classic.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Charles Den­nis.
• The Oscar Wilde play at Project Guten­berg.
• YouTube clips from the film. They’re funny.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #138: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashô­mon.

There isn’t a whole lot to say in crit­i­cal terms about Rashô­mon that hasn’t been said before, and bet­ter than I could say it. So instead of talk­ing about it in terms of its exam­i­na­tion of truth, its cul­tural con­text, or its inno­v­a­tive style, I’m going to review this film in terms of what makes it enter­tain­ing; one of those rare for­eign films that just about every­one can enjoy. And since Japan decided that films made before 1953 should be released into the pub­lic domain, you can watch the entire thing on Google Video. I’ve linked to it below.

Much ado has been made about Toshirô Mifune’s act­ing as the ban­dit Tajo­maru, but all of the per­for­mances are superb. This time around I was struck by the qual­ity of Masayuki Mori’s por­trayal of Take­hiro, a char­ac­ter whose trans­for­ma­tion from story to story is even more wide-ranging than Mifune’s. At least Mifune did not have to play a dead man. This leads to the creepi­est part of the film. The tes­ti­mony of the late Take­hiro comes through the employ­ment of a local medium.

Quite pos­si­bly the ugli­est woman ever, a sequence fol­lows with Takehiro’s lo-fi and tor­mented voice lip-synched to the medium’s trance thrash­ings. I hadn’t made con­nec­tions between this and Ringu, but now that I have it seems almost cer­tain that Ringu takes some of its cues from this scene. The film is full of sex and vio­lence, but it never gets old since the sus­pense built by the con­flict­ing tes­ti­monies refreshes the uncer­tainty. The use of sus­pense is wor­thy of Hitch­cock, espe­cially in terms of defy­ing expec­ta­tion, since just about every­one claims to have killed Take­hiro [includ­ing Take­hiro] instead of the expected denials.

Quite sim­ply, Rashô­mon is a good movie because its foun­da­tion is good sto­ry­telling. It becomes a great film due to its addi­tional philo­soph­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of truth, but the excel­lent act­ing makes this dis­cus­sion seem nat­ural and the film avoids becom­ing overly preachy, overly far­ci­cal or overly tragic and instead seems as nat­ural as a sum­mer rainstorm.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Stephen Prince.
• Kuro­sawa on Rashomon.
• Roger Ebert review.
• Dan Schnei­der Review.
• Watch the whole movie on Google Video.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #112: Jacques Tati’s Play­time.

M. Hulot is back, at least part-time, for his last appear­ance in cin­ema. Play­time con­tin­ues Tati’s tra­di­tion of sat­i­riz­ing the mun­dane, but unlike M. Hulot’s Hol­i­day, this time the focus is on moder­nity rather than leisure time. Filmed nearly 15 years after Hol­i­day, Tati has pol­ished Hulot’s man­ner­isms and now makes him work smarter, not harder when he is on-screen. In fact, there are faux-Hulot’s through­out the film, con­fus­ing both the spec­ta­tor and var­i­ous char­ac­ters in the film itself.

This sort of refine­ment increases the enjoy­a­bil­ity fac­tor of the film, but it is hard to dis­cover this fact until the very end.. There is quite a bit of slap­stick involved, but it is so restrained as to be almost uncom­fort­able; the sound of hard shoes on a hard floor, the irra­tional mod­u­la­tions of ven­ti­la­tion sys­tems, the unin­tel­li­gi­ble mur­murs of smalltalk, all com­bines to make ambi­ent sound its own char­ac­ter in the film. The whole envi­ron­ment of in mod­ern city life cre­ates unin­ten­tional hilar­ity after unin­ten­tional hilar­ity, and part of what strength­ens this aspect is that none of the peo­ple in the film notice that some­thing funny is hap­pen­ing; a facet that was not present in M. Hulot’s Hol­i­day.

Every per­son in the film seems obsessed with being as mod­ern [and to Tati, as ridicu­lous] as pos­si­ble. There is an empha­sis on pro­to­col, fol­low­ing the direc­tions of the mod­ern man­ner and devices, when the old ways would be faster and less prone to con­fu­sion. At one point Hulot wan­ders into a trade show of new inven­tions and they are pos­si­bly the stu­pid­est things ever invented. [e.g. a broom with head­lights, a silent door [which sounds alright until you need to slam it for effect]]. The sales­per­sons earnestly dis­play their Ionic col­umn trash cans and pan­tomime their use, and there are ubiq­ui­tous leather chairs that act like whoopee cush­ions when­ever some­one so much as touches them. But, all this is “mod­ern” and so over­looked by peo­ple doing their best to appear mod­ern themselves.

This is infu­ri­at­ing, and it all comes to a head in an inter­minable sequence at a night club that has opened even though con­struc­tion on it hasn’t fin­ished. In their haste to be mod­ern they’ve neglected com­mon sense on every level. The chairs ruin people’s cloth­ing, they only had enough food for 27 peo­ple, the kitchen is com­pletely unfin­ished, and the neon sign directs the bounced right back inside. Thank­fully every­one thinks this is just part of the restaurant’s mod­ern ambi­ence and play along until the band gets frus­trated and leaves. After this cli­max the peo­ple start act­ing like real peo­ple for a change and the atmos­phere of the film ceases to be as bland in color [rem­i­nis­cent of Le samouraï]and affect as it has for most of the film. It ends with a vibrant release of color, a round­about becomes a carousel, and we get a feel­ing that there is some­thing sub­lime about being so ridiculous.

Oh yeah, I almost for­got to men­tion the ref­er­ence to Godard’s Breath­less that takes place in the film. You couldn’t miss it if you tried.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Jonathan Rosen­baum.
• Roger Ebert Review.
• Details on the recon­struc­tion of the 70mm print.
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle on Tati.
• Cin­e­matic Reflec­tions arti­cle on the film.
• Five clips from the film on YouTube.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #315: François Truffaut’s Shoot The Piano Player.

I only have ten more films to rewatch in The Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion before I can start watch­ing stuff I haven’t seen before again. I’m look­ing for­ward to that day. Here’s a lit­tle con­text about Shoot the Piano Player. It is con­sid­ered part of the French New Wave, and its direc­tor, François Truf­faut, one of the pre­mier nou­velle vague auteurs. It is based on a pulp fic­tion novel by David Goodis called Down There. The film is much bet­ter than the novel. This is also one of those films that sends aca­d­e­mics into shark­like slaver­ing fits due more to its con­text than its qual­ity. That isn’t to say it is a crummy film. It is very enter­tain­ing, poignant, pol­ished and still fresh after nearly 50 years.

But the Möbius strip feed­back between the film, its dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion as French film noir from Amer­i­can film noir, its self-awareness, its obvi­ous under­cut­ting of expec­ta­tion, and its humor lend the focus more on Truffaut’s direc­tion, the mech­a­nism, rather than the con­tent. That is really only to be expected, since the gen­eral con­tent, apart from the afore­men­tioned under­cut expec­ta­tions, is noth­ing really new. Despite the fact that there is a sui­cide, a few mur­ders and some kid­nap­ping, a sort of dynamic equi­lib­rium is main­tained with brief philo­sophic inter­ludes and con­sis­tent humor. The result is a film that leaves a viewer sated on all fronts, gorged or starved on none.

The most inter­est­ing char­ac­ter is, of course, the piano player: Charlie/Edouard. There is a remark­able amount of his char­ac­ter expo­si­tion in a film that is only 81 min­utes long. At times the viewer is privy to his inner mono­logue, but ulti­mately he remains a mys­tery and his obses­sion with the piano a simul­ta­ne­ous bless­ing and curse. Still, this unsolved mys­tery doesn’t leave any dis­sat­is­fac­tion, as it is obvi­ous that Char­lie is con­tent with his lot, as long as there is a piano within fin­ger range. Char­lie reminds me of this open­ing passage:

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of the ocean, the jel­ly­fish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from any­where to any­where, for in the deep sea there is no com­pass but nearer and far­ther, higher and lower, the jel­ly­fish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diur­nal pulses beat in the moon­driven sea. Hang­ing, sway­ing, puls­ing, the most vul­ner­a­ble and insub­stan­tial crea­ture, it has for its defense the vio­lence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.

–Ursula K. LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven

While Char­lie isn’t quite as pas­sive as a jel­ly­fish, he does have a cer­tain stoic accep­tance of the sit­u­a­tions he finds him­self in. The only time he is vis­i­bly agi­tated is when Lena is in dan­ger. The rest of their char­ac­ters play their parts, so it really is the man­ner of the film-making, the gim­mick shots, the sight gags, the under­cur­rent of smar­tassed French humor that gives the film its pep.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Kent Jones.
• Carter B. Hors­ley Review.
• Tom Hud­dle­ston Review.
• Pulp cover of David Goodis’s Down There.
• YouTube clips [1, 2].

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #336: Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Con­fused.

Nos­tal­gia isn’t what it used to be.
–Peter De Vries

The screen­caps are crummy in this review because the library sent me the Full Screen ver­sion instead of the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion ver­sion. I had to grab screen­caps from else­where. Dazed and Con­fused is a movie a bit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in its attempt to recap­ture the cul­tural aroma of the 1970s. F&L has an advan­tage, it is based on pri­mary source mate­r­ial, so its nos­tal­gia is less removed from the decade and despite its ram­bunc­tious­ness, it comes across as a bit more authen­tic than Dazed and Con­fused, per­haps because of the sense of doom that is present through­out the film. D&C on the other hand, is nos­tal­gic for a time that, to me, seems impos­si­ble to have ever existed.

In any case, the verac­ity of the film shouldn’t be a ques­tion, it is meant to be nos­tal­gic and enter­tain­ing, not some exam­ple of truth. What is inter­est­ing to me is that the nos­tal­gia present in the film is aimed at my demo­graphic, specif­i­cally, folks that prob­a­bly weren’t even born in 1976. In this case it cre­ates an inter­est­ing par­a­digm, where folks feel nos­tal­gic for a time before they were even born. As irra­tional as this seems, it can find its pur­chase in the fact that the film presents a time less fraught with insti­tu­tion­al­ized worry, pre-War on Drugs, pre-HIV, pre-litigation soci­ety, all has­sles that were just hit­ting their stride in the late 80s/early 90s. The 1976 we see in the film haven’t com­pletely for­got­ten the 60s or even the 50s, in some respects, hot rods have given way to mus­cle cars, but every­one still goes to the drive-in and pool hall to hang out. The worst thing any­one has to worry about is sign­ing a prim­i­tive anti-drug/alcohol/sex/rock and roll pledge in order to play football.

The film is a com­edy though, such semi-deep thoughts aren’t its focus. Despite the weird nos­tal­gia, the high school arche­types are so well rep­re­sented that it is almost instinc­tual to imag­ine your­self as a cer­tain char­ac­ter or in a cer­tain clique. The retro fad was just pick­ing up when I was in high school, so I had a col­lec­tion of 70s shirts, orange cor­duroy bell­bot­toms and other para­pher­na­lia that could have been spawned by this movie or only just fed by it. As an ado­les­cent rite of pas­sage film it gains an almost time­less appro­pri­ate­ness. You take your allot­ment of shit from the higher-ups and then they intro­duce you into the mys­ter­ies of High School. I know as a fresh­man I spent a fair amount of time in a trash can, and as a senior I spent a fair amount of time putting fresh­men in trash cans. This is what gives the film its stay­ing power, while it is nos­tal­gic for a high school in a spe­cific time period, it gives enough arche­typal exam­ples of high school behav­ior that any­one who’s been there can relate to it.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Kent Jones.
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Jim DeRo­gatis.
• Dazed and Confused.net.
• Damox Fan­site.
• Cinepad review.
• YouTube clips [1, 2].
• Wood­er­son et al. v. Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Inc. et al.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #196: Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour.

Rien is, per­haps, the most beau­ti­ful word in French. In Hiroshima mon amour such words of empti­ness and loss echo through­out. The open­ing sequence in par­tic­u­lar is stun­ning for its evo­ca­tion and dia­logue; it is so full of impli­ca­tion that the viewer imme­di­ately suc­cumbs to its inten­sity. Two post-coital lovers, one Japan­ese, one French, are debat­ing the epis­te­mol­ogy of Hiroshima. The dia­logue is sim­ple but the evo­ca­tion com­plex; rais­ing ques­tions as star­tling as: Is empa­thy ulti­mately a form naïveté? What does it mean to claim to have seen Hiroshima, a thing that the Japan­ese man emphat­i­cally denies is pos­si­ble? Dur­ing this dis­cus­sion he images on screen are attempt­ing to show us Hiroshima, and although it would seem they are refut­ing the Japan­ese man’s point, they empha­size it — show­ing what used to be Hiroshima — the sub­tle con of authen­tic replica. The jux­ta­po­si­tion con­tin­ues when the woman describes flow­ers bloom­ing in Hiroshima while the screen shows stock footage of radi­a­tion hor­rors, crum­pled build­ings, lame dogs, and peo­ple rot­ting alive. Even the con­stantly shift­ing score keeps the viewer from grasp­ing Resnais aim, which was prob­a­bly Resnais’s aim, at this point in the film. The quicker the viewer is com­pletely unbound from a sta­ble emo­tional state, the better.

When the love story kicks in it is pos­si­ble to begin to under­stand why the dia­logue sounds like poetry; the char­ac­ters are near to burst­ing with pent up emo­tion. We know already that the unimag­in­able and unex­pected power of the Hiroshima bomb has left inerad­i­ca­ble marks on the Japan­ese man, but now we begin to sense [and glimpse] that there might be a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion in the woman’s past. Get­ting to the meat of the inquiry takes some dig­ging, the film has lev­els within lev­els, like an onion or a par­fait. It turns out that the woman is in town because she’s an actress in a film about peace, a fact that is men­tioned a few times as if Resnais’s rep­e­ti­tions are intended high­light another sort of self-reflexive naïveté, Can a film about peace alter the truth of Hiroshima? As the staged peace parade pro­ceeds, it is filmed as if it was a part of the film within the film; thus com­plet­ing the self-reflexive cir­cle, Can Resnais make a film about peace that alter’s the truth of Hiroshima?

As the flash­back sequences begin to unravel in long­shot, as coun­ter­point to the con­sis­tent close­ups that take place in real time, the focus of the story becomes less on Hiroshima and more on the woman’s past as a French girl with a Ger­man lover in Nev­ers dur­ing the war four­teen years ago. Her trauma is more per­sonal, but no less dev­as­tat­ing than the man’s. [There are delib­er­ately no names in this film.] It begins to come clear that maybe she did have her own pri­vate Hiroshima. As ter­ri­ble as this is, the true emo­tional toll con­tin­ues, she has begun to for­get the details of her lover. The man refers to her as “the sym­bol of love’s for­get­ful­ness.” For him, the abil­ity to for­get Hiroshima is a source of relief, not the ter­ror that the woman feels in her loss of Nev­ers. She repels him but he pur­sues, another set of oppo­site reac­tions that occur as they begin to under­stand each other. At the moment of truth they name each other: Hiroshima and Nevers.

It would almost seem that Resnais laid a false trail in the fas­ci­nat­ing open­ing sequence and the ques­tions it raises. I think it was nec­es­sary for a few rea­sons. If we weren’t hooked from the first bite, the movie would have ended up being godaw­fully bor­ing. But more impor­tantly, the con­text it lays and the appar­ent mis­un­der­stand­ings and tough ques­tions become respec­tively inter­nal­ized and dis­carded as the true mean­ings emerge. I’m not going to drop a moral at the end of this review like Aesop; that would be a dis­ser­vice to the film, which offers no obvi­ous moral. Just watch it and decide for yourself.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Kent Jones.
• Name-dropping review at Pop Mat­ters.
• Clips on YouTube: [1, 2, 3].

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #175: Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Amer­ica is the first coun­try to have gone from bar­barism to deca­dence with­out the usual inter­ven­ing period of civ­i­liza­tion.
—Oscar Wilde

I’ve never used any sort of ille­gal drug, so offer­ing an exam­i­na­tion of the verisimil­i­tude of Hunter S. Thompson’s and Terry Gilliam’s por­trayal of drug-induced behav­ior isn’t going to hap­pen. I also thought about writ­ing this review as HST him­self would have writ­ten it, but that would be [pos­si­bly] the worst thing I have ever writ­ten. Any­way. This film and book are about as Amer­i­can as they come. I’m not talk­ing about a mythol­o­gized Amer­ica, although that is present, or a nos­tal­gized Amer­ica [also present], but a sub­tle sim­u­lacrum of the actual Amer­i­can psy­che. I’m going to talk about the film and the book inter­change­ably, since Gilliam’s pre­sen­ta­tion is gen­er­ally spot on. They are about pur­su­ing the Amer­i­can Dream and get­ting lost along the way, some­thing that even­tu­ally hap­pens to all of us. In the film, the Amer­i­can flag, in the hyper­bol­i­cally Amer­i­can city of Las Vegas, lit­er­ally lit­ters most scenes. It is tram­pled, blan­keted, torn and ignored for vir­tu­ally the entire film, as the main char­ac­ters go on their vision quest for the real­ity behind the sym­bol. Fail­ing at that, they revel, albeit para­noically, in their drug-induced haze until, abruptly emerg­ing into the glare of the desert, they are left with a feel­ing of sat­is­fac­tion, despite not know­ing how they’ve arrived at it. Count the commas.

He who makes a beast of him­self
Gets rid of the pain
Of being a man.
—Dr. Johnson

The drug-driven self-reflective atavism becomes a rhyth­mic coun­ter­point to the osten­si­bly noble pur­suit which Dr. Gonzo and Duke claim to be chas­ing. Yet even this itself is a very Amer­i­can sit­u­a­tion. The pen­du­lum between bar­barism and deca­dence. When the film swings to the ani­mal end it shows the more real­is­tic aspects of Amer­i­cana: vio­lence, sex, rage and power. But here there are also moments of an almost primeval quiet, the quiet that Duke is con­stantly seek­ing and which seems to offer him con­tin­ual epipha­nies. At the famous “wave speech” Duke real­izes that he’s not going to find/beat the Amer­i­can Dream though he is now far too com­mit­ted to sim­ply give up. Per­haps his manic glee at the end of the film is the result of his real­iza­tion that although he didn’t beat the Amer­i­can Dream, he at least fought it to a draw.

And as seri­ous as this review has been, the fact that this film and this book are come­dies should not be neglected. In fact, the com­edy is the icing on the cake in terms of the American-ness of the film. My mom would say that the film has a smart mouth, but the kind of lip it keeps giv­ing is salty for a rea­son. Gilliam and Thomp­son knew they out­come was futile, so true to Amer­i­can form they cloak the deadly earnest­ness with a dis­mis­sive atti­tude. At some level we all feel that the truth lives with the bar­bar­ians and the ideals with the deca­dent; never shall the twain meet. Fear and Loathing is more ethnog­ra­phy than acid trip.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by J. Hober­man.
• Jacket copy for the book by Hunter S. Thomp­son.
• Fear Under The Micro­scope: A Com­par­i­son of the Terry Gilliam/Tony Grisoni and Alex Cox/Tod Davies screen­plays for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
• Gilliam Grisoni Screen­play.
• Tons of clips on YouTube.
• Lots of jour­nal­ism on the film from the Las Vegas Sun.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #252: John Cas­savetes’ Faces.

I think, maybe, that the cor­rect reac­tion [at least in terms of the reac­tion Cas­savetes was aim­ing for] to Faces is sup­posed to be loathing. It is a long, tor­tur­ous jour­ney through the dark­est parts of mar­ried adult life, and there are no redeem­ing qual­i­ties to any of the char­ac­ters that I can see. Granted, there is per­se­ver­ance and forth­right­ness, but it only serves to feed the destruc­tive paths all the char­ac­ters tread.

There is a basic ten­dency in chem­istry that liq­uids and gases flow from areas of higher den­sity to lower den­sity; hypo– to hyper-. This ten­dency holds true in Faces as well, but with the addi­tion of human instinct and intent; a dan­ger­ous com­bi­na­tion. Dickie, Louise, Chet, Jean­nie, every­one feels emp­tied of mean­ing or ful­fill­ment, yearn­ing for the days of their youth, or the golden years the never existed. Flo­rence is prob­a­bly the best exam­ple of this in the film; old, dumpy and des­per­ate, she throws her­self at Chet and begs to be kissed, any­thing to feel a bit alive again.

The forced, rau­cous laugh­ter, the end­less drink­ing and smok­ing, the chiaroscuro light­ing and stac­cato impro­vi­sa­tional dia­logue effec­tively force the viewer to face their inner dis­af­fec­ta­tion while the char­ac­ters onscreen con­tin­u­ally man­age to avoid this very con­fronta­tion. My mother watched most of this with me, and she talked about how tragic every­one seemed. She didn’t know which would be worse, whether Dickie and Maria split apart or stuck it out together in the end. She expected a sui­cide, but made no men­tion of mur­der, so while she didn’t state it explic­itly, I think she caught on to the fact that every­one is far too self-centered-obsessed to con­sider harm­ing any­thing other than themselves.

So while I still never really want to see Faces again, I guess I have a respect for it now. It is a pas­sion play with no pulled punches, frank and uncom­pro­mis­ing. True to Cas­savetes’ form there is lit­tle flash and glit­ter, only true to life expe­ri­ences, most of which, in this film, deal with the seamier side of things.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Stu­art Klawans.
• Ron Car­ney on Faces.
• Strictly Film School review.
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle.
• A few scenes from Faces on YouTube 1, 2, 3.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #251: John Cas­savetes’ Shad­ows.

I said I was dread­ing the Cas­savetes films that I was going to have to watch as a part of my some­what manic deter­mi­na­tion to watch all of the films in the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion, so, of course, I ordered the two I’ve already seen from the library. I must admit that I don’t hate Shad­ows any­more, maybe in the 6 years since last I saw it, I’ve grown to under­stand it bet­ter, or I have more expe­ri­ence with which to rub it against; whichever, I now like this movie. I still fully expect to still hate Faces when I watch it later tonight though.

Shad­ows, like most of Cas­savetes films is an impro­vi­sa­tion. This is remark­able, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the qual­ity of the per­for­mances. What is also remark­able was the price tag, a fea­ture length film made for $40,000, shot mainly on loca­tion in Man­hat­tan, and some­thing that, by today’s stan­dards, seems much more real than real­ity tele­vi­sion. There isn’t truly a plot, but there is a large event that the lives of the char­ac­ters orbit. The three main char­ac­ters are Ben, Lelia and Hugh, broth­ers and a sis­ter, black or mixed, lov­ing each other though fight­ing often. Lelia and Ben could and can pass as white in most instances and for the viewer this is even more the case, since Cas­savetes’ choice of high con­trast cin­e­matog­ra­phy height­ens this appear­ance. Hugh’s back­ground is read­ily appar­ent how­ever. Ben is a jazz trum­pet player and Hugh a jazz singer.

Lelia is a doe-eyed beauty and all kinds of men are after her. She is deftly manip­u­lated into los­ing her vir­gin­ity to this guy named Tony who, when he meets her dark-skinned brother and finds out she’s not Whitey, gets a lit­tle nau­se­ated and bails like a bucket. Lelia’s bereft and depressed and look­ing to avenge her­self on some dude as a result of the bad sex. Ben and Hugh, in addi­tion to doing their own thing, try to make her feel better.

I feel sorry for Hugh, he’s strug­gling as a singer but is the only one to bring in any money for the fam­ily. Ben­nie stays out all night and in all day, and his entire com­port­ment is a mix between mis­an­thropy and self-consciousness. He never plays his trum­pet on-screen, but he prob­a­bly bends that thing around his soul. Lelia spends all day hang­ing out with suit­ors or mop­ing. I’m kind of mak­ing her out to be a rather unsym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter, but she’s not. Her actions in film-time cen­ter around a trau­matic expe­ri­ence, but it is obvi­ous from her man­ner of recov­ery that she is as strong as the bond between the fam­ily underneath.

All of the char­ac­ters are fight­ing for some­thing. Lelia to regain her bal­ance after her inno­cence is destroyed, Ben­nie to come to grips with his place in a world he doesn’t like, and Hugh to reclaim a dream that has slipped from his grasp. Their strug­gles ring true, in dynamic coun­ter­point to the soul­less dis­cus­sions about Sartre and exis­ten­tial­ism that take place at a “lit­er­ary party” in the first third of the film. In the end Cas­savetes has cre­ated a pol­y­se­mous snap­shot of spe­cific peo­ple with spe­cific trou­bles and made their lives applic­a­ble, under­stand­able and real to those that watch it. I fig­ure that’s a pretty good accom­plish­ment with only $40,000 to work with.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Gary Gid­dins
• Excerpts from Cas­savetes on Cas­savetes on the mak­ing of Shad­ows.
• More Ray Car­ney on Cas­savetes and Shad­ows.
• Dan Schnei­der review of the film.
• A minute of footage from the begin­ning of the film on YouTube.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #51: Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen this film and this time it gave me the creepy crawlies. This is satire done right, and the fact that after 20 years real­ity has nearly caught up with its pre­science is what makes me feel so strange. Terry Gilliam is, as you might expect, one of my favorite direc­tors, and Brazil is regarded by many to be his finest work. This review is going to be a turn­about from the last one [M. Hulot’s Holiday].

Imag­ine your­self liv­ing in a world where the government’s only con­cern is root­ing out ter­ror­ism, where bureau­cracy is so entrenched that you can’t get pub­lic doc­u­ments unless you fill out other paper­work first, where peo­ple are impris­oned indef­i­nitely for crimes they didn’t com­mit, tor­tured for infor­ma­tion they don’t have—and then charged for the ser­vice. Quick, tell me what coun­try you’re in!

Brazil is a movie about a place where the buck has been passed for so long that the focus is now on get­ting some­one else stuck with it instead of resolv­ing the issue. Brazil is a movie about a place where cor­po­rate con­for­mity is expected, unend­ing ambi­tion to power is a virtue, and con­tent­ment and imag­i­na­tion are things to be despised. Brazil is a movie about a place where no one does any sort of work that is pro­duc­tive; there is no goal but self-preservation in every aspect of soci­ety. Infor­ma­tion is the main com­mod­ity and its labyrinthine fun­nel­ing through bureau­cratic red tape is the main source of employ­ment for those we see. Granted, there are a few out­siders who refuse to sign on the dot­ted line, and these are the ones con­sid­ered ter­ror­ists, because they refuse to sup­port the power struc­ture in all its actions.

Stuck as we are, squarely in the mid­dle of an Infor­ma­tion Age where most of the infor­ma­tion is of no sub­stance and the sub­stan­tive infor­ma­tion can­not be accessed, Brazil is prophetic in hind­sight. Yet Gilliam was obvi­ously in dia­logue with events con­tem­po­rary to the mak­ing of his film. He con­sid­ered call­ing it 1984½ and its release in 1985 seems to ful­fill that par­tic­u­lar intent.

The satire doesn’t limit itself to pol­i­tics and busi­ness, even the moti­va­tions of pri­vate life are skew­ered by Gilliam and Tom Stop­pard [who helped write the screen­play]. There are so few char­ac­ters with soul in the film that Sam Lowry’s inde­fati­ga­bil­ity is notable both for its exis­tence and per­sis­tence in the face of the face­less soci­ety [and mother] that has fos­tered him. His toil under the hands of Infor­ma­tion Retrieval becomes rife with Chris­to­log­i­cal sym­bol­ism. His even­tual cata­to­nia is, func­tion­ally at least, as tran­scen­dent as Christ’s resurrection.

• Long ram­bler com­par­ing Brazil to cur­rent Amer­i­can lead­er­ship and pol­icy.
• Rotten.com arti­cle on Gilliam and Brazil.
• Brazil FAQ.
• Inter­view with Gilliam.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #110: Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Hol­i­day.

I have a the­ory that the qual­ity of a country’s com­edy is inversely pro­por­tion­ate to the qual­ity of its cui­sine. Thus, the genius of Monty Python and the hor­rid dish known as Toad in the Hole have the same sort of rela­tion­ship that M. Hulot’s Hol­i­day has with an exquis­ite Aile de Raie aux Câpres. The well-fed have lit­tle to joke about. Watch­ing Tati’s films [sev­eral of which have received the Cri­te­rion treat­ment] are only exceeded in appre­hen­sion by the Cas­savetes col­lec­tion I’m going to have to even­tu­ally wade through. To many and most, M. Hulot’s Hol­i­day is one of the best slap­stick come­dies of all time, so my opin­ions are more sus­pect than usual in this review. I found myself actu­ally look­ing for­ward to watch­ing Play­time again as I saw this film, and that’s say­ing something.

Now the film isn’t as bad as it may seem that I’m mak­ing it out to be. But since com­edy is meant to be the main moti­va­tor and I find the film uncomedic, it lacks a cer­tain punch and comes off a bit bor­ing. M. Hulot’s Hol­i­day is a satire of vaca­tion­ers who are con­sis­tently aggra­vated by the obliv­i­ous Hulot [played by Tati]. He’s con­stantly knock­ing things over, get­ting caught on things, trip­ping over things, and this con­sis­tency and his lanky frame make it seem as if he’s a bit too big for the world he inhab­its. Not larger than life, but just wear­ing pants two sizes too small.

Con­sis­tency is prob­a­bly the film’s great­est strength; time and again the viewer runs into the same char­ac­ters doing the same things in dif­fer­ent sur­round­ings. An old cou­ple is con­stantly strolling, and the old man seems to think that Tati is delib­er­ately prank­ing the other vaca­tion­ers. The rhythms of the vaca­tion­ing life imme­di­ately fall into a rou­tine for most of the folks at the beach, and Tati and a young woman seem to be the only ones who aren’t treat­ing the vaca­tion as just another type of work. The satire is very present, it just doesn’t make me want to laugh.

I think this is because French humor is a com­pas­sion­ate humor, where my taste runs to that which cuts to the quick. There is also the pos­si­bil­ity that M. Hulot’s Hol­i­day hasn’t aged well. Shot in the ‘50s, the humor may now be more or less sophis­ti­cated than a con­tem­po­rary audi­ence expects. Per­onally I just think the French aren’t very funny. These sort of gen­er­al­iza­tions are dan­ger­ous of course; the next thing you know I’ll start talk­ing about the eru­di­tion of French phi­los­o­phy and the French predilec­tion to cute­ness that is only sur­passed by the Japan­ese. For every Hello Kitty there is a Ten­ta­cle Mon­ster, so I’m going to keep my eye open for a French com­edy that cracks me up. There’s gotta be at least one, right?

• Cri­te­rion Essay by David Ehren­stein
• Guardian anec­dote about Tati as Hulot and Hulot as Tati.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #16: Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samu­rai III: Duel at Gan­ryu Island.

Unin­ten­tional Mifu­ne­fest con­cludes with Samu­rai III: Duel at Gan­ryu Island. Most folks say that this is the best of the three films, and I have to agree at least in terms of plot and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. I think that Samu­rai I has the best cin­e­matog­ra­phy and Samu­rai II has the best edit­ing. III takes place an unspec­i­fied [unless I missed it] num­ber of years after II, which we can tell because Musashi’s dis­ci­ple, Jotaro, is much big­ger and mouthier. Musashi’s leg­end has also spread, unde­feated and unscratched in 60+ duels, he has become sought after as a trainer for var­i­ous lords. Kojiro is still liv­ing in Musashi’s shadow, and his resent­ment has made him wholly evil and with­out com­pas­sion. He almost seems mad, so obses­sive is his desire to duel with Musashi and prove his mas­tery. From the start we see how the char­ac­ters have changed over the inter­ven­ing years, Musashi is not as quick to accept a fight, and indeed chooses to defuse such sit­u­a­tions, he has mas­tered his strength. Kojiro kills indis­crim­i­nately in order to gain attention.

They end up run­ning into each other in a grave­yard and arrange a duel for the next day. Musashi has a change of heart, how­ever, and goes off to become a farmer, instead. He first arranges a rain check for a year in advance. Then he will meet Kojiro. Kojiro sets Akemi after Musashi, as usual, and Otsu is also walk­ing her­self to death search­ing for him. They both end up at the vil­lage, which is promptly attacked by ban­dits and burned just in time for Musashi to go fight Kojiro. Otsu pur­sues him once again [they since rec­on­ciled from the almost-rape in Samu­rai II] and man­ages to see him before he hops on a boat for Gan­ryu Island and his duel with Kojiro. He requites her love, and she tries to get him to give up the sword. On his way to the island he carves a bokken out of an oar and fights Kojiro with that instead of his katana. Of course, Kojiro is killed, but he man­ages to cut Musashi, a first for any­one, with his fancy swallow-tail cut. The film ends with Musashi weep­ing as his boat returns to the main­land. The one thing he has been unable to cope with is the feel­ing of regret for all of the lives he has taken in his duels over the years.

Musashi the man and Musashi the leg­end are pretty inex­tri­ca­bly bound nowa­days. He was def­i­nitely an inter­est­ing per­son and his myr­iad skills and intrigu­ing per­son­al­ity ensure his con­tin­u­ing impor­tance to many peo­ple. If you’ve not read his book of five rings, I’ve left a link to it below.

• My review of Samu­rai I: Miyamoto Musashi.
• My review of Samu­rai II: Duel at Ichi­joji Tem­ple.
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Bruce Eder.
• The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review.
• Read The Book of Five Rings. [Eng­lish] [Japan­ese]

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #15: Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samu­rai II: Duel at Ichi­joji Tem­ple.

Unin­ten­tional Mifu­ne­fest con­tin­ues with the cre­pus­cu­larly spec­tac­u­lar Samu­rai II: Duel at Ichi­joji Tem­ple. Even as a mid­dle por­tion of a tril­ogy this film is strong enough to stand on its own. The lack of firm res­o­lu­tion might have been a prob­lem back in the ‘50s but would fit right in with con­tem­po­rary pro­duc­tions and the viewer is given enough back-story to feel com­fort­able. Musashi is gone ronin as a train­ing exer­cise to hone his abil­i­ties and to gain the nec­es­sary cul­tured bear­ing that will enable him to be a true samu­rai. The focus on char­ac­ter devel­op­ment is just as strong as in the first film, but since Musashi has pro­gressed far­ther along the road to mas­tery there are glimpses of the man­ner in which he will become a legend.

Right from the start we are pre­sented with the prob­lem that Musashi will strug­gle with through­out the film. It is a con­tin­u­a­tion of his strug­gle from the first film to con­trol his strength. A monk he meets at the begin­ning states that he is true strong, and that a true samu­rai lives a life of chivalry, which is all that sep­a­rates him from a com­mon thug. So while Musashi has con­trol of a sort over his power, he as yet does not pos­sess the wis­dom to know when to use it, or when to take another path. The peo­ple who take him under their wing all pro­vide the puz­zle pieces for his advance­ment. After offend­ing an entire fenc­ing school and killing the brother of its mas­ter in a hasty duel, he retreats to the geisha side of town and learns to appre­ci­ate music, sumi-e and the ben­e­fits of still­ness. Mean­while all of the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters con­tinue their machi­na­tions and quests, Otsu and Akemi are oppo­site sides of a coin when it comes to their unre­quited love of Musashi. The viewer is intro­duced to the main antag­o­nist, the ambi­tiously skilled fencer Kojiro Sasaki, who clev­erly manip­u­lates the Yosh­ioka school as a way of test­ing Musashi’s strength.

The Yosh­ioka school pub­licly pro­claims Musashi a cow­ard, which pulls him from hid­ing. They agree to terms and the mas­ter Sei­juro will duel Musashi at the pine tree of Ichi­joji Tem­ple. Most of the action takes in twi­light, and can be seen as some­thing of a reflec­tion of obscured moti­va­tions of many of the char­ac­ters. Although the duel has been arranged in pub­lic and fairly, 80 or so Yosh­ioka stu­dents have planned from the start to ambush Musashi on the road to the tem­ple. He catches wind of this from Kojiro-by-way-of-Akemi and decides to pay them a lit­tle visit. Then starts the ass-kicking. There is an excel­lent shot, a pan over the swamp [water is another reflec­tion of feel­ing in this film] while we here the death cries of Musashi’s ene­mies in the dis­tance. After killing most of the ambus­caders, Musashi runs into Sei­juro [who has finally man­aged to free him­self of the retain­ers who tried to restrain him], and they fight. Musashi gets Sei­juro at his mercy fairly quickly, but instead of killing him out­right, he finally real­izes that chivalry means always tak­ing the high road. He spares Sei­juro and hits the high road with Otsu; even­tu­ally set­tling in the mountains.

He still isn’t a samu­rai how­ever, since he nearly rapes Otsu when his repressed feel­ings burst forth. There is yet another shot of a rush­ing moun­tain stream inter­cut with this sequence. Ashamed of his behav­ior, and con­vinced that Otsu is angry at him, Musashi leaves once again to con­tinue his train­ing and strengthen his dis­ci­pline and wis­dom. Kojiro is still out there, and waiting.

• My review of Samu­rai I: Miyamoto Musashi.
• My review of Samu­rai III: Duel at Gan­ryu Island.
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Bruce Eder.
• The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #52: Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

You might know the remake of this film bet­ter than Yojimbo itself. Clint East­wood and Ser­gio Leone retold it as A Fist­ful of Dol­lars. I’ve not actu­ally seen A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, but this is the sec­ond time I’ve seen Yojimbo. While the film isn’t as deep or ripe for crit­i­cal analy­sis as many of Kurosawa’s other works, it also isn’t as shal­low and anti­cli­mac­tic as the Cri­te­rion Essay indi­cates. Alexan­der Sesonke states that:

Mifune achieved inter­na­tional star­dom in Kurosawa’s films of the 1950s, emerg­ing as an actor of com­pelling power, capa­ble of a great range and sub­tlety of expres­sion. But as San­juro, no sub­tlety is necessary—sheer phys­i­cal pres­ence suffices.

Yet what kept con­stantly catch­ing my atten­tion was the sub­tle cun­ning and glee that San­juro takes in play­ing the war­ring gangs against each other. He almost always has a smar­tass grin lurk­ing when open dis­dain is not present. His phys­i­cal pres­ence suf­fices for the two-dimensional sup­port­ing char­ac­ters he manip­u­lates, but the audi­ence and the innkeeper [the only other char­ac­ter to show actual devel­op­ment in the film] are privy to the strate­gic mas­tery that is Sanjuro’s true strength.

The innkeeper shouldn’t be dis­re­garded. He is the only per­son we see in the film that takes an inde­pen­dent role and sees no point in the fight­ing. His dis­dain stands in oppo­site to the undertaker/cooper and Sanjuro’s view of the war as an oppor­tu­nity. Their dif­fer­ent opin­ions are based on eco­nom­ics, the innkeeper’s cus­tom has been hurt by the fight, while for the under­taker busi­ness is boom­ing, but they also reflect the per­son­al­i­ties of the char­ac­ters themselves.

As San­juro plays one side against the other, the innkeeper slowly comes to under­stand that, though he is mer­ce­nary, San­juro is vir­tu­ous under­neath. An easy dis­tinc­tion between good and evil would not have caught Sanjuro’s atten­tion the way that the bad ver­sus worse sit­u­a­tion that actu­ally exists in the town does. This nov­elty appeals to a true ronin lifestyle, self-serving but not appear­ing so, and well-suited to such a mal­ad­justed, mis­an­thropic per­son­al­ity as San­juro. Even after he gets his ass handed to him and is near death, his spirit is never more alive. This is where it is eas­i­est to see how West­ern in intent is Yojimbo; with its par­tic­u­lar style of deter­mi­na­tion and intent. It is some­what hilar­i­ous but not unex­pected then, that a film made with delib­er­ate West­ern influ­ence would be picked up and redone by a West­ern direc­tor. Although there is prob­a­bly less dif­fer­ence between East and West than mod­ern and traditional.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Alexan­der Sesonske
• Roger Ebert Essay
• Stu­dent Essay com­par­ing the film to Fist­ful of Dol­lars
• Crit­i­cal com­par­i­son of Yojimbo and Fist­ful of Dol­lars
• A briefer com­par­i­son of the films
• YouTube com­par­sion between a few scenes of Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven and Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars

Just as I was get­ting bored yes­ter­day Rafeeq called me up because he needed a ride to Cracker Park to pick up some shoes. Rafeeq is good for me because he helps me loosen and lighten up. So we got valet park­ing for my car, which, if you’ve seen my car, is hilar­i­ous. We got his kicks and I ordered a pair of brown shoes for $25. Then we wan­dered through Bor­ders and I got my first Christ­mas gift of the year, Sea­mus Heaney’s Selected Poems. I read a bit of it last night, and it promises to be excel­lent. We stayed to watch Casino Royale, which lives up to all of the hype. The open­ing chase sequence fea­tures some com­pletely awe­some and fully inte­grated park­our. [1, 2, 3] It was a great flick and worth the $8.50 ticket price. I hadn’t real­ized how used to the Mar­quee Club Mem­ber­ship I was until I ended up drop­ping full price for a movie ticket. After the movie we shot the shit with the valets, mak­ing fun of the gag­gles of mid­dle school aged per­sons flit­ting around in their shrugs and flip flops in 30 degree weather. ‘Feeq said he couldn’t wait to read what I wrote about the evening. So here it is. I dropped him off and then got my car filled up and washed. So now it is miss­ing even more paint.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #157: Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenen­baums.

As I pointed out in my review of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zis­sou, I don’t like Wes Anderson’s films. This cre­ates a slight prob­lem for me, since he’s got a con­tract with Cri­te­rion Co. to have his films [the ones I don’t like] receive their DVD treat­ment. The upside to this prob­lem is that I can refine my under­stand­ing of exactly why I don’t like Wes Anderson’s films.

Much ado is made of the 4th Wall in both film and the­ater, but I’m not sure if there is a term that describes the audience’s aware­ness of the direc­tor instead of the actors. This is how I feel when I watch a Wes Ander­son film; there is some­thing about the con­struc­tion that pre­vents me from sus­pend­ing my dis­be­lief, and instead all I see are the con­trivances that make a film pos­si­ble. The only other direc­tor that I can think of that makes him­self vis­i­ble in this way is Kies­lowski in his Three Col­ors tril­ogy. Yet Kies­lowski doesn’t drop as many balls as Ander­son, mainly because he’s not try­ing to jug­gle as many.

In The Royal Tenen­baums I feel more like I’m watch­ing some­one play with action fig­ures instead of watch­ing a movie. In addi­tion, the char­ac­ters don’t seem like real peo­ple, but instead as actors play­ing char­ac­ters. This is an inevitable con­se­quence of fill­ing out the cast with big names. I do not get immersed in The Royal Tenen­baums. I can under­stand that the movie is sup­posed to be a com­edy, but there isn’t one point that makes me want to laugh, or even grin wryly. It isn’t my style to laugh at the sin­cere pain of oth­ers, no mat­ter how ridicu­lously they behave or how shal­low they are as characters.

All of this is trans­posed to some extent in The Life Aquatic, because there is an added layer of film-making between Ander­son and his char­ac­ters: the “doc­u­men­tary” crew; which is able to bear most of the “vis­i­ble direc­tor” bur­den I men­tioned above. Because of this added layer, the char­ac­ters become actors, and the viewer’s impulse is to dis­cover who the char­ac­ter really is under all of the act­ing. The extra layer also makes it eas­ier to sus­pend dis­be­lief which, in turn, gives the com­edy and tragedy some breath­ing room. Yet oth­er­wise, The Life Aquatic is just The Royal Tenen­baums on the ocean.

Both films have many of the same actors, the same char­ac­ters with sim­i­lar unlikely back­grounds, the same plot moti­va­tions, the same quirky and unbe­liev­able mise-en-scene, the same mil­que­toast denoue­ments and the same insuf­fi­cien­cies; not enough com­edy to be funny, and not enough char­ac­ter devel­op­ment to cre­ate true drama. I’m left with the impres­sion that Ander­son doesn’t care if his films say any­thing at all as long as they look shiny and smart.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Kent Jones. [Mar­vel as Mr. Jones ver­bally fel­lates Wes Ander­son and uses the “You Just Don’t Get It” cop-out if you dis­agree with him.]
• IGN Behind the scenes fea­ture includ­ing stills and video.
• Tons of YouTube clips.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #14: Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samu­rai I: Miyamoto Musashi.

Miyamoto Musashi is the first install­ment of Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samu­rai Tril­ogy, an action-packed series of films that fol­lows the life of Japan’s great­est war­rior as he grows into his leg­end. This ini­tial film shows a very dif­fer­ent Musashi from the one most peo­ple are famil­iar with; when he was known sim­ply as Takezo, and was a hunted and feared ban­dit. Toshiro Mifune, who plays Musashi, is per­fect for the role; one might argue that thoughts about Musashi are at the core of most of his samu­rai per­for­mances. Yet, in this first film we see lit­tle of the nuance that Mifune is capa­ble of, instead we are immersed in the unfet­tered and unfo­cused inten­sity that is his other strength.

The cin­e­matog­ra­phy is care­ful to remove most of Takezo’s human­ity, often show­ing him in shadow, obscured by brush, or pur­sued by picket lines of searchers, like a hunted boar. As he gives him­self up wholly to this wild­ness he becomes dark­ness per­son­i­fied, and years later as he emerges as a focused and strong samu­rai, there is a par­al­lel with his emer­gence into light. Every aspect of Musashi’s char­ac­ter growth is care­fully man­aged and pack­aged in such a way that, although we are rarely privy to his actual thoughts, we under­stand his moti­va­tions as if they were our own.

There is an array of sup­port­ing char­ac­ters whose own jour­neys and moti­va­tions add impor­tant con­text to Musashi’s life. His friend Mata­hachi has more cun­ning, but is a cow­ard and faith­less. Otsu, Matahachi’s for­mer betrothed, is shown to have a strength of char­ac­ter and well of kind­ness that is likely more instru­men­tal in Takezo’s reform than the Bud­dhist priest Takuan’s own meth­ods. In the later films this devo­tion becomes much more promi­nent, cul­mi­nat­ing in one of the most Roman­tic romances of all time.

Takezo is an echo of his time as well, the coun­try was split in war and the Toku­gawa Shogu­nate would emerge vic­to­ri­ous at about the same time that Takezo becomes the samu­rai Musashi. At the end of the film, Musashi is told to go ronin, much like a knight errant, to build his skills and hone his dis­ci­pline, in order to be fit to serve his mas­ter. Set­ting the stage for the sequel, which I’ll rewatch and review when­ever it comes in from the library.

• My review of Samu­rai II: Duel at Ichi­joji Tem­ple.
• My review of Samu­rai III: Duel at Gan­ryu Island.
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Bruce Eder.
• The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• Kung-Fu Cin­ema Review

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #160: René Clair’s À nous la lib­erté.

Ever since I first saw this film a few years ago its cheery theme song comes back as an ear­worm at least once a month. “À nous, à nous, la li-ber-té!” While it is no longer roll-on-the-floor hilar­i­ous, it is still a light-hearted and enjoy­able jaunt through an ide­al­ized, not-yet-cynical 20th cen­tury indus­trial envi­ron­ment. I promise not to fill this review with hyphens, although it might already be too late. Even if Clair made the film today it still might be bereft of the cyn­i­cism, so potent is the joie de vivre of the main char­ac­ters. The plot is rel­a­tively sim­ple, two friends attempt to escape from the pen, but only one makes it, and becomes a suc­cess­ful indus­tri­al­ist. Years later his yuro­divy friend ends up work­ing in the same fac­tory, even though he’d rather be nap­ping in a field of wild­flow­ers. They rekin­dle their friend­ship, by acci­dent, but the cen­ter can­not hold as other crim­i­nals try to black­mail the escaped con/industrialist.

He man­ages to stave off this doom long enough to bequeath his entire cor­po­ra­tion to the work­ers and escapes with his friend in the ensu­ing windstorm/riot. In a reprise of the theme song at the end, both friends are happy as wan­der­ing bums, free as the wind and with as few cares.

While the core of the plot requires lit­tle to think about [as the core of the film is com­edy] its appendages are open to many read­ings. Through­out the film, com­par­isons are made between prison life and fac­tory life, which you can see in the first two screen shots I’ve pro­vided. Ini­tially all the ref­er­ences to free­dom are made by peo­ple who are, in some way, not free at all. The song is yearn­ing and moti­va­tional at these points as opposed to its func­tion as a hymn of rejoic­ing in the end. While the film has an unmiss­able social­ist fla­vor to it, it is less a cri­tique of author­ity than a doc­u­ment of man’s ten­dency to obsess about order, even unto the loss of freedom.

Even as an indus­tri­al­ist, Louis, is restricted by the expec­ta­tions of his syco­phants, the need to con­form to the behav­ior that other wealthy peo­ple expect, and his past. He has man­aged to drug him­self with his wealth and it takes the return of Emilé to remind him that life is not about being impor­tant, but about being happy and free. This recog­ni­tion likely pro­vides the inspi­ra­tion he has to give the newly auto­mated fac­tory over to the work­ers, who can now spend their days bowl­ing, play­ing cards, fish­ing or danc­ing instead of mak­ing phono­graphs. Despite its focus on free­dom, the film isn’t really exis­ten­tial­ist, since it equates free­dom with a lack of respon­si­bil­ity instead of free­dom as respon­si­bil­ity itself.

It is claimed and debated that this film was the inspiration/plagiarized for Chaplin’s Mod­ern Times, but I think that whole dis­cus­sion is miss­ing the point; that in the con­text of the age, there was a need for films as specif­i­cally sim­i­lar as these to be made. Social­ism and the assem­bly line were rel­a­tively new and fresh ideas, ripe with promise and expec­ta­tion. What René Clair cre­ates in À nous la lib­erté is an alloy of the two, where automa­tion leads to utopia and free­dom for all. Despite the now-obvious errors in his idea, À nous la liberté’s hope for the future and zest for free­dom remain inspir­ing even 75 years later.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Atkin­son.
• DVD Jour­nal essay by Mark Bourne.
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle by John Flaus.
• DVD Ver­dict essay by Bar­rie Maxwell.
• YouTube clip [a bit sketchy at the begin­ning, but set­tles out].

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #56: Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.

I would like to pref­ace this review by say­ing that Mar­ian Keane’s Cri­te­rion Essay linked at the end is going to be much bet­ter than any­thing I will write here. The 39 Steps is my favorite Hitch­cock film, made when he was still in Great Britain. In many respects his later work in The Lady Van­ishes is related to this film. I have pro­vided more than my usual num­ber of screen­shots because there were so many strik­ing ones in this film. Some of the best can­not be repro­duced in still pho­tos, because the cam­era move­ment is the real star. I’m an unabashed fan of Hitchcock’s ear­lier works, pos­si­bly because of their qual­ity in spite of bud­get and the British Board of Film Censors.

The plot of The 39 Steps is cen­tered around a Cana­dian in Great Britain who becomes embroiled in a spy ring and is wrongly accused of mur­der. With only one clue and a tal­ent for on-the-spot story-telling, he flees to Scot­land from the cronies of a man with a short­ened pinky fin­ger in order to track down a Pro­fes­sor who turns out to have a short­ened pinky fin­ger. You see, they are try­ing to trans­port a gov­ern­ment secret about a new plane out of the coun­try to an unnamed for­eign power. Of course, you don’t find out about this until the last minute or two of the film, in typ­i­cal Hitch­cock­ian sus­pense mode.

Along the way, the Cana­dian Richard Han­nay keeps bump­ing in to this blonde woman who keeps turn­ing him over to the police/spies from which he keeps escap­ing. Even in the most seri­ous of scenes Hitch­cock man­ages to place lit­tle bits of humor such as this to lighten the inten­sity of the action. And it isn’t the same sort of humor at every point, some is low-brow, some comes from awk­ward sit­u­a­tion com­edy and there is plenty of wry wit from the pro­tag­o­nist himself.

Most peo­ple think hor­ror when they think Hitch­cock, but it is mys­tery and sus­pense that are the bread and but­ter of his films. The deft­ness with which these traits are meted out in The 39 Steps, cou­pled with Hitchcock’s abil­ity to add a twist right when we think the sus­pense is going to be sus­pended make the film inter­est­ing at every moment. The char­ac­ters we meet, though only briefly, have last­ing impacts through­out the film, and the most innocu­ous of items or actions cre­ate a sim­i­lar rip­ple effect. It takes a spe­cial sort of direc­tor to so eas­ily roughen the waters and sub­se­quently still them and have a good time while doing it. Thank­fully Hitch­cock is that man.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Mar­ian Keane.
• Detailed Film Site film review.
• Down­load the entire novel by John Buchan at Project Guten­berg.
• Hitch­cock Online
• Dr. Macro has scans and WMV clips.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #97: Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing.

It might be a bit reduc­tive to com­pare Spike Lee and Jane Cam­pion [An Angel at My Table] in terms of minor­ity film­mak­ing, but it is inter­est­ing to see how their films exert them­selves in that sort of space. I think they can be called “minor­ity films” because the direc­tors’ engage­ment and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with their minor­ity sta­tus informs and directs what takes place on the screen.

I think Spike Lee is ulti­mately more suc­cess­ful at this. Do The Right Thing is still effec­tive and con­tem­po­rary because noth­ing in the film is con­tained; the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing the film, and the action itself are just as messy as real life, while still pre­sented in Lee’s unique sub­jec­tiv­ity. Because of this, any per­son who watches Do The Right Thing has a point of access that is not alienating.

Vio­lence as a way of achiev­ing racial jus­tice is both imprac­ti­cal and immoral. It is imprac­ti­cal because it is a descend­ing spi­ral end­ing in destruc­tion for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves every­body blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humil­i­ate the oppo­nent rather than win his under­stand­ing; it seeks to anni­hi­late rather than to con­vert. Vio­lence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys a com­mu­nity and makes broth­er­hood impos­si­ble. It leaves soci­ety in mono­logue rather than dia­logue. Vio­lence ends by defeat­ing itself. It cre­ates bit­ter­ness in the sur­vivors and bru­tal­ity in the destroyers.

–Dr. Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.

They key point in the pre­vi­ous quote, as it seems to me, is: “it seeks to humil­i­ate the oppo­nent rather than win his under­stand­ing.” By pro­vid­ing such a var­ied and non-judgmental set­ting, Spike Lee enables King, Jr.‘s words a chance to take effect. Whereas, in my expe­ri­ence of Campion’s films, points of access for under­stand­ing are much more dif­fi­cult to dis­cern due to her focus on a sin­gle protagonist’s sub­jec­tiv­ity. In the Cut is a per­fect exam­ple of this, but it is also present in Angel at My Table and to a lesser extent in The Piano.

Bam­boo­zled [if only I could find my Film The­ory paper on it] is another Spike Lee Joint where mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives mesh together into a real-world mess of authen­tic­ity and sub­jec­tiv­ity. It adds another facet to the milieu of Do The Right Thing. Every­one in Do The Right Thing is authen­tic, but in Bam­boo­zled the char­ac­ters have to con­front the con­se­quences of soul-selling and being con­sid­ered a race trai­tor. I like Bam­boo­zled more than Do The Right Thing, even if it is a less per­fect and more trou­bling film.

I always seem to get to pro­duc­tion val­ues at the end. Do The Right Thing is a per­fect film in this regard. Col­ors and film stock make the spec­ta­tor feel the Bed-Stuy sum­mer heat, increas­ingly preva­lent dutch angles rein­force the pre­car­i­ous fire watch atmos­phere, and when the con­fronta­tion finally comes it is still sur­pris­ing how hot the con­fla­gra­tion gets. The after­math is just as sur­pris­ing. While Spike Lee is delib­er­ately not spe­cific with a Jerry Springer “Final Thought” the whole con­struc­tion of the film is such that it encour­ages any­one with two neu­rons to rub together to think about what it means to do the right thing.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Roger Ebert
• Screen­play
• Spike Lee Inter­view
• Salon arti­cle on the effects of Pub­lic Enemy’s Fight the Power. [Uncut and Uncen­sored YouTube music video]
• YouTube clip

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #289: Peter Gilbert’s, Steve James’s, and Fred­er­ick Marx’s Hoop Dreams.

I never really wanted to watch this movie again. I saw it twice in col­lege dur­ing my His­tory of Doc­u­men­tary Film class [along with Nanook of the North] and as it is nearly 3 hours long, it is quite a time invest­ment. Hoop Dreams is a trou­bling film, both cin­e­mat­i­cally and con­tex­tu­ally. These aspects are, of course, inter-related, but I’m going to attempt to deal with them as sep­a­rately as I can.

First, cin­e­mat­i­cally. As a doc­u­men­tary, Hoop Dreams pro­vides a level of inti­macy with its sub­jects that many other docs attempt but ulti­mately fail at. This gives the entire film an authen­tic­ity that is per­haps a bit too strong, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the inevitable effects that the film­mak­ers had on their sub­jects’ lives. They have the role of participant-observers but it quite easy to see them manip­u­late the action for their desired ends. This is most notable with Arthur Agee, who is plied with ques­tions about Isiah Thomas on the way to a bas­ket­ball camp and then gets to play him one-on-one with his hero. This event was staged, but there is impromptu manip­u­la­tion as well; when, years later, he is prompted by the film­mak­ers to read a report on but­ter­flies that high­lights Arthur’s grammar-school level edu­ca­tion and gen­eral embarass­ment and dis­re­gard for school.

In some sense every char­ac­ter in the film is an actor; so-and-so as him– or her­self. At times they ham for the cam­era, and at oth­ers pre­tend as if it isn’t present. Per­haps the eas­i­est exam­ple to show the prevalance of this cliché in the film is when William’s team fails to go down-state his senior year. The film­mak­ers get right up in his face as he walks off, and the barely restrained frus­tra­tion and rage is evi­dent. This moment does not fea­ture William Gates as him­self, but merely William Gates, a young man who feels the pres­ence of the film­mak­ers as a tan­gi­ble reminder of his failed promise. William is no longer the sub­ject of a film in this moment, but a per­son again. Arthur has a sim­i­lar moment, while play­ing one-on-one with his unsta­ble father, when he states “This ain’t no con game any­more. I’m older now.”

The film­mak­ers manip­u­late the audi­ence as eas­ily as they do their sub­jects. The film is delib­er­ately con­structed so that we expect William to be the high school star and go to the pros and Arthur to fail. This becomes inverted fairly quickly as William is trou­bled by knee injuries and Arthur emerges as the one with the abil­ity to lead his team down-state. Sim­i­larly, William’s child and girl­friend are intro­duced to us as a sur­prise, after the baby has been born for sev­eral months. The drug-addiction of Arthur’s father is sim­i­larly absent, until it serves as a plot spark.

Con­tex­tu­ally the film jux­ta­poses the mod­ern slave-market of bas­ket­ball recruit­ment with the hopes of two ghetto kids for NBA star­dom. Rich white per­son after rich white per­son sees a money-maker in William Gates, and tal­ent scouts read­ily admit that they focus on serv­ing “gourmet meat.” William is intel­li­gent enough to not fully com­mit him­self to this sys­tem, to make an effort at the edu­ca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties offered to him, but his unwill­ing­ness to sac­ri­fice him­self on the hard­wood altar ulti­mately earns him the scorn of his loath­some high school bas­ket­ball coach, a man so jaded that when his star ath­lete leaves his office for the last time he shrugs “Another one leaves, another one comes in, that’s the way it goes.”

Due to con­stant reminders of The Insti­tu­tion of bas­ket­ball, there is lit­tle focus on other paths of oppor­tu­nity for these kids. When Arthur Agee sur­pris­ingly gets a visit to a junior col­lege, he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, he men­tions account­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and real estate, a dif­fer­ent answer for each time the ques­tion is asked. William, plagued by injury, seems to rec­og­nize that he needs another path if his dream dies, but he is sur­rounded by peo­ple who have pinned their dreams on his bas­ket­ball abil­ity and don’t want to hear about any­thing else.

In the end we’re left with a film that points out how fleet­ing the dream of bas­ket­ball glory can be for ghetto youth, but offers no other alter­na­tives for the bet­ter­ment of the kids. Yes, bas­ket­ball has got­ten them into higher edu­ca­tion, but with­out a safety net bas­ket­ball could just as eas­ily kick them out of it again. Com­bined with the slick manip­u­la­tion in the edit­ing suite, we’re left just as bereft as Arthur and William, unsure, chimeric. Hoop Dreams, not reality.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by John Edgar Wide­man
• Roger Ebert Review
• Hoop Dreams Schol­ar­ship Fund
• Com­pre­hen­sive Hoop Dreams site that may or may not be outdated.

This clip, gra­tu­itous and exploita­tive as it is, is one fine piece of film­mak­ing; which is the main rea­son it is so delib­er­ately gra­tu­itous and exploita­tive. Note how the tim­ing of the cuts and changes in shot fram­ing ramp up the sex­i­ness of the scene, and by proxy, its com­edy. Also, take note that I, Adam Har­vey, have now said Some­thing Good™ about a teeny­bop­per roman­tic com­edy done in the style of 1980s Brat Pack Crapfests™.

To dis­tract you from what you most cer­tainly think of as my blas­phemy here is a spoof of the end of every 80s movie. 80s End­ing.

I also rec­om­mend watch­ing these ani­mated shorts from Blur Studio:

Gopher Broke
Rock­fish
In The Rough
Aunt Luisa

A few weeks ago I received a request to review a short film that acts as a teaser for a fea­ture film called Sex, Love & Z-Parts. I received the screener last week, along with com­pre­hen­sive sup­ple­men­tal mate­ri­als and have also traded a few emails with Mar­cus D. Rus­sell, the dri­ving force behind the pro­duc­tion. So here’s the review:

Sex, Love & Z-Parts imme­di­ately recalls Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Video­tape, but since I’ve not seen that film, I can’t speak to any other par­al­lels. This is likely for the best, since I know of few things that inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers hate more than being accused of deriv­a­tive style. The first thing you notice about this film is the qual­ity of the pro­duc­tion val­ues. The film­mak­ers are only ama­teur in the sense that no stu­dio is pay­ing them to do the work. It is obvi­ous that each aspect of the pro­duc­tion was cho­sen care­fully, from the film stock to the pac­ing of the action. This care has enabled the film­mak­ers to pro­vide a space in which the story can be told through mul­ti­ple subjectivities.

The style and con­tent is informed by a care­ful ren­der­ing and expo­si­tion of Gen­er­a­tion X traits, enu­mer­ated in the the­sis that was part of the sup­ple­men­tary materials:

The films of Gen­er­a­tion X have the fol­low­ing characteristics:

1) Con­spic­u­ous absence of parental figures…

2) Long­ing for the icono­graphic male bravado com­mon­place in the cin­ema that pre­ceded it…

3) The ever-present sense of failure…

4) The issue of man­hood. How would a man act?…

5) An inabil­ity to mold into the Amer­i­can framework…

6) The rela­tion­ship problem…

This man­i­festo was informed by Dogme 95, but Big Hit’s ideas focus on more exis­ten­tial themes than cin­e­matic require­ments. It is pos­si­ble to see glimpses of this in the short­ened fea­ture I was sent, and while it will take the full film to flesh out and prove whether or not Mar­cus and his crew have been accu­rate as well as pre­cise in their tar­get­ing, they are cer­tainly doing more with this film than most other independents.

From an email:

Scott and I didn’t think we could really get out point across with­out extremely high pro­duc­tion val­ues. They are so used to grainy dig­i­tal images that they fall in love with the prettiness.…that gives us an edge and a level of trust that is tough to cre­ate in indie film. We really try to emu­late some of the pop­u­lar looks/setups of film and TV..and then invert the meaning.

This is an inter­est­ing film because you are really not sup­posed to do this kind of shit on the short film cir­cuit. The expec­ta­tion is that you are an amateur…so you can imag­ine that they aren’t exactly happy that two loud mouth guys from LA…are puttin’ it down in the frame.

Per­son­ally, com­ing from some­one born at the ass-end of the Gen X curve, they seem to have the bag­gage behind the label under their thumbs. The pro­longed ado­les­cent estrange­ment from the baby boomer world­view and simul­ta­ne­ous implanted desire to live up to it, the strug­gle for agency, authen­tic­ity and loy­alty in spite of it all resound strongly in SLZP. The mis­sion of Gen X, to me, seems to be the process of defin­ing what it means to be an adult in a life that has had a dis­tinct lack of them. Thanks in part to their choice of film stock [“East­man Kodak 7278 (500 Tung­sten bal­ance) for the inte­ri­ors and the night shoots… East­man Kodak 7274 (200 Tung­sten bal­ance) for the ext/day stuff”] the film almost feels like it was shot in the early 80s, seems to say “this is how we would have done things [includ­ing make movies] if we were adults when we were chil­dren. They might not be the best choices, but we’ll roll with it and accept the world for what it is.” And if that isn’t Gen X, I don’t know what is.

I shut­tled the screener off to Tremont Inde­pen­dent, maybe it’ll show at their Decem­ber screening.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #62: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc.

I must admit that the first time I saw this, I slept through the major­ity. I was fresh from fenc­ing prac­tice in the womb­like screen­ing room of O’Shaughnessy Hall and there was no accom­pa­ni­ment to the film. In the warm dark, I snoozed through one of my top ten great­est films ever made. The sec­ond time I saw this was at an Unsi­lent Film show put on by the now-defunct Syn­th­Cleve­land at the the now-defunct Rain Night­club. Local elec­tronic musi­cians played orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions while the film played behind the bar. In this atmos­phere I paid more atten­tion to the hot goth girls and my Guin­ness than the film. Yet last night, sit­ting down with the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion edi­tion proved that third time is the charm. Like the sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als for A Night To Remem­ber, Carl Dreyer’s Pas­sion ben­e­fits hugely from the Cri­te­rion treat­ment and the addi­tion of Richard Einhorn’s mag­nif­i­cent Voices of Light opera/oratorio.

There is some­thing about this film and the life of Joan of Arc that demands artis­tic inter­pre­ta­tion, rein­ter­pre­ta­tion and con­sis­tent exam­i­na­tion. Dreyer’s focus on por­tray­ing “real­ized mys­ti­cism” by “…interpret[ing] a hymn to the tri­umph of the soul over life” is so suc­cess­ful that it is unsur­pris­ing that other are inspired to cap­ture the same tran­scen­den­tal feel­ing. Dreyer states:

What streams out to the pos­si­bly moved spec­ta­tor in strange close-ups is not acci­den­tally cho­sen. All these pic­tures express the char­ac­ter of the per­son they show and the spirit of that time. In order to give the truth, I dis­pensed with “beautification”.

This is a bit of over­state­ment. Although the diegetic space is severe, the pro­duc­tion val­ues: qual­ity light­ing, grace­ful track­ing shots, dutch-angle fram­ing, and most espe­cially close-ups to pow­er­fully effec­tive actors cre­ate an atmos­phere that is per­fectly described in the reli­gious sense of Grace-ful. The cam­era is almost always sta­tion­ary on Joan. In con­trast, we are con­stantly made aware of the vast forces arrayed against her by long track­ing shots in medium close-up of her learnèd judges. In moments of her great­est agony, she is framed as if the cam­era can’t bear to watch, ashamed of what it is witnessing.

Joan of Arc is a strong sym­bol in many dif­fer­ent direc­tions [French Nation­al­ism, Reli­gion, and Fem­i­nism to name a few] but I’m going to focus on its strengths as a fem­i­nist film, since these points kept pop­ping up as I watched it. Joan is a 19 year-old vir­gin trans­ves­tite on trial in front of half a hun­dred or so old, bald, pow­er­ful men. They leer, they smirk, they look like dev­ils and vul­tures; yet she con­founds them at every turn. She is inno­cent, so they must first teach her guile before they are finally able to trick her into sign­ing an abju­ra­tion of all she believes in. She is emo­tion­ally tor­tured and shown the instru­ments of phys­i­cal tor­ture, although they are not used. Her head is shaved, she is bled by doc­tors and given a crown and scepter like Jesus in the Gospel of John. The libretto from Voices of Light [linked at the bot­tom] echoes these visual acts of oppres­sive patri­archy, even cre­at­ing vocal par­al­lels between the “Glo­rioses playes” dur­ing the tor­ture sequence and the final burn­ing at the stake. The libretto is a must read for fram­ing this film in a fem­i­nist context.

In revenge for my past cav­a­lier treat­ment of this film I spent most of the night watch­ing it over and over in my dreams and awoke with “Glo­rioses playes” echo­ing in my head. I want to insist that you fol­low the links I’ve pro­vided and read more on this film. Even if you just read Roger Ebert’s review. And if you can get your hands on a copy of the Cri­te­rion edi­tion of this film, watch it.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Carl Theodor Dreyer.
• Roger Ebert review.
• Strictly Film School arti­cle on the film.
• Images Jour­nal review with great stills.
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle on the film.
• Watch the entire film [no sound­track] on YouTube.
• The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review.

• Voices of Light at Richard Einhorn’s site.
• Liner notes on Voices of Light.
• Read the libretto here. [Page 10 of the PDF].
• Joan of Arc Archive

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #224: Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street.

I first saw this in a film noir class I took in col­lege, That same week we watched Kiss Me Deadly, so I got a bit con­fused and thought this film involved Mike Ham­mer and ended with a nuclear bomb. Woops. Def­i­nitely shame on me for mis­plac­ing my mem­ory of this sharply com­pli­cated but nev­er­the­less deft lit­tle film. The most imme­di­ately strik­ing aspect of this film is the dia­logue. Over­flow­ing with the argot of ‘40s small-time crime, the New York pre­sented in this film is markedly dif­fer­ent from most por­tray­als. Like the char­ac­ters them­selves, most of the action takes place on the fringes of the city; the water­front or under­ground in the sub­way. Spaces are small, crowded, claus­tro­pho­bic, in typ­i­cal noir fashion.

Also in typ­i­cal noir fash­ion, every­one smokes all of the time and most of the action takes places at night. But Fuller inverts some of the other items on the noir check­list. The pro­tag­o­nist, while still anti-heroic, is not destroyed by his ambi­tion, and although the female lead, an implied ex-prostitute, starts off this trou­ble, she is more femme sauveur than femme fatale. In addi­tion to these inver­sions Fuller adds in a hefty dose of Red Threat that has echoes in Shock Cor­ri­dor ten years later. The cast­ing was spot on and the act­ing excel­lent, which cou­pled with the plot, is why this film is a sta­ple of film noir.

As a side-note: my favorite trick in this film was Fuller’s con­stant empha­sis on what was not on screen; typ­i­cally bound to entrances involv­ing Skip and how obser­vant he is. He enters a room, glances around, com­pletes some action [most notably the light­ing of two cig­a­rettes] and then the cam­era fol­lows him to reveal what caught his notice [usu­ally Candy].

The plot cen­ters around Skip McCoy, a can­non fresh from the clink, who binges a dame named Candy of her pock­et­book on the sub­way and unknow­ingly ruins a gov­ern­ment sting oper­a­tion. He’s stolen some micro­film con­tain­ing secrets that would lead the gov­ern­ment to “Mr. Big.” The police call a stool pigeon to iden­tify Skip and give a lead on his where­abouts. Mean­while, the com­mies are also try­ing to track him down to reclaim the micro­film. Candy and Skip get caught in the mid­dle of this power play and it turns out the Candy isn’t a com­mie, just their pawn. There are a few bru­tal scenes of vio­lence against Candy and plenty of loose morals, so I doubt the film would have been approved with­out the strong nation­al­is­tic fla­vor. It could be argued that Candy and Moe get what is com­ing to them, the for­mer for con­sort­ing with com­mu­nists, the lat­ter for being an informer, but Moe’s mur­der is more mar­tyr­dom than pun­ish­ment. She’d inform on any­one to any­one except a communist.

It is impor­tant to note that Skip McCoy doesn’t fight the com­mies out of a sense of nation­al­ism, [“Don’t wave the flag at me.”] but because he finally real­izes that Candy loves him. So it is strange to see that he is not affected at all by the mael­strom he’s found him­self in. Per­haps because he’s such a slim cus­tomer, with a cock-eyed smar­tass smile that embod­ies a cer­tain idea of Amer­i­can pugnac­ity all this drama is expected to roll off his back. Well, it does, and he is the man, not the cops or the feds, who ulti­mately breaks up the com­mie plot and cap­tures Mr. Big, all thanks to his skills as a pickpocket.

The resound­ing mes­sage is that while some Amer­i­cans may be ene­mies with each other in civil­ian life, when a threat to the nation appears, they’ll work together to defeat the damn dirty com­mies. Just another type of exploita­tion cin­ema for your view­ing pleasure.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Luc Sante.
• Essay by Grant Tracey.
• Bright Lights Film Jour­nal with a great arti­cle putting the film in a cin­e­matic con­text.
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle by Richard J. Thomp­son.
• Moe ver­sus the Com­mie. Excel­lent clip from the film on Youtube.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #227: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Cor­beau.

Le Cor­beau was made in occu­pied France in 1943. It was denounced by the Vichy gov­ern­ment, denounced by the French Resis­tance and denounced by the Vat­i­can. For a film that seems rather innocu­ous in 2006 Amer­ica there must be a lot of sub­text that would have been picked up by World War II era French folks. The story takes place in a provin­cial town dur­ing the occu­pa­tion and the action revolves around mys­te­ri­ous, anony­mous “poi­son pen” let­ters that are cir­cu­lated among the towns­folk, con­tain­ing just enough truth and just enough lie to turn the town into a mob of pitchfork-and-torch-waving lunatics. Minus the pitch­forks and torches.

Cast­ing Pierre Fres­nay, star of La Grande Illu­sion cre­ates a dis­tinct and imme­di­ate jux­ta­po­si­tion between both films. In one, Fres­nay is a French offi­cer and Ger­man cap­tive and there is honor and respect from both sides. In Le Cor­beau, there is not a Ger­man to be seen and Fresnay’s Dr. Ger­main is a sus­pected abor­tion­ist. Yet the absence of any men­tion of the war or Ger­many in the light of Fresnay’s 1938 per­for­mance in La Grande Illu­sion invites a com­par­i­son of the Ger­mans then to now along with the jux­ta­po­si­tion. Clouzot could not have been openly crit­i­cal of the occu­pied gov­ern­ment, so cast­ing Fres­nay was inspired in this regard.

The Resis­tance prob­a­bly didn’t like the film because there is no resis­tance in it. Every­one is just con­tin­u­ing with their lives as if the war was not even hap­pen­ing. They should have been happy with the obvi­ous state­ment that inform­ing on peo­ple is one of the surest ways to destroy a com­mu­nity. But per­haps this was the very rea­son they objected, since this film shows just how effec­tive it can be. This is just conjecture.

The Vat­i­can obvi­ously hated this because of all of the abor­tion talk and all of the pre– and extra-marital sex that is going on while hus­bands are “gone”.

In terms of a mys­tery and sus­pense film the exe­cu­tion is extra­or­di­nary. Most of the main char­ac­ters have the means, motive and oppor­tu­nity to pen the let­ters, and it is only as the film pro­gresses that some are elim­i­nated. Added into the mix we have copy-cat corbeau’s, inquests, a nun named Marie-Corbin who every­one ini­tially sus­pects, and a mor­phine thief. There is mur­der and may­hem, and some of the ugli­est and man­nish French women I’ve ever seen. Until the last two min­utes we’re still not sure who Le Cor­beau is.

As sub­tle as this film is, it is still quite brave of Clouzot to make some­thing such as this dur­ing the occu­pa­tion. Lacombe, Lucien wasn’t made by Louis Malle until 1974, so fraught was the sub­ject of French inform­ing dur­ing the war.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Allen Williams.
• Wikipedia entry on the film.
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle on Clouzot.
• Some stills from the film.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #13: Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs.

“Noth­ing is so fright­en­ing as what’s behind the closed door. The audi­ence holds its breath along with the pro­tag­o­nist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door…
–Stephen King in Danse Macabre and before that Val Lew­ton.

The Silence of the Lambs is all kinds of great. For a hor­ror movie it offers rel­a­tively lit­tle gore, instead rely­ing on what is not seen to grow the fear. The film pretty much uses one cin­e­matic trick over and over through­out, but it never gets old. Demme’s choice to use a shal­low depth of field and straight-on fram­ing of the char­ac­ters do much to strengthen the rela­tion­ships between char­ac­ter dia­logue and rela­tion­ship, the con­stant scopophilic gaze directed by almost every man to Agent Starlng cre­ates a delib­er­ate and con­stant sense of unease to her sub­jec­tiv­ity, and the myr­iad ref­er­ences to change and meta­mor­pho­sis ensure that no one thing we know can be seen as certain.

But time and time again what gives the movie its pep is the closed door, the reveal, the pas­sage through. The next time you see this film, count them. Door­ways are lim­i­nal sym­bols, inher­ently unpre­dictable and the con­stant action of open­ing, pas­sage and clos­ing taken by Clarice reflects her own growth as an FBI agent. The viewer grows along with her and grat­i­fi­ca­tion is delayed in almost every scene; when we think we are about to make a dis­cov­ery, only another door is revealed.

The cli­mac­tic sequence of the film [if only I could find it online!] has well over twenty doors that must be passed through or at least iden­ti­fied as a pos­si­ble source of ter­ror for Clarice. Cou­pled with the unpre­dictabil­ity of Han­ni­bal Lector’s mind and the ease with which he manip­u­lates an entire inves­ti­ga­tion it should be no sur­prise that the viewer is just as eas­ily manip­u­lated by the edit­ing in the lead-up to the Starling’s con­fronta­tion with Buf­falo Bill. This is a film that has got our num­ber, can fool us over and over with the same cin­e­matic par­lor tricks and leave us want­ing more. Hitch­cock, who I had ini­tially thought of as the man who made the closed door quote, would have been proud.

The other main strength of the film is the act­ing. Just about every­one is superbly creepy. This might be due to the fact that just as nearly every­one is a man and we are often encased within Agent Starling’s world­view as the object of desire, but even the bit-part actors are awash in uncan­ni­ness that is all the more effec­tive because it is so nat­ural. We all know peo­ple who are that sort of weird. The rela­tion­ship between Lec­tor and Star­ling is often that of a snake hyp­no­tiz­ing a bird. Cer­tainly Anthony Hop­kins act­ing is makes the film extra extra­or­di­nary and the qual­ity of every­one else buoys his per­for­mance up even higher. I really have no crit­i­cisms of this film, it is so cruft­less, pol­ished and so effec­tive at what it does that I can’t think of much else to say.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Amy Daubin.
• Roger Ebert review.
• *.wav clips from the film.
• Out­takes on YouTube.
• Jodie Fos­ter on Inside the Actor’s Stu­dio talk­ing about the film. [YouTube]
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #19: Samuel Fuller’s Shock Cor­ri­dor.

It was nice see­ing this film again. Samuel Fuller has that pecu­liar posi­tion that only seems pos­si­ble in the world of film; a mas­ter of cin­ema, but also a pro­ducer of schlock. Shock Cor­ri­dor is a per­fect exam­ple of this sort of dou­ble­think. It most cer­tainly is a piece of exploita­tion cin­ema, meant to bring peo­ple to the the­ater through its overblown and seedy por­trayal of the men­tally ill, but it also sup­plies the spec­ta­tor with thorny polit­i­cal ques­tions in a dis­tinc­tive, mas­ter­ful and lurid style.

The actors are no-names and the act­ing is blunt. So is the edit­ing. So is the dia­logue. Fuller has no patience with flair in this film. Although there are parts that seem quite styl­is­tic, they were not done for styl­is­tic rea­sons. Each choice is made for prac­ti­cal util­i­tar­ian effi­cacy and it is from this focus that the style derives. This is very dif­fer­ent from The Sword of Doom, where mad­ness is sub­servient to its por­trayal. In Shock Cor­ri­dor, mad­ness points to its own causes as, in brief moments of lucid­ity, the patients explain and inher­ently crit­i­cize the social stresses which drove them mad.

Fuller uses these moments to make his great polit­i­cal points. One patient, a sort of Manchurian can­di­date trai­tor who thinks he is a Con­fed­er­ate gen­eral explains that Com­mu­nism offered him what his own upbring­ing never could, edu­ca­tion and open-mindedness, at the cost of his loy­alty to his coun­try. An infan­tile ex-Manhattan project sci­en­tist preaches of the evils of Cold War men­tal­ity arms-racing, and most dis­turbingly the first black stu­dent to attend a white uni­ver­sity tells how the racism of the South drove him mad, ulti­mately con­vinc­ing him that he is the founder of the Ku Klux Klan and a white suprema­cist. [See the YouTube clip linked at the end.]

In another vein, Johnny the reporter, who has infil­trated the asy­lum in order to deter­mine which of the three char­ac­ters above can iden­tify a mur­derer, is slowly dri­ven mad by his prox­im­ity to the patients and the treat­ments admin­stered to him by the staff. The destruc­tion of his per­son­al­ity due to an excess of ambi­tion becomes the basis by which we can empathize with the plights of the other patients. The scene with the nymphos [Result­ing in one of the best VO nar­ra­tion lines ever: “Nymphos!!”] is exploita­tion cin­ema at its best, but is a nec­es­sary step for Johnny’s road to madness.

There are aspects of noir to this film that can be exam­ined in com­par­i­son to Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, but since that is also a Cri­te­rion film, I’ll do that then. I’ll sim­ply say now, that a reporter pro­tag­o­nist and his strip­per girl­friend are the arche­typal seedy char­ac­ters for noir.

This is another film where the cin­e­matog­ra­phy is out­stand­ing. Stan­ley Cortez’s cam­era move­ments and fram­ing invite the viewer into each patient’s sub­jec­tiv­ity. These sequences are the films most blunt and most effec­tive. The viewer is star­tled by abrupt switches to color stock footage when the patients hal­lu­ci­nate and the scene with Paliacci’s singing is jaw-dropping in terms of both cin­e­matog­ra­phy and post-production. [See the YouTube clip linked at the end.]

For those who find grace and style to be insep­a­ra­ble and any art that is not “high” to be no art at all, this film will seem like so much trash. For the casual viewer the film will offer enter­tain­ment but its angry tone and sug­ges­tion that mad­ness is the only escape from a world gone mad will not res­onate. The result is a film that demands an open mind and broad taste for true appre­ci­a­tion of all its aspects. Just like every­thing else ever, really.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Tim Hunter
• Cul­ture Court essay by Rick McGrath.
• The Guardian review.
• Many stills and cap­tions from the film.
• YouTube clip fea­tur­ing the black white suprema­cist.
• YouTube clip of one of Johnny’s dream sequences fea­tur­ing Pali­acci.
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #11: Ing­mar Bergman’s The Sev­enth Seal.

1 And when he had opened the sev­enth seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
Rev. 8:1

There is lit­tle I can say about The Sev­enth Seal that has not been said before. I will say that I love the sound of Swedish and the way that I can almost under­stand it at times. I will say that I love the crys­tal cin­e­matog­ra­phy and the way the light­ing is nearly its own char­ac­ter, so strong is its pres­ence on the screen. And I will talk a lit­tle about the motifs that I noticed this sec­ond time that I’ve watched the film.

Silence is the most notice­able theme, estab­lished quite early with the open­ing quo­ta­tion from the book of Rev­e­la­tion and then rein­forced when the appear­ance of Death mutes the sound of break­ers rolling onto the shore of Swe­den. It con­tin­ues, but is not present through the entire film. Bergman insists, at first at least, that silence says more than speech if you lis­ten cor­rectly. Wit­ness Jōns account of his inter­ac­tion with the corpse of a plague victim:

KNIGHT
Well, did he show you the way?

JŌNS
Not exactly.

KNIGHT
What did he say?

JŌNS
Nothing.

KNIGHT
Was he a mute?

JŌNS
No, sir, I wouldn’t say that. As a mat­ter of
fact, he was quite eloquent.

The knight Anto­nius Block’s dis­re­gard for this silence or his squire’s smar­tass com­ments shows another sort of deaf­ness, to speak mixaphor­i­cally, the inabil­ity to hear what is under one’s nose. Jōns is the truth-speaker in the film, almost a Dos­to­evk­sian holy fool, except for the thick skin of cyn­i­cism that he has gained as a vet­eran of ten years of cru­sad­ing. He has no illu­sions regard­ing the absur­dity of his exis­tence and thinks of reli­gion as noth­ing more than enter­tain­ing folklore.

But Block refuses to give in to look into Nieztsche’s abyss. He seeks one sig­nif­i­cant act to make him feel as though his life has been worth some­thing. And even Jōns, for all his talk, doubts his own doubt. As this tur­moil builds within each char­ac­ter, the silence becomes less obvi­ous and sound takes a larger role. A storm is building.

Enter Death! Even when Bengt Ekerot isn’t onscreen, the pres­ence and threat of death is never far off. The moun­te­banks have a skull mask that is always hang­ing nearby, and shots are often framed so that the mask is look­ing over the shoul­der of the char­ac­ters. In Block’s most pas­toral scene, the din­ner of wild straw­ber­ries and milk at dusk, the mask of Death is at its liveli­est, the eyes seem alive as a sheet blows behind them.

A sim­i­lar pro­gres­sion as the one from silence to sound also takes place in terms of Death. Early in the film Death is to be respected but feared, and the scenes where he is present are filled with a vivac­ity that even­tu­ally becomes Death’s province by the end of the film. The light­hearted scenes seem shal­low in the after­math of the plague-swept coun­try­side and the fear that dri­ves men to burn a girl for for­ni­ca­tion with the Devil. What Death offers becomes more and more appeal­ing, almost joy­ous to the per­ils of living.

Yet Block still seeks the one mer­i­to­rius act that will allow him to die at peace, even if his ques­tions remain unan­swered. He suc­ceeds, in a tran­scen­den­tal moment [fea­tur­ing my favorite shot, below] while play­ing chess with Death. He knows he has lost, but stalls long enough for the moun­te­bank fam­ily to escape. He has cheated Death on oth­ers’ behalf, at the cost of his own life. Yet in some way, death is a reward involv­ing the sub­mis­sion of his own will to that of the inevitable.

In the final sequence, as Death makes them dance along the hill­side, it is inter­est­ing to see who is not in his train, Jōns girl and Block’s wife Karin are not included. I don’t know why, but I sus­pect it has some­thing to do with the fact that they were the most wel­com­ing of Death when he appeared.

This film is so ripe for exam­i­na­tion that I could go on for much longer, talk­ing about it as an alle­gory for the Cold War, as an exis­ten­tial­ist moral­ity play, as a film about deal­ing with reli­gious doubt and tons more. But I’ve writ­ten enough for today.

2 And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets.

3 And another angel came and stood at the altar, hav­ing a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne.

4 And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand.

5 And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thun­der­ings, and light­nings, and an earth­quake.
Rev. 8:2–5

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Peter Cowie.
• Tons of good qual­ity stills here.
• An undated draft of the script at IMSDb. The Cri­te­rion sub­ti­tling is supe­rior, in my opin­ion.
• Analy­sis of The Sev­enth Seal from Film & the Crit­i­cal Eye by Den­nis DeNitto and William Her­man.
• YouTube film stu­dent reen­act­ment of a scene from the film. [I had to do one of these from a Steven Soder­bergh film]
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #33: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North.

This is the third time now that I’ve seen Nanook of the North. I’m cur­rently rewatch­ing films I’ve already seen but not reviewed that are on the Cri­te­rion list. Despite the fact that Nanook of the North is filled with more inac­cu­ra­cies and staged scenes than actual ethnog­ra­phy, it is impor­tant to real­ize that though much of its crit­i­cism is accu­rate, it isn’t all justified.

Fla­herty was blaz­ing trail for fea­ture length non-fiction film­mak­ing, as well as loca­tion shoot­ing in harsh envi­ron­ments. The cam­era he used was so large that a non-authentic three-walled igloo had to be con­structed to allow enough light and space inside for film­ing to take place. He used this equip­ment in the Arc­tic, on ice fields and in bliz­zards and haul­ing it hun­dreds of miles. And while actu­al­i­ties were com­mon fare at nickel odeons, con­struct­ing a non-fiction nar­ra­tive of this sort had never been done before.

This is a sit­u­a­tion in which crit­i­cism should not be per­sonal. In hind­sight, tak­ing in the legacy that Fla­herty cre­ated with doc­u­men­tary cin­ema, it is easy to rip Nanook of the North to shreds as more story than doc­u­ment, but aim would be bet­ter taken at doc­u­men­taries which are arranged in the style of Nanook and con­tinue to make the same mis­takes and fal­si­fi­ca­tions, often deliberately.[Michael Moore, I’m look­ing at you.] In fact, I would argue that Fla­herty made no mis­takes in the film­ing of Nanook apart from being care­less enough to acci­den­tally burn the neg­a­tives from his pre­vi­ous attempts at mak­ing it.

From an ethnographer’s stand­point, Flaherty’s insis­tence that the Inuit use meth­ods that were already becom­ing used less and less often was inspired. The preva­lence of firearms, West­ern build­ing mate­ri­als and motor­ized water­craft was on the increase, and likely within another gen­er­a­tion it would have been impos­si­ble to make a film like Nanook of the North. So Fla­herty was unknow­ingly cre­at­ing sal­vage ethnog­ra­phy that has been equally impor­tant to anthro­pol­ogy as to cin­ema. It is no coin­ci­dence that I watched this film once in a film class and once for an anthro­pol­ogy class.

It is pos­si­ble to read the film as a meta-document about spec­ta­tor­ship in the early 20th cen­tury as well. Fla­herty was clever enough to real­ize that he must craft a film that his audi­ence would enjoy so we end up with patron­iz­ing and roman­tic inter­ti­tles and oscil­lat­ing shots of the Inuit as skilled and sim­ple [Nanook and the gramo­phone being a prime exam­ple of the lat­ter] but always as sav­ages. Flaherty’s pres­ence as a char­ac­ter within the film is min­i­mal, unlike in Hoop Dreams [another Cri­te­rion title] where the direc­tor acts as a participant-observer.

Ulti­mately, I think it is impor­tant to rec­og­nize the faults in a film like Nanook of the North while not hold­ing it against the film­maker. This film is truly a land­mark of early cin­ema, so it is no sur­prise that its form con­tin­ues to be copied even to this day. Mis­takes and all, and even by those who should know better.

• Watch the entire film at Google Video.
• How I Filmed Nanook of the North by Robert Fla­herty.
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Dean W. Dun­can.
• Roger Ebert essay.
• DVD Out­sider Review.
• Mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of real­ity in Nanook of the North [with a tiny video clip] Full project on the film here.
• Ger­hard Lampe’s aca­d­e­mic analy­sis of Flaherty’s style.
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #23: Paul Verhoeven’s Robo­Cop.

This is a good time to explore the Cri­te­rion Collection’s mis­sion state­ment, since I know plenty of peo­ple think that hav­ing Robo­Cop on a list with The 400 Blows and 8½ is an abomination.

The Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion, a con­tin­u­ing series of impor­tant clas­sic and con­tem­po­rary films, is ded­i­cated to gath­er­ing the great­est films from around the world and pub­lish­ing them in edi­tions that offer the high­est tech­ni­cal qual­ity and award-winning, orig­i­nal supplements.

Robo­Cop is the kind of film on which an enter­pris­ing and lazy film stu­dent could base an entire the­sis. It is a post-modern mas­ter­piece, in both lit-crit and cult-crit usages of the term. While films like The Ter­mi­na­tor and The Matrix are also excel­lent post-modern films, they lack a cer­tain cul­tural applic­a­bil­ity that is the main motive force in Verhoeven’s image of the future. To call Robo­Cop a com­edy or satire is to do it a great dis­ser­vice. It is often bark­ingly funny, but the per­vad­ing bru­tal­ity, cal­lous­ness and cyn­i­cism is not present for its own sake but to flesh out an idea and warn­ing about Verhoeven’s pre­dic­tion of cul­tural evo­lu­tion in the late 1980s. The fact that Robo­Cop is more and more often billed as a com­edy does more to strengthen the pre­science of the film than any­thing else. We laugh at Robo­Cop because we are con­tin­u­ally becom­ing closer to the future it pre­dicts. We laugh because it is cor­rect, even though we don’t want to believe it.

Robo­Cop, there­fore, becomes the poster child of post-modern man. And there is noth­ing funny about him. While gay gang-member drug deal­ers blow apart Detroit with huge guns held crotch-high spurt­ing fire [No, I am not kid­ding], Robo­Cop is dri­ven by his prime direc­tives to bring jus­tice to all and sundry but for a select few. He is a man impris­oned within cir­cuitry, who can feel his fam­ily although he can­not remem­ber them. With a sub­jec­tiv­ity so frac­tured and con­trolled by cor­po­rate and polit­i­cal inter­ests there is lit­tle cause for Robo­Cop to accept the name of the dead man he is [Are all cops named Mur­phy?] or to accept any­thing at all.

Robo­Cop is far too sym­pa­thetic a char­ac­ter to be funny. Despite all of the stric­tures placed upon him, he strives to be as autonomous as pos­si­ble, to live up to obso­lete stan­dards in a cutting-edge envi­ron­ment with ADD news­casts NUKEM board games; he ulti­mately tri­umphs because his prison is also his weapon. So if that isn’t rea­son enough to include Robo­Cop in the Cri­te­rion list, noth­ing I can say will change your mind.

I can’t end this review with­out men­tion­ing the stop-motion ani­ma­tion debt that the film owes to Ray Har­ry­hausen. I love that man, and were it not for him, the ED-209 and the 6000 SUX com­mer­cial, inte­gral to the cul­tural aroma of the film, would have not been nearly as effective.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Car­rie Rickey
• YouTube clip of RoboCop’s intro­duc­tion, one of cinema’s great reveals.
• The Robo­Cop Archive
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #280: Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom.

As I watched this, I kept think­ing that if Samuel Fuller had been Japan­ese, he would have made The Sword of Doom. This film has the curi­ous mix of shlock and art, bru­tal­ity and grace that Fuller was known for. Even the mechan­ics of the schlock and art are par­al­lel. The shlock cen­ters around the action and plot, while the art comes through in shot selec­tion and edit­ing. Even the con­clu­sion is Fulleresque, when the shlock gets lever­aged into an ambigu­ous ques­tion aimed at the audi­ence. I’m going to need to rewatch Shock Cor­ri­dor soon, so I can stitch it back to Okamoto’s film.

The Sword of Doom, once again like Shock Cor­ri­dor, is an exam­i­na­tion of the human psy­che. The main char­ac­ter, Ryono­suke, is a mas­ter swords­man, com­pletely unread­able in regard to fenc­ing style and emo­tion. He kills for plea­sure or power, his exact rea­son­ing is unknown, but the ene­mies he cre­ates, both known and unknown, fol­low him seek­ing revenge. As do the dead. He ends up sup­port­ing the ex-wife of one of his vic­tims and sells him­self out to groups of ronin as backup for assas­si­na­tion after assas­si­na­tion. If I was a bit more knowl­edge­able about Japan­ese his­tory as it con­cerns the fall of the Toku­gawa shogu­nate I’d prob­a­bly be able to place a bit more con­text to his actions. I might be miss­ing a whole layer of applic­a­bil­ity here.

Ryono­suke kills his way through a few more years, includ­ing killing the woman he sup­ported and her child. He is bent on killing the brother of the woman he killed’s hus­band whom he killed. Brother is just as intent on killing Ryono­suke, at the behest of Ryonosuke’s late father. At least there is some par­ity here. Every­one wants Ryono­suke dead, and Ryono­suke wants to kill every­one. Mean­while, the grand-daughter of a man that Ryono­suke killed is stuck in geisha-training and a thief that Ryono­suke almost killed who has sup­ported the grand-daughter of the man that Ryono­suke killed is try­ing to free her. They end up com­ing into con­tact with the brother of the dead hus­band with the dead wife and dead child that Ryono­suke killed. Ryono­suke ends up with the grand-daughter of the [oh, fuck it] in a room where he has just been asked to kill the right-hand man of the boss he serves.

The pos­si­bil­ity of more death finally catches up with him and Ryono­suke is dri­ven mad by the shades of those he has killed. He tries to kill them again, but the ronin with whom he is cur­rently asso­ci­ated try to kill him in order to stop the mad­ness. Of course, he kills most of them. The film ends dur­ing this bat­tle, so likely, no one gets their vengeance.

The fenc­ing did not impress me. I could be a badass samu­rai judg­ing by the qual­ity of Ryonosuke’s oppo­nents. Most of them just run past him with their katana held high. They don’t even try to hit him. It is like chop­ping bam­boo. Yet the focus on Ryonosuke’s gen­eral emo­tion­less aspect as it grows through­out the film and the bat­tle with the shades [pun oh so very intended] are genius scenes. The shade fight is on par with the house of mir­rors from The Lady of Shang­hai in terms of cin­e­matic artistry. There are a cou­ple hun­dred other dead samu­rai in this film [some of which you can see below] but I doubt you want to hear about them. Samu­rai must have grown on trees dur­ing the shogu­nate. This is a samu­rai movie that def­i­nitely grows on you. Track it down if you like samu­rai flicks and haven’t seen this one.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Geof­frey O’Brien
• A teaser for the film. I apol­o­gize for the clas­sic rock accom­pa­ni­ment to this, but at least there are a few clips of the cli­mac­tic wig out.
• Bad as the fight scenes were, they are Oscar-winning per­for­mances com­pared to this. [I have since learned that the bad guy in this film is Akron’s own Don Niam.]

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #12: Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.

This will be short since I don’t know if I’m capa­ble of speak­ing crit­i­cally about a film that is so near and dear to my heart. In a sense, its exe­cu­tion was pre­scient, though rock­u­men­taries like The Song Remains The Same and the minu­tiae of the lives of ‘70s super­groups were com­mon when Spinal Tap appeared, there was no way to pre­dict that its focus and satire would be just as applic­a­ble a decade later when VH1 started mak­ing a This is Spinal Tap for every dude that’s ever tuned a gui­tar. This is so potent that every VH1 Behind the Music becomes a joke in its shadow.

Mak­ing a fake doc­u­men­tary that remains believ­able as a doc yet hilar­i­ous and heart­warm­ing is no mean feat. Where stan­dard fic­tion films can get away with leav­ing out cer­tain visual details, and true doc­u­men­taries have them sup­plied with no effort, a mock­u­men­tary must be planned down to the place­ment of the last pimento-stuffed olive and trampy, inco­her­ent fan. This is com­pletely nailed by the cre­ative tal­ent behind the film. From the drugged-out keyboardist’s exact place­ment always vis­i­ble on the periph­ery and included seem­ingly only as an after­thought, to the string of drum­mer deaths and unin­tel­li­gi­ble artis­tic blath­er­ings and rib­ald ado­les­cent lyrics of the cre­ative tal­ent of the band, a com­pos­ite is cre­ated that encom­passes the entire State of Rock of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Echoes of Led Zep­pelin, Queen, The Bea­t­les and psy­che­delia ring through­out and cou­ple with the des­per­a­tion and addic­tion to celebrity in such a way that the petty human­ity of these larger than life char­ac­ters is exposed. In this light, the achieve­ment of This Is Spinal Tap is ulti­mately more human­ist than comedic. The com­edy serves the human­ism. Christo­pher Guest and com­pany suc­ceed so well in their mock­u­men­taries because ill-intentioned mock­ery has no place in their films. They poke fun at what is most ridicu­lous because those are the very traits that they love the best.

• Cri­te­rion essay by Peter Occhiogrosso
• The Unof­fi­cial Spinal Tap site
• Spinal Tap mp3s
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #332: Luis Buñuel’s Virid­i­ana.

Virid­ian comes from the Latin viridis, mean­ing green, but color has lit­tle to do with Buñuel’s Virid­i­ana. He took the name from the life of a St. Virid­i­ana [Feb 1st], but that is tan­gen­tial to the action of the film. It is almost eas­ier to talk about what this film isn’t than about what it is, an influ­ence which stems, I think, from Buñuel’s asso­ci­a­tions with sur­re­al­ism and his own under­stat­edly inter­est­ing per­son­al­ity. I’ve seen Un chien andalou and Las Hur­des, but this is the first of Buñuel’s work that I’ve seen with an obvi­ous nar­ra­tive struc­ture. The film itself is above aver­age, but it becomes more inter­est­ing when placed within the con­text of its pro­duc­tion and distribution.

This won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was then promptly denounced by the Vat­i­can, sub­se­quently banned in Spain [after being approved by the Franco’s fas­cist cen­sors] and all kinds of other hoopla. This is a film where many things are fetishized, a lit­tle girl’s legs, the novice Viridiana’s legs, women’s cloth­ing; and other things are merely day to day tongue-in-cheek comedic mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tions, jump-rope, cloth, music and art. Above all, Virid­i­ana is a com­edy in the old­est sense of the word. The main char­ac­ters never prac­tice what they preach, are blind to their own faults, and seem dri­ven more by instinct than will or rea­son. The blas­phe­mous aspects of the film seem to me to be less blas­phe­mous and rather more con­cerned with point­ing out struc­tural inad­e­qua­cies in the rela­tion­ship between real life and spir­i­tual life.

Buñuel appears to be mak­ing pointed com­men­taries about the land he returned to after a 20 year exile and the world that could creat fas­cist Spain. I don’t think the com­men­taries are inten­tional, because the film is not preachy, but there are unavoid­able reflec­tions of Buñuel’s per­sonal world­view echo­ing through­out. His dis­taste for modes of con­trol is quite evi­dent in Virid­i­ana. Virid­i­ana her­self tries to con­trol and direct the wel­fare of the beg­gars that she takes in, but does more to restrict than allow the beg­gars room to live. Sim­i­larly Don Jaime and Don Jorge’s attempts to con­trol the women in their lives show the empti­ness of the men’s lives and a pos­si­ble weak­ness in the cul­ture of Spain at the time [that’s just a guess]. The con­trol cri­tique is most obvi­ous in the reli­gious aspects, and in the end it seems that the mes­sage is: Accept and revel in the messi­ness of life instead of try­ing to con­trol it.

Almost an anar­chic mes­sage and cer­tainly a sur­re­al­ist one.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Wood
• Objects of Desire: Con­ver­sa­tions with Luis Buñuel [If you’re will­ing to drop 6 bucks to read this inter­view with Buñuel about Virid­i­ana and other films]
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle on Luis Buñuel and Viridiana

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #294: Anthony Asquith’s The Brown­ing Ver­sion.

Sum­mer is over and since all the chil­dren are head­ing back to school I thought I’d bet­ter pick up where I left off 4 months ago and start watch­ing Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion films again. This film hap­pens to take place at the end of a school year, but no mat­ter. The Brown­ing Ver­sion is a movie based on Ter­ence Rattigan’s play of the same name. Rat­ti­gan also wrote the screen­play for this film, which won an award at Cannes over 50 years ago. The action flows around an old clas­sics teacher named Andrew Crocker-Harris who has been bro­ken down by his wife and his nearly 20 years of teaching.

Crocker-Harris is every­thing that peo­ple loathe in a per­son, always punc­tual, unbend­ingly respect­ful of every rule, no mat­ter how triv­ial, and appar­ently with­out a sense of humor or any other emo­tion. He is con­sis­tently referred to as a dead man, a corpse, and a man with­out a soul. His stu­dents live in fear of him, his wife has cuck­olded him, and he is being replaced by a younger more mod­ern teacher. Even the estab­lish­ment is cast­ing him aside with­out a pen­sion and com­pound­ing the injury by ask­ing him to give his give up his place of honor at the vale­dic­tory convocation.

There is one young stu­dent who feels sorry for the chap and makes efforts to break through the accre­tion of apa­thy that has immo­bi­lized the once bril­liant Crocker-Harris. His inter­est in Aeschylus’s Agamem­non reminds Crocker-Harris of his past youth­ful exu­ber­ance regard­ing the same play. He opens up slightly and tells young Taplow that he once attempted his own trans­la­tion in rhyming cou­plets, but never com­pleted it. Later, Taplow buys Crocker-Harris the Brown­ing ver­sion of the Agamem­non, and inscribes, in Greek, the ded­i­ca­tion “God from afar looks gra­ciously on a gen­tle mas­ter.” [For an inter­est­ing reflec­tion and reverse engi­neer­ing of the Greek usage in the film see here.] This ded­i­ca­tion, com­ing as it does at the end of a day full of blows, touches Crocker-Harris so deeply that he begins to cry. Though his wife still tries to crush his soul, this small act even­tu­ally gives Crocker-Harris the strength nec­es­sary to accept respon­si­bil­ity for his past and the deter­mi­na­tion to do bet­ter in the time left him.

Two the­matic ele­ments were highly vis­i­ble to me in this film. The first is the obses­sion with time as a diegetic motive. Crocker-Harris, of course, is the most obsessed with it, and the con­stant bell-ringing and dec­la­ra­tions of what time it is [for din­ner, for fire­works, for tea] make it seem as though despite all his efforts, time is merely pass­ing him by. The sec­ond theme is the film’s def­i­nite rela­tion and inter­ac­tion with The Agamem­non. In many ways Crocker-Harris’s life mir­rors the life of Agamem­non, even down to the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, but the dif­fer­ence is that Agamem­non is phys­i­cally killed, while Crocker-Harris is only soul-dead. This cre­ates an inter­est­ing space for diver­sion from the orig­i­nal and allows the film more room for con­tem­po­rary concerns.

Asquith’s shot selec­tion is excel­lent as well. Crocker-Harris is usu­ally seen in pro­file or slightly from behind, adding a sense of alien­ation and unap­proach­a­bil­ity to his already tac­i­turn nature. Even when he breaks down and cries, we only see his back. Only toward the end, when Crocker-Harris begins to take charge of his life again, does he start to take an active posi­tion in the shot. Michael Redgrave’s act­ing is superb and fits hand-in-glove with Rattigan’s screen­play. While the film isn’t flashy at any point, for fans of drama and ele­gance, this is a film to see.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Geof­frey Mac­Nab
• Tran­scrip­tion and clip of Crocker-Harris’s farewell speech.
• Wikipedia arti­cle on Ter­ence Rattigan’s play.
• The Brown­ing ver­sion of Aeschylus’s Agamem­non at perseus.tufts.edu. [I’m get­ting flashbacks]

I saw Ter­ence Malick’s The New World a few days ago. He’s really known for his cin­e­matog­ra­phy, [You must see Days of Heaven if you’ve not already] but what struck me most about The New World was the mon­tage. Not the spin­ning news­pa­per stuff that is most preva­lent, but hon­est to God rhyth­mic mon­tage. The film has a dis­tinctly small amount of dia­logue and just slightly more nar­ra­tion. It would work as a silent and the edit­ing is inspired in its hybridiza­tion of Soviet mon­tage and Godard-legacy jump cuts. I’d love to sit with the edi­tors and pick their brains.

The story didn’t do so much for me though.

My newest film infat­u­a­tion is For­bid­den Zone, a cre­ation by The Mys­tic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and fea­tur­ing a great sound­track enhanced by Danny Elfman.

True to my ever-eclectic film taste, this cult mas­ter­piece com­bines my favorite Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, old style Bosco car­toon­ish­ness, extra-dimensions, midgets [Herve Vil­lechaize!], frog but­lers, hot top­less women, and bondage into a strange con­fec­tion of joy [to me at least]. This is def­i­nitely some­thing you should see at some point in your life. Many thanks go to Ball­room John­son and Andy at The Lit for intro­duc­ing me to this film. I now own it on DVD, though it took 6 weeks to get it. Here is another take on it and the offi­cial site [images]. Thanks to YouTube, you can see some clips:

• Squeezit the Moocher [Danny Elf­man as Satan!]
• Bim Bam Boom
• Pico and Sepul­veda
• Learn Your ABCs
• Witch’s Egg [Susan Tyrell!]

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #61: Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

I’m tak­ing a bit of a break from watch­ing Cri­te­rion films I’ve not seen before and doing a lit­tle catch-up by writ­ing reviews for films I’d seen before I decided to work on this list. Appro­pri­ately, Monty Python’s Life of Brian starts off this pseudo-sabbatical. Like most geeks, I’ve been a Python fan since early high school, and I’ve seen this film on the order of a dozen times or so. It has always been my sec­ond favorite after The Holy Grail, but I’ll read­ily admit that it is their best cin­e­matic work. In addi­tion to the taut­ness of the film the satire and social cri­tique is multi-layered and still mean­ing­ful to this day.

The large num­ber of terrorist/resistance orga­ni­za­tions empha­size and reil­lu­mi­nate the fact that Middle-Eastern strife has been a con­stant for thou­sands of years. By point­ing this out in comedic terms, the idiocy of such vio­lence is under­scored. There is anger and frus­tra­tion hid­den behind the com­edy as well; much of it seem­ingly derived from the gen­eral igno­rance and sheep-like qual­ity of humans en masse. Here too, the Pythons can preach with­out being preachy, and show time and again how peo­ple take lessons from the Bible and twist them to their own ends. We see that every­one has an ulte­rior motive, although they might be blind to it them­selves. Extrem­ism is the tar­get here, whether from an aggra­vat­ingly polit­i­cally cor­rect demo­c­ra­tic ter­ror­ist group or from the speech and mercy imped­i­mented Roman tyranny.

Yet there is also com­pas­sion and love in the com­edy. Jesus is never a tar­get and because of this it is pos­si­ble to rec­og­nize the Python’s own recog­ni­tion that sheep need a shep­herd, some­one as gen­uine as a Jesus or Brian. There is just the right blend of ham and grav­i­tas in the Python’s treat­ment of the Jews [that joke is prob­a­bly in bad taste] to know that strug­gles against oppres­sion are respected. In fact, the silli­ness serves as a kind of anthem to those who think that com­edy is a lesser art than drama or that it can­not tell as impor­tant a tale. If any­thing, I think it is prob­a­bly even more dif­fi­cult. Life of Brian man­ages it with ease.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by George Perry.
• A com­plete script of the film and other resources.
• The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #140: Fed­erico Fellini’s 8 ½.

Cin­ema is the art form that lends itself most eas­ily to post­mod­ernism and 8 ½ is the most snugly post­mod­ern film I’ve seen in a long time. Self-reflexivity is its bread and but­ter, and while that may be gim­micky now, it was rightly pow­er­ful when this film was ini­tially released. Other stan­dards of pomo per­me­ate the struc­ture and the die­ge­sis, namely a heavy help­ing of sym­bol­ism, and a decon­struc­tive psy­cho­analy­sis of the main character’s exis­ten­tial cri­sis. With such rich fod­der for the lit crit and cinecrit crowd, it is no won­der this film is so talked about. I even won­der if its advent, cou­pled with auteur the­ory, cat­alyzed the homog­e­niza­tion of directorial-based film crit­i­cism, where every­thing becomes auto-biographical. Which came first, the direc­tor or his critic?

While the film is pretty good, it doesn’t make me cream my jeans, or even want to watch it again, really. This is not the film’s fault. For some unknown rea­son, like most Ital­ian cin­ema, it just isn’t to my taste. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy and mise-en-scene are nearly per­fect, but the pace and inter­nal­ized cri­sis dragged a bit for me. Guido is obvi­ously com­pletely inde­ci­sive and has been occlud­ing this for months by only talk­ing halfway to every­one who crosses his path. The ten­sion betwen desire and duty plays itself out in dream sequences that indi­cate that the inde­ci­sion is present because Guido’s cur­rent focus is on infi­delity, or, per­haps, an exam­i­na­tion of his abil­ity to love. Guido is piti­ful, not because he is such a bas­tard, but because he has a nearly per­fect life and hasn’t learned how to appre­ci­ate it.

The self-reflexivity ulti­mately dis­in­te­grates, since Guido’s film does not get made, but Fellini’s goes on to gar­ner great fame. This adds a layer of irony that I think was likely inten­tional, but makes the sense of the film a bit too murky for my taste, like a cake with too much frost­ing. Maybe I just haven’t learned to appre­ci­ate it.

• Cri­te­rion excerpt from I, Fellini by Fed­erico Fellini
• Cri­te­rion essay by Tulio Kezich
• Cri­te­rion essay by Alexan­der Sesonske
• Cri­te­rion excerpt from I, Fellini (reprise) by Fed­erico Fellini

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #328: Louis Malle’s Mur­mur of the Heart.

In the Criterion-associated strange syn­er­gies of my life I’ve had two sep­a­rate works in two sep­a­rate days that replay the story of Oedi­pus and his mother in new fash­ions. First, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, in which the 15 year old pro­tag­o­nist [might have] killed his father and def­i­nitely slept with his mother a few times and now Malle’s Mur­mur of the Heart in which the 14 year old main char­ac­ter has no love for his father and sleeps with his mother once. In these works, the rev­e­la­tion of the act is a precipice that allows for res­o­lu­tion. For me, the par­tic­u­lars aren’t impor­tant, but the man­ner of the rev­e­la­tion and the out­come of the act are. I don’t think this just applies to incest, but to any turn­ing point in a narrative.

The man­ner and mech­a­nism is pre­med­i­tated by the author. The out­come is the character’s reac­tion to what has occurred. Very dif­fer­ent functions.

In Mur­mur of the Heart, Malle uses a major­ity of the film to set-up an event that is noth­ing more than a sim­ple edit. Yet that cut has the force of nearly two-hours of expo­si­tion behind it and is all the more pow­er­ful for its brevity. For Lau­rent, it serves as a suc­cess­ful spring­board into adult­hood in a film filled with unsuc­cess­ful attempt after unsuc­cess­ful attempt. The film recalled Amer­i­can Beauty in form and func­tion, and while the Oedi­pal stuff is miss­ing from that film, the same middle-class dis­sat­is­fac­tion that plagues Kevin Spacey’s char­ac­ter also fills Laurent’s mother. Her hus­band and her lover make no attempts to under­stand her, and Lau­rent seems to do so uncon­sciously. She comes to under­stand him and his under­stand­ing of her, and their love scene mir­rors this change; from a child and mother cud­dling, to a [n albeit] young man and a woman who love each other.

It almost seems appro­pri­ate that Lau­rent, whose whole life has been guided by his mother’s eye and his nascent adult­hood almost smoth­ered by her atten­tion is “made a man” by her. His agency becomes more and more focused as the film pro­gresses, and after he finally com­pletes the sex act, he seems much more com­fort­able in his own skin. The film is per­me­ated with great jazz music [which has been sig­nif­i­cantly white­washed in recent times] that retains seeds of the shock­ing sex­ual frank­ness and dan­ger that early jazz was asso­ci­ated with. The end result is a film that is a steady expo­si­tion of the pen­du­lous dan­gers of coming-of-age and also a strik­ing cri­tique of the inad­e­quacy of middle-class fam­ily life.

• Cri­te­rion essay by Michael Sragow
• Offi­cial Louis Malle site

I went to an advance [for Cleve­land] screen­ing of The Promise last night at the Cedar Lee. This is one of those films that uses CG stuff to keep the bud­get low at the price of qual­ity. I can’t decide if I’d like it bet­ter as com­pletely live-action with no CG or com­pletely done in hand-drawn ani­ma­tion. Either option has its pos­i­tives, but the use of CG in this film, in order to cre­ate a feel­ing of fan­tasy, is much less effec­tive than either of the options I’d sug­gest. Hand drawn ani­ma­tion [I’d say anime, but this film is Chi­nese] would have allowed the fan­tas­tic natures of the char­ac­ters and the realm itself to shine forth at the price of the amaz­ing cos­tumes and chore­o­graphed sequences [although I’m also offi­cially tired of wire-fu, there were other scenes that were quite nice]. A pure live-action film would have echoed Crouch­ing Tiger, Hid­den Dragon even more than the CG-hybrid ver­sion does cur­rently and would likely have lost much of its fan­tas­tic scenery in favor of more nuanced [also offi­cially tired of that word] act­ing and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. As for the story… meh, noth­ing I haven’t seen or read a gril­lion times before.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #240: Yasu­jiro Ozu’s Early Sum­mer.

As con­tem­po­rary dra­mas go, Ozu’s Early Sum­mer man­ages to select issues that are both time­less and prac­ti­cal in the instant of their gen­e­sis. It is at once a story of post-war Japan and fam­ily cri­sis, and a chance to exam­ine both rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and res­ig­na­tion to the alter­ing sta­tus quo. [Can you tell I’m try­ing to sound as pompous as possible?]

Ozu’s vision of post­war Japan is a good ful­crum for com­par­ing Japan­ese cin­ema that focuses on the tra­di­tional lifestyle, and that which takes rapidly assim­i­lated West­ern cul­ture as its focus. In this film, women in tra­di­tional garb visit mod­ern offices and sit in chairs and white-coated doc­tors of inter­nal med­i­cine come home to paper walls and extended fam­ily. Lanes are still made of dirt, but women ride the train into Tokyo to earn their pay­checks. It is the chang­ing role of women, and their imme­di­ate and con­fi­dent embrace of oppor­tu­nity [at least in the film’s world] that ends up caus­ing the rel­a­tively minor prob­lem that loosely serves as the plot.

Three gen­er­a­tions of the Mamiya fam­ily live in the same house, a not uncom­mon set-up in tra­di­tional Japan. Noriko, how­ever, is the untra­di­tional fam­ily mem­ber. At twenty-eight, she remains hap­pily unmar­ried. Every­one, includ­ing her boss, wants to get her hitched. They focus on men who have good prospects, not wor­ry­ing about love in the slight­est. The match-making is meant to improve the family’s lot, any hap­pi­ness would be a mere byprod­uct. Noriko, mainly through her silence, is polite but unwill­ing to com­mit to mar­ry­ing a man her boss has rec­om­mended to her. Despite all of this, her fam­ily acts as if she is already as good as mar­ried, and there is a pal­pa­ble sense of relief. Then, Noriko chooses to marry a wid­ower with a child, a man who also has good prospects and is her child­hood friend. She doesn’t admit that she is in love, but she says she knows Yabe well enough that she can trust him all her life.

The fam­ily doesn’t like the fact that she made this choice with­out con­sult­ing them, nor do they like that Noriko will have to move to Akita. Noriko’s par­ents had promised Uncle that they would move to Yam­ato when Noriko mar­ried. Through her own deci­sion for mar­riage, some­thing all wanted for her, she scat­ters the fam­ily. Yet despite all of this anger and poignancy, the love of the fam­ily sus­tains. The grand­fa­ther is resigned to the changes but thank­ful for the hap­pi­ness he’s had, Koichi is focused on his doc­torly ambi­tions, and Noriko fully embraces the new world that is open­ing for her. They all know the changes are inevitable.

I have to say that I really like Ozu’s style. Appar­ently he only used two height setups for his cam­era on a tri­pod, and cam­era move­ment is almost nonex­is­tent, and serves more as a end-of-scene flour­ish and segue than as any­thing else. Since he only uses two heights, the fram­ing of his shots is deter­mined only by the dis­tance he puts the cam­era from the action. Cuts in retain the same height but alter the frame sig­nif­i­cantly, nonethe­less. He also likes to hold shots after the scene is ended to allow a brief moment of palate cleans­ing before the next action begins. I’m quite inter­ested in watch­ing more by Ozu.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by David Bor­d­well
• Jim Jar­musch on Ozu [from Art Forum mag­a­zine]
• An Ozu fan page

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #329: Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien.

Lacombe, Lucien is a film inten­tion­ally filled with sym­bols, almost alle­gor­i­cal in effect, per­tain­ing to issues about the loy­alty and respon­si­bil­ity of French civil­ians dur­ing the Ger­man occu­pa­tion in World War II. Lucien is nec­es­sar­ily the most nuanced char­ac­ter, since the film cen­ters on his expe­ri­ences, yet Pierre Blaise’s stone-faced por­trayal and assym­met­ric dia­logue ini­tially cre­ate a very unsym­pa­thetic view his personality.

He’s still ado­lesc­ing, but his peas­ant upbring­ing ensures that he is a bit bet­ter equipped to fend for him­self than might be expected. Death sur­rounds him, he acts as its instru­ment through most of the film, killing birds and rab­bits, haul­ing a dead horse, deliv­er­ing up his towns­folk to be tor­tured, going on raids and con­stantly exam­in­ing or clean­ing his guns. Yet dur­ing all of this, Malle leaves hints both sub­tle and not so sub­tle that Lucien will ulti­mately be death’s victim.

Lucien ini­tially attempts to join the Under­ground, but is rejected because he is too young and untried. He even­tu­ally gets picked up by some French who are work­ing as Ger­man police, is ques­tioned and then brought into the orga­ni­za­tion. Malle seems to delib­er­ately make it appear that Lucien is hook­ing up with gang­sters, the same sym­bols attach­ing to his sta­tus within the group as we might see in The Pub­lic Enemy or Good­fel­las, a first suit, a first gun, etc. He even loses his vir­gin­ity to the ugly maid Marie.

It is the gain­ing of his suit that causes Lucien to ques­tion his loy­al­ties. The tai­lor, Albert Horn, is a rich Jew who has man­aged to keep away from the Ger­mans for most of the war, mainly by brib­ing a French Gestapo agent to keep him safe. We hear a piano play­ing in the back­ground, but we don’t see the pianist [although we know she pretty much has to be a beau­ti­ful young Jew­ess] until Lucien returns for a fit­ting. Even then there is very lit­tle reac­tion to their first sights of each other, but we sense a perk­ing of ears and other things. Lucien uses his Gestapo clout to bully his way into their lives in pur­suit of the Jew’s daugh­ter who hap­pens to be named…France.

This seems laugh­able because it is so bla­tant, but it allows Malle to ulilize dou­ble enten­dre to mag­nif­i­cent affect. In Lucien’s dis­cus­sions with Albert, it is hard to deter­mine whether they are talk­ing about France the coun­try, France the woman or both. As cul­tured Parisians, the Horns are polite but wary of Lucien’s pres­ence, and the never-ending patience of Mon­sieur Horn adds a healthy dose of fear to the equa­tion, since only a man who knows that Lucien holds the power to hand them over could take so much churlishness.

Despite all of this, Lucien means well, he just knows no bet­ter. I started out the movie with a healthy dose of dis­like for him, but by the end he is quite sym­pa­thetic. He thinks he does an excel­lent job hid­ing his emo­tions, and using mis­di­rec­tion in speech to fur­ther obscure his feel­ings, but every­one can read him like a book. Even in the moments when he is off in the coun­try won­der­ing to him­self, and hid­ing from the pur­suit of France we can tell that he is yearn­ing for something…perhaps a France that will pro­vide him with fulfillment.

• Couldn’t really find much for this film.

Thank­fully I’ve seen a ton of these already. The bul­leted and bolded ones. From Roger Ebert:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) Stan­ley Kubrick
• The 400 Blows” (1959) Fran­cois Truf­faut
• “8 1/2″ (1963) Fed­erico Fellini
“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) Werner Her­zog
• Alien” (1979) Rid­ley Scott
“All About Eve” (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
• Annie Hall” (1977) Woody Allen
• Apoc­a­lypse Now” (1979) Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola*
• Bambi” (1942) Dis­ney
• The Bat­tle­ship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisen­stein
“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) William Wyler
“The Big Red One” (1980) Samuel Fuller
• The Bicy­cle Thief” (1949) Vit­to­rio De Sica
• The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
• Blade Run­ner” (1982) Rid­ley Scott
“Blowup” (1966) Michelan­gelo Anto­nioni
“Blue Vel­vet” (1986) David Lynch
“Bon­nie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
• Breath­less” (1959 Jean-Luc Godard
• Bring­ing Up Baby” (1938) Howard Hawks
“Car­rie” (1975) Brian DePalma
• Casablanca” (1942) Michael Cur­tiz
• Un Chien Andalou” (1928) Luis Bunuel & Sal­vador Dali
“Chil­dren of Par­adise” / “Les Enfants du Par­adis” (1945) Mar­cel Carne
• Chi­na­town” (1974) Roman Polan­ski
• Cit­i­zen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
• A Clock­work Orange” (1971) Stan­ley Kubrick
“The Cry­ing Game” (1992) Neil Jor­dan
• The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) Robert Wise
“Days of Heaven” (1978) Ter­ence Mal­ick
• Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
“The Dis­creet Charm of the Bour­geoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
• Do the Right Thing” (1989 Spike Lee
“La Dolce Vita” (1960) Fed­erico Fellini
• Dou­ble Indem­nity” (1944) Billy Wilder
• Dr. Strangelove” (1964) Stan­ley Kubrick
“Duck Soup” (1933) Leo McCarey
• E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) Steven Spiel­berg
• Easy Rider” (1969) Den­nis Hop­per
• The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) Irvin Ker­sh­ner
• The Exor­cist” (1973) William Fried­kin
• Fargo” (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
• Fight Club” (1999) David Fincher
• “Franken­stein” (1931) James Whale
“The Gen­eral” (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruck­man
• The God­fa­ther,” “The God­fa­ther, Part II” (1972, 1974) Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola
• Gone With the Wind” (1939) Vic­tor Flem­ing
• Good­Fel­las” (1990) Mar­tin Scors­ese
• The Grad­u­ate” (1967) Mike Nichols
• Hal­loween” (1978) John Car­pen­ter
• A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) Richard Lester
• Intol­er­ance” (1916) D.W. Grif­fith
“It’s a Gift” (1934) Nor­man Z. McLeod
• It’s a Won­der­ful Life” (1946) Frank Capra
• Jaws” (1975) Steven Spiel­berg
“The Lady Eve” (1941) Pre­ston Sturges
• Lawrence of Ara­bia” (1962) David Lean
“M” (1931) Fritz Lang
• Mad Max 2″ / “The Road War­rior” (1981) George Miller
• The Mal­tese Fal­con” (1941) John Hus­ton
• The Manchurian Can­di­date” (1962) John Franken­heimer
• Metrop­o­lis” (1926) Fritz Lang
• Mod­ern Times” (1936) Charles Chap­lin
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
“Nashville” (1975) Robert Alt­man
“The Night of the Hunter” (1955) Charles Laughton
• Night of the Liv­ing Dead” (1968) George Romero
• North by North­west” (1959) Alfred Hitch­cock
• Nos­fer­atu” (1922) F.W. Mur­nau
• On the Water­front” (1954) Elia Kazan
“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Ser­gio Leone
• Out of the Past” (1947) Jacques Tournier
“Per­sona” (1966) Ing­mar Bergman
• “Pink Flamin­gos” (1972) John Waters
• Psy­cho” (1960) Alfred Hitch­cock
“Pulp Fic­tion” (1994) Quentin Taran­tino
• Rashomon” (1950) Akira Kuro­sawa
• Rear Win­dow” (1954) Alfred Hitch­cock
• Rebel With­out a Cause” (1955) Nicholas Ray
“Red River” (1948) Howard Hawks
“Repul­sion” (1965) Roman Polan­ski
“The Rules of the Game” (1939) Jean Renoir
“Scar­face” (1932) Howard Hawks
“The Scar­let Empress” (1934) Josef von Stern­berg
• Schindler’s List” (1993) Steven Spiel­berg
• The Searchers” (1956) John Ford
• The Seven Samu­rai” (1954) Akira Kuro­sawa
• Sin­gin’ in the Rain” (1952) Stan­ley Donen & Gene Kelly
• Some Like It Hot” (1959) Billy Wilder
“A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
• A Street­car Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
• Sun­set Boule­vard” (1950) Billy Wilder
“Taxi Dri­ver” (1976) Mar­tin Scors­ese
• The Third Man” (1949) Carol Reed
“Tokyo Story” (1953) Yasu­jiro Ozu
• Touch of Evil” (1958) Orson Welles
“The Trea­sure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) John Hus­ton
“Trou­ble in Par­adise” (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
• Ver­tigo” (1958) Alfred Hitch­cock
“West Side Story” (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
• The Wild Bunch” (1969) Sam Peck­in­pah
• The Wiz­ard of Oz” (1939) Vic­tor Fleming

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #326: Whit Stillman’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan.

Met­ro­pol­i­tan is a movie about the Urban Haute Bour­geoisie, debu­tantes and their escorts, peo­ple who read lit­er­ary crit­i­cism but not the actual books, and kids who obses­sively worry about their own down­fall, debate the­o­ret­i­cal polit­i­cal sys­tems and don’t know how to drive a car. I would detest hav­ing even the slight­est con­tact with these peo­ple, who are essen­tially all talk and no follow-through. Yet I enjoyed Met­ro­pol­i­tan and I’m glad it made me go mental.

Met­ro­pol­i­tan is a movie about class, and though the only class present is the upper-class, the “UC” as the char­ac­ters so smarmily refer to it, this focused approach effec­tively made me exam­ine my own class sit­u­a­tion in a new light. Luc Sante’s essay, linked at the end of this post, says that Amer­ica pre­tends that class doesn’t exist. I think this is close but not quite. I think many peo­ple who aren’t con­sider them­selves to be mid­dle class. This makes sense, since mid­dle class can cover ground from some­one like me who makes less than $30k a year to some­one like a sur­geon, who might make twenty times as much. We’re still peo­ple make ends meet by work­ing for our pay. In Met­ro­pol­i­tan, dis­cus­sion cen­ters not on the neces­sity of work to make ends meet, but on the choices of pro­fes­sion that should main­tain or strengthen their sta­tus as UHB. They don’t need to work, but they need some­thing to fill the time.

The char­ac­ter that lets us [middle-classers] enter in to this world is an ex-trust fund kid who, after his par­ents’ divorce, has become one of the mid­dle class. In this movie, one is never poor, only “finan­cially lim­ited.” But Tom’s finan­cial inad­e­quacy is bla­tant. He has a rented tuxedo and can’t afford a great­coat to keep off the chill of Man­hat­tan win­ter. His parent’s are also divorced, another mid­dle class dis­tinc­tion. Yet he went to prep school and has the right pedi­gree in all other aspects. In fact, just hav­ing a pedi­gree helps him enor­mously. Some folks think he is a fake, but as the film devel­ops we find that, to some extent, each char­ac­ter is play­ing the role of the UHB at the price of his or her own soul, and they’re all fakes. Most impor­tantly we learn that Nick, who seems to be the ulti­mate UHB, is closer to Tom than we realize.

This trig­gered all kinds of thought processses. I real­ized that I had been watch­ing the eco­nom­i­cally derived cul­tural aspects of the upper class, which func­tions like any other cul­tural base, with its own taboos, rites of pas­sage and eti­quette. This in turn made me exam­ine the cul­tural aspects that have resulted from my own mid­dle class exis­tence. This is the main strength of the film, by show­ing us another class try­ing to fig­ure itself out, we in turn exam­ine our own sta­tus and role. It almost seems to indi­cate that cul­ture does more to sti­fle true expres­sions of self than ease inter­ac­tion with oth­ers. Per­haps this is merely an effect of the exam­i­na­tion of the strictly con­trolled exclu­siv­ity of the UHB, but I found myself relat­ing to almost every male char­ac­ter in the film. It would be inter­est­ing to watch it with a woman to see if she feels the same in regard to the debs.

This film would be a good tag team with Spike Lee’s Bam­boo­zled for an exam­i­na­tion on how class and eth­nic­ity are knotted.

Tom also serves as a reflec­tion of the movie itself, which has be appear high class while being “finan­cially lim­ited.” I for­got to men­tion that.

• Cri­te­rion essay by Luc Sante
• The Wikipedia on class

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #105: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Spar­ta­cus.

The first time I saw this film I was about ten. There­fore I missed all the polit­i­cal crit­i­cism, sex­ual under­tones [there should totally be a lounge band called The Sex­ual Under­tones] and pathos con­tained in the film. I also knew jack about film his­tory, so the impor­tance of this epic in terms of back­lot Hol­ly­wood machi­na­tions was also lost upon me. Now that I’ve seen it again, 15 years later, I have a slightly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, although ulti­mately the same feel­ing about the film itself.

Spar­ta­cus is more about the peo­ple who made it and the rea­sons they made it and how they made it than it is about some long-dead rev­o­lu­tion­ary with a humon­gous chin. So many peo­ple had a vested inter­est in mak­ing Spar­ta­cus suc­ceed [espe­cially Kirk Dou­glas as producer-actor, Kubrick as direc­tor and Dal­ton Trumbo finally using his own name again as screen­writer] that the not-so-subtle social­ist fla­vor­ing of the slave revolt mir­rors the mav­er­ick wills of the film­mak­ers. This is a good exam­ple of why I don’t like auteur the­ory; too many peo­ple are involved in the pro­duc­tion of a film and leave their mark on it, to speak of it solely as a director’s creation.

The reac­tionary tone to McCarthyite Com­mu­nist witch-hunting could also find reflec­tions with con­tem­po­rary events; the focus on order at the cost of free­dom, the com­pil­ing of lists of trai­tors, the oppos­ing fac­tions whose polit­i­cal maneu­ver­ings even­tu­ally destroy Spar­ta­cus. Yet where the noble goal of Spar­ta­cus ulti­mately fails, the efforts of Dou­glas & Co. suc­ceeded in revi­tal­iz­ing a Hol­ly­wood that had been toe­ing the line to a select group of peo­ple for far too long. Even though the film moves far too slowly for my taste, I think we could use another Spar­ta­cus anytime.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Stephen Far­ber
• Wikipedia arti­cle on the film

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #59: Lil­iana Cavani’s The Night Porter.

There is a pic­ture of a naked woman at the end of this review. If you or your work­place has a prob­lem with that, you should prob­a­bly not read this or wait until you get home.

The Night Porter is a film about a sado­masochis­tic rela­tion­ship between an SS offi­cer and a con­cen­tra­tion camp pris­oner. The film takes place in 1957, but nei­ther Max [Dirk Bog­a­rde] or Lucia [Char­lotte Ram­pling] have moved on from their old lives as Nazi and pris­oner, respectively.

Max is the night porter at a Vien­nese hotel, still proud of his Nazi past, per­haps sub­con­sciously wracked by guilt, and now forced to “wipe people’s asses;” a taker of orders, not a giver of them. Lucia, emo­tion­ally needy and by a twist of fate, is stay­ing at the hotel with her con­duc­tor hus­band. They run into each other and, out of fear and obses­sion, stalk each other until the hus­band leaves town. Then Max slaps her around a bit and they have a rip-roaring good shag.

This couldn’t have hap­pened at a worse time for Max, he and his SS com­pa­tri­ots are per­form­ing some sort of psy­cho­an­a­lytic mock tri­als on each other, in attempts to assuage [or fully repress] any guilt they feel for their actions dur­ing the war. After each per­son has had their trial, any wit­nesses that remain alive are “filed away” and all paper trails com­pletely destroyed. These men still feel that the Nazi dream can be ful­filled, and they know there is still at least one woman alive who knows about Max. Unfor­tu­nately, Max is in love with her, and the feel­ing is returned.

The Nazis lay siege to Max & Lucia, by keep­ing a 24/7 watch on his apart­ment. If either of them leave, they will be killed. They’re okay with this at first, Max chains Lucia up so “they can’t take her away” and they play their power and pain games with each other. When they are almost out of food, Lucia starts gob­bling jam, they wres­tle over it and then have a rip-roaring good shag. Then, after their power is cut, they escape by night and are still assassinated.

The film is osten­si­bly about power dynam­ics, espe­cially capture-bonding, a mech­a­nism related to Stock­holm syn­drome. While it was con­tro­ver­sial at the time, for its por­trayal of con­cen­tra­tion camp cul­ture and debase­ment, this set­ting, and the sub­se­quent Vien­nese after­math, are well suited to weav­ing together the inter­ests of com­pet­ing groups.

The bond that binds Max & Lucia is one that is still very mis­un­der­stood and taboo. Max always has the power, but some­times he sub­mits to Lucia, his cap­tive, after he has trained her. She also fights back on her own, but only in order to up the ante, to see how far they can push them­selves into cru­elty. If you can call it cru­elty, since they both love it. Sim­i­larly, the Nazis seek to con­trol every pos­si­ble loose end of their lives, to erad­i­cate any threat to pre­serve them­selves. Through­out, I get the sense that all of the play­ers are under the con­trol of their desire for power, instead of con­trol­ling the power of their desires. There are likely quite a few ref­er­ences that I missed, such as the applic­a­bil­ity of Mozart’s The Magic Flute [with which I have only pass­ing famil­iar­ity] and the Ger­man song that Lucia sings for the SS offi­cers in the cabaret.

Over­all, I thought this was a superb film, with excel­lent act­ing and extremely poignant dia­logue [at times]. The cam­era work was inter­est­ing, as lots of shots hug the frame or seem like the cam­era could be tracked out just a bit. There are long reveals and lin­ger­ing shots that cre­ate a strong sense of impend­ing cat­a­stro­phe. This one is worth a watch, if you aren’t too prude.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Annette Ins­dorf
• Images Jour­nal review by Shane M. Dall­man
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #317: Pow­ell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoff­mann.

This is another Cri­te­rion film that didn’t do so much for me. I’m not too keen on musi­cals and there are some very large hur­dles to sur­mount in turn­ing a musi­cal into a musi­cal on film. The Tales of Hoff­mann is an opera, so the hur­dles are even higher. Pow­ell and Press­burger did a mar­vel­lous job adapt­ing a French Opera to an Eng­lish libretto and mak­ing it appeal­ing to watch through a lens and on a screen instead of a stage. What I didn’t like was the opera itself. Bored the shit out of me. If you really care a plot syn­op­sis is here.

So, I’m going to talk about pro­duc­tion val­ues, which is what truly sets this film apart. I’ll begin with the most incon­sis­tent part, the cam­era work. There is quite a bit of trick pho­tog­ra­phy: forced per­spec­tive stair­cases and lily­pads, dou­ble expo­sures, trick dis­solves, trompe l’oeil set pieces that become three dimen­sional with a slight shift of the cam­era. It is pretty mag­i­cal. Unfor­tu­nately, dur­ing the epic dance sequences, the cam­era tends to sit at a medium long shot for extended peri­ods of time, and even though there is plenty of move­ment on-screen, the pace drags. It has to be ridicu­lously hard to edit a musi­cal. The sets were all fan­tas­tic, and though still obvi­ously sets, fit well with the tech­ni­color dream­coats every­one was dressed in. The sound­stage must have been humon­gous, because rarely do you see a ceil­ing or even sense one in the gen­eral vicinity.

To me, there is one main aspect about a musi­cal that acts as both strength and weak­ness. The cam­era has the abil­ity to show the action from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives, espe­cially in ways that a theater-goer could never expect to see, yet at the same time, try­ing to hold on to the theater-going expe­ri­ence while mak­ing a film is hurt by this ten­dency. Instead of remain­ing sta­tion­ary and hav­ing the action move around the eye of the viewer, the viewer is moved around the action, a very unthe­ater­like expe­ri­ence. This dis­con­ti­nu­ity [and the fact that most musi­cal film drags ass like I used to in cross-country] is prob­a­bly the biggest rea­son I can’t get my head around films like these. If you’re a fan of huge musi­cals though, you’ll prob­a­bly like this film.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Ian Christie
• The libretto of the actual opera [in French]
• Tons of info at the Pow­ell and Press­burger pages.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #320: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lin­coln.

Young Mr. Lin­coln is a film by John Ford, star­ring Henry Fonda, about Abra­ham Lin­coln when he was just a green­horn lawyer in Spring­field, Illi­nois. The Geof­frey O’Brien essay linked at the end of this review is so well done that I insist you read it, if I can make you care about the movie itself. The Cri­te­rion liner notes also con­tain an essay from Sergei Eisen­stein about the film, enti­tled “Mr. Lin­coln by Mr. Ford”. If you can scrounge up a copy, that too is worth a read.

The film itself is Ford to a T; with an obvi­ous bond between man and land, a sense of Amer­i­can mas­culin­ity that would con­tinue to per­vade his later films, and sim­ple but deft cam­era work. Fonda plays an impres­sive Lin­coln, actu­ally man­ag­ing to look like him at times. It appears that they cast many shorter statured folks to make Fonda’s height seem unnat­ural, and I think Fonda wore a suit just a lit­tle too small for him as well.

The por­trait we get of Lin­coln seems out of place, if we’re only used to see­ing him in state and famous. Watch­ing that famous stovepipe hat ride down a coun­try road on a mule becomes a strange site, even though Lincoln’s down-home roots are an essen­tial part of his mys­tique. So the power of Young Mr. Lin­coln derives from the fact that we’re see­ing a side of the man that has always been assumed but never really exam­ined. The ini­ma­tions of impend­ing dis­con­tent are present, and ring even stronger since we know what is in store for Lin­coln, though he does not. Through­out, the non-diegetic music hints at The Bat­tle Hymn of the Repub­lic and Lin­coln him­self is seen play­ing “Dixie” on his Jew’s Harp.

Dias­pora is also a strong theme in the film. From Lincoln’s expla­na­tion that the Jew’s Harp came down and spread from King David’s harp, from the slow Con­estoga roads of pio­neers pass­ing through Illi­nois, and most impor­tantly from Lincoln’s own jour­ney, dis­placed from Ken­tucky by cheaper slave labor, through Indi­ana and then from New Salem to Spring­field, there is an obvi­ous path and jour­ney tak­ing place, and this leg is Lincoln’s. Thank­fully he’s got long ones.

His rivalry with Stephen Dou­glas is already present, but not as pub­lic, his hon­esty and self-deprecation are already well-honed, but his employ­ment of these skills is some­times inspired and at other times con­fus­ing. Lincoln’s humil­ity and patience and espe­cially his will­ing­ness to take a swing at what­ever is pre­sented to him are the traits we end up admir­ing most. Even if this story is more apoc­ryphal than fac­tual it still serves an impor­tant pur­pose by mak­ing us think about how where we’ve come from can help us get to where we’re going.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Geof­frey O’Brien
• Senses of Cin­ema arti­cle on John Ford
• The Abra­ham Lin­coln Papers at the Library of Congress

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #244: Jean Renoir’s Elena and Her Men.

I’ve had plenty of strange coin­ci­dences in my Cri­te­rion view­ings so far. I’ve not been pick­ing films with any rhyme or rea­son, but stuff like this has been hap­pen­ing all too often: The last movie I reviewed was by Ing­mar Bergman, and this movie stars Ingrid Bergman. Any­way, I didn’t like this film at all. I hon­estly can’t quite fig­ure out why The Cri­te­rion Com­pany decided to add it to their col­lec­tion. Even the essay by Christo­pher Faulkner at the end shows the lengths and hoops you have to jump through to talk about this film in a semi-intelligent manner.

So Renoir is a play­wright be ini­tial pro­fes­sion. Ok, fine. Mak­ing a film look like you’re watch­ing a set in a the­ater, and never mov­ing the cam­era is bor­ing. The sets were pretty and so was the cos­tum­ing and other aspects of the mise en scene, but it was get­ting so obvi­ous that peo­ple were walk­ing on screen, hit­ting their mark and stat­ing their lines, that I was get­ting really fid­gety. I want a film to keep me rapt. A play can do the same thing, but not watch­ing a play on a screen. The film is sup­posed to be a com­edy. It isn’t funny at all, until the very end when all the Frogs start snog­ging. At the begin­ning, Renoir attempts to cover his ass by say­ing that the film is not meant to be polit­i­cal in nature, but it so very obvi­ously is, and the machi­na­tions so trite that the entire film came off as a half-assed Much Ado About Noth­ing with crap­pier writ­ing. Ingrid Bergman and her red­headed maid Lolotte looked hot though.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Christo­pher Faulkner
• Les Fleurs du Mal post with lots of screen caps.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #321: Ing­mar Bergman’s Jungfrukäl­lan [The Vir­gin Spring].

The Vir­gin Spring is based on a Swedish bal­lad called “Töre’s Daugh­ter in Vänge” that, for the life of me, I can­not find online [although it is avail­able as part of the liner notes for the Cri­te­rion edi­tion of the film]. This bal­lad recounts the rape and mur­der of a vir­gin on her way to church and the father’s ret­ri­bu­tion. The bal­lad is short and was fleshed out sig­nif­i­cantly in Bergman’s final treat­ment, with added lay­ers of con­flict, pathos and exis­ten­tial strug­gle to sup­port the weight of a fea­ture length film. I remem­ber a cou­ple of film majors who hated Bergman when I was in col­lege. I’ve never really had that ani­mos­ity, I like the state­li­ness of his style and the respect with which he treats his char­ac­ters. The Vir­gin Spring is no slouch when it comes to this, and Ang Lee’s intro­duc­tion [appar­ently The Vir­gin Spring was the first art film he ever saw] seems to back up my own feel­ings on Bergman.

The story is a mir­a­cle play, a moral­ity play and a folk tale. There is great ten­sion between newly con­verted Chris­t­ian Swedes [many of whom have no idea what a church looks like] and those who still wor­ship Odin & Co. There is gen­der and class ten­sion as well, and an under­cur­rent of the super­nat­ural that the char­ac­ters rec­og­nize as pow­er­ful and use­ful, although they are too human to use it themselves.

Blonde-haired Karin is the spoiled only daugh­ter of Töre and Ingeri is a dark and wild fos­ter­ling who does most of the work. They are nec­es­sar­ily antag­o­nists and Karin’s token Chris­tian­ity is bal­anced by the fer­vor of Ingeri’s pagan­ism. Sim­i­larly, the Chris­t­ian fer­vor of Töre’s wife Märeta is bal­anced by her hus­bands spir­i­tu­ally shrugged shoulders.

Karin gets all spiffed out in her best to go deliver some can­dles to church. Ingeri sets off with her but gets freaked out by some creep­tas­tic guy who mans the ford at the river. Once she escapes, it is too late for Karin. She’s already deep in the clutches of three herders who spout things like the wolf says to Red Rid­ing Hood. She is raped [a scene which was heav­ily cen­sored at the time of release in the US, but seems rather tame now, espe­cially in com­par­ion with Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs] and after the act, her hys­ter­ics cause one of the herders to club her to death. They strip her of her fin­ery and run off, leav­ing their lit­tle brother who is wracked with guilt, to guard the body. [If ever there was a time for a joke in poor taste about “If she didn’t want to be raped she shouldn’t have dressed that way” this is it. Bergman’s treat­ment keeps the vic­tim­hood with Karin though. She is not at fault.]

As Fate or the All­fa­ther or God would have it, the herders show up at Töre’s farm and beg guestright for the evening. Töre offers it to them and they break bread. The lit­tlest herder gets sick because of his guilt, and the fact that he knows they are in the house of the daugh­ter they killed adds extra suf­fer­ing. Later that evening one of the herders offers to sell Karin’s clothes back to the mother. This part strikes me as slightly con­fus­ing, unless he knows that he is pro­tected by guestright and just wants to rub in his act, why would he give those clothes back?

Once Töre dis­cov­ers that he has fed and shel­tered the mur­der­ers of his only daugh­ter he decides to take vengeance. First he takes a puri­fy­ing bath, and while he goes out to get some birch branches, decides to rip the whole tree out of the ground in his agony and anger.

He pre­pares him­self, with the help of Ingeri, and then mur­ders all three herders, includ­ing the boy, most viciously. Wracked with guilt that he so eas­ily acted unChris­tian­like and stuff, he searches out Karin’s body and has a heart to heart with God. Tore says that he doesn’t under­stand God, but asks for for­give­ness any­way, and promises to build a stone and mor­tar church [the stone and mor­tar is a big deal in 14th Cen­tury Swe­den] on the site of her mur­der. In covenant, a spring appears where Karin lay and the film ends.

Down to fun­da­men­tals, the film wres­tles with emo­tions and desires that are restricted by moral and spir­i­tual codes. It is no less impor­tant that Töre broke guestright than he mur­dered a child and dis­carded his new faith. The vicious­ness of the rape is nec­es­sary to bal­ance the depth of Töre’s rage and later repen­tence. In the final wash, Bergman seems to be say­ing that life is often self­ish and ter­ri­ble, but those same ter­ri­ble acts can act as spurs to acts of self­less cre­ation. I guess.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Peter Cowie
• Max Von Sydow Gallery from The Vir­gin Spring

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #7: Roy Baker’s A Night to Remem­ber.

This is a film where I’m going to talk nearly as much about the Cri­te­rion DVD as much as the film itself. Or maybe not. But it bears men­tion­ing that the com­men­tary on this release comes from two Titanic experts and dis­cusses the actual events in com­par­i­son to the Wal­ter Lord book and the film adap­ta­tion of that book. This is the type of high qual­ity and novel film expe­ri­ence that only Cri­te­rion could sup­ply. A movie based on a book based on one of the most mem­o­rable events of 20th cen­tury ana­lyzed by two experts of the actual event.

Dra­matic reen­act­ments don’t do a whole lot for me, but A Night to Remem­ber sup­plies enough snarky social com­men­tary on pre-World Wars Britain that the film only drags slightly. We watch the boat sink in approx­i­mate real time, and it tor­tur­ously takes for­ever. I mean, we know what hap­pens. The boat sinks, most of the peo­ple die. Roy Baker makes the film inter­est­ing by using it as hind­sight fore­shad­ow­ing of the end of Britain’s golden age, though none of the Brits seem to real­ize that this is the case. Class dis­tinc­tions are still sup­pos­edly quite marked in present day Britain, but I find it unlikely that they are even close to being as seg­re­gated as they were in 1912. I could be wrong, how­ever, since as a dra­matic reen­act­ment it is likely Baker extrap­o­lated the gap. The tragedy is empha­sized again and again by the prox­im­ity of the Cal­i­forn­ian and the sim­ple missed com­mu­ni­ca­tions and brief fits of pique that ulti­mately result in the deaths of 1500 folks.

Baker para­dox­i­cally seems to yearn for the feel­ing of con­fi­dence that suf­fused the pas­sen­gers at the start of the voy­age and simul­ta­ne­ously shred the arro­gance of many of the aris­toc­racy who refuse com­mon sense in favor of their appear­ance and com­fort. The steer­age pas­sen­gers become inno­cent vic­tims and the sur­vivors unwor­thy in this par­a­digm. The busy­body financier of the voy­age escapes on a lifeboat like the rat he resem­bles, and the brave-faced fatal­ist good­byes num­ber in the dozens. Most of the sailors are gal­lant, and a cook who gets drunk when he real­izes all is lost [and brings a bit of lev­ity to the film] ulti­mately saves someone’s life and is res­cued him­self. The cul­mi­na­tion of all this blame-throwing is a gen­eral resent­ment for the rich pas­sen­gers, pity for the vic­tims, grudg­ing respect for the sailors and a strong feel­ing that “this should never have hap­pened” which is admirable nearly 100 years after the ill-fated voy­age. Most ill-will is directed toward the pas­sive British­ers and this is high­lighted by the gauche but spunky and warm-hearted token Amer­i­can pas­sen­ger; she’d be in steer­age if her hus­band hadn’t struck it rich in California.

The spe­cial effects, mostly mod­els and clever edit­ing, are rel­a­tively well done and effec­tive. The only real crit­i­cism I have is that I wish Baker would have killed every­one a half hour sooner.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Sragow.
• The Titanic Archive.
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #288: Orson Welles’s F for Fake.

This is a movie about char­la­tans and hanky-panky men, charis­matic liars and magi­cians. It is some­thing like a doc­u­men­tary but one in which a con man tells you he is a con man and is so good that he cons you any­way. As Welles’s penul­ti­mate film it does lack the panache of his early tri­umphs but it con­tin­ues to dis­play his mas­ter story-telling abil­ity. And his ego. But he’s such a lik­able ego­tist and jus­ti­fied in his ego­tism, that you don’t really mind.

This review is going to be extra short, because I’ll need to watch the film three or four more times before I can fol­low it well enough to dis­cover the cha­rade. Watch­ing it is a bit like play­ing three card monte with a six armed man.

I sup­pose it is a story about an appar­ent art forger and his biog­ra­phers appar­ent forgery of the biog­ra­phy with some other forg­eries thrown in, such as the War of the Worlds broad­cast and some Picasso forg­eries by a com­pletely dif­fer­ent forger whose may or may not grand­daugh­ter may or may not be play­ing the part of his appar­ent granddaughter.

That’s basi­cally how the whole movie flows. Welles’s nar­ra­tion is as rapid fire and clause-ridden as the edit­ing and cin­e­matog­ra­phy of the film itself. They over­lap and inter­twine and then bust out into tan­gents and we get absolutely no sense of the con­ti­nu­ity that Welles’s nondiegetic nar­ra­tion seems to assume we’ll see in the die­ge­sis itself.

We’re told by Welles him­self, after he per­forms a few bits of leg­erde­main for some chil­dren and then has the set dis­man­tled around him, that for one hour he won’t tell a lie. The film is 88 min­utes long.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #300: Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zis­sou.

I don’t like Wes Ander­son films for the same rea­son I don’t like Quentin Taran­tino films and the same rea­son I don’t like most of my poetry. It is all too ref­er­en­tial. Yet, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zis­sou was enjoy­able enough, mainly because many of the ref­er­ences were actu­ally things I knew about [doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing, David Bowie]. I still don’t get his appeal though. I’ll try to dis­miss my loathing for self-reflexive-obligatory-oblique-retro-pomo-irony long enough to point out what I found effec­tive in the film.

Steve Zis­sou is an oceano­graphic explorer who makes doc­u­men­tary films of his adven­tures, a la Cousteau. He is pos­tur­ing, arro­gant, self­ish and emo­tion­ally dis­tant. His entire life has con­sisted of craft­ing and main­tain­ing a celebrity image; result­ing in a man who has for­got­ten who he is in favor of chas­ing after the man he watches on screen. We con­stantly see the film­ing of his doc­u­men­taries; which are just as chore­o­graphed as Zissou’s pri­vate life. In fact, Zis­sou has been in front of the lens for so long, he has for­got­ten that the cam­era isn’t always rolling. His desire for drama is born from an extended slump in the recep­tion of his documentaries.

It should be noted, how­ever, that while The Life Aquatic with Steve Zis­sou [the movie within the movie] is a rather obvi­ous send-up of real­ity tele­vi­sion, in its essen­tials it doesn’t dif­fer from true doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing at all. Real doc­u­men­taries are not the objec­tive tes­ti­mo­ni­als that we instinc­tively believe them to be. Things are shot and not shot, things that were shot are left out, com­men­tary is added in, the edit­ing gives the film some sort of syn­tax, and often turns it into a narrative.

The use of Kodachrome [at least, that’s what it looks like to me] for the film within a film clips was nice, since I’ve always liked how the warm col­ors pop out with that stock, and though the awk­ward fram­ing and dis­con­cert­ing cuts made me a lit­tle sea­sick, they did seem to strengthen Anderson’s por­trait of Zis­sou as a man alien­ated from him­self. The Bowie trans­lated to Por­tuguese is another inspired choice in this regard.

Yet with all of this stag­ing, the most impor­tant parts of Zissou’s story never get filmed. [That is, if we’re watch­ing with a stan­dard view of spec­ta­tor­ship and assum­ing that the 4th wall still exists and that TLAwSZ was made by Wes Ander­son and not Steve Zis­sou mak­ing TLAwSZ about mak­ing TLAwSZ]. When he meets his son, when he fights off pirates, when he saves his neme­sis from pirates, when his son is killed in a heli­copter crash…no cameras.

These con­stant blows, cou­pled with the dif­fi­cul­ties of financ­ing the film, even­tu­ally force Zis­sou to make peace with his inner demons, sym­bol­ized tan­gi­bly by the jaguar shark.

If we watch the film in House of Leaves mode and pre­tend that Wes Ander­son didn’t direct it and that Steve Zis­sou made a film called The Life Aquatic with Steve Zis­sou about mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary called The Life Aquatic with Steve Zis­sou, then noth­ing that we see in the film can be con­sid­ered non-fiction. Espe­cially since his dead part­ner Este­ban and dead son Ned both appear on screen after their deaths.

Ulti­mately I think this movie [and most Wes Ander­son films] would suc­ceed a bit bet­ter if there were less attempts to say some­thing about every­thing as intri­cately and obliquely as pos­si­ble. To delib­er­ately mix some metaphors in a self-reflexive-obligatory-oblique-retro-pomo-irony way, I think the mul­ti­ple paths of mean­ing both drown the oth­ers out and are weak­ened by their profligacy.

• DVDTalk Review of the film and the Cri­te­rion DVD
• New York Mag­a­zine story on Wes Ander­son
• Cousteau.org

I watched The Iron Giant last evening. I’m a huge fan of ani­ma­tion and had heard good things about this movie, so it surely took me long enough to get around to see­ing it. It is a good movie and while the plot is typ­i­cal kid movie fare, the art is very well done, and it has some sub­tle lay­ers that pro­vide both con­tem­po­rary and his­tor­i­cal parallels.

Tak­ing place in the late fifties, Cold War para­noia is becom­ing increas­ingly insti­tu­tion­al­ized in Amer­i­can soci­ety. A power-mad gov­ern­ment offi­cial asso­ci­ated with national secu­rity is will­ing to go to any lengths, includ­ing the drug­ging of a small boy and nuk­ing a small town in Maine to pro­tect the coun­try from neb­u­lously per­ceived for­eign threats.

This movie was made in 1999.

The kid, Hog­a­rth, appeals to me because he basi­cally acts like I acted when I was a kid. He even brings home for­est crit­ters and straps on army sur­plus issue and stomps off into the woods for adven­tures. I never found a huge robot though. The ref­er­ences to the Golden Age of sci­ence fic­tion abound, and appeal to my never nascent nerdiness.

Hogarth’s mom is a sin­gle par­ent work­ing hard [and late] to do right by her kid, which was likely an even tougher gig back in the fifties. We never find out if Hogarth’s dad died, or if his mom is still unmar­ried. Pops is just…absent.

That’s all I got.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #304: Nico­las Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suf­fer­ing they were never wrong,
The Old Mas­ters: how well they under­stood
Its human posi­tion; how it takes place
While some­one else is eat­ing or open­ing a win­dow or just walk­ing dully along;
How, when the aged are rev­er­ently, pas­sion­ately wait­ing
For the mirac­u­lous birth, there always must be
Chil­dren who did not spe­cially want it to hap­pen, skat­ing
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never for­got
That even the dread­ful mar­tyr­dom must run its course
Any­how in a cor­ner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its inno­cent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how every­thing turns away
Quite leisurely from the dis­as­ter; the plow­man may
Have heard the splash, the for­saken cry,
But for him it was not an impor­tant fail­ure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs dis­ap­pear­ing into the green
Water; and the expen­sive del­i­cate ship that must have seen
Some­thing amaz­ing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had some­where to get to and sailed calmly on.
–Auden

The plan­ets were surely aligned for the pro­duc­tion of The Man Who Fell To Earth. David Bowie was deep in the midst of his androg­yne star­man per­sona, Nico­las Roeg was grow­ing ever defter in his direc­to­r­ial skills and Wal­ter Tevis pro­vided the novel to bring them all together. I’d say all three are peas in a pod; com­bi­na­tions of mys­tic and cynic that para­dox­i­cally sub­vert the mech­a­nisms they hate by using them; albeit for dif­fer­ent goals. Bowie was a space prophet as Ziggy Star­dust, offer­ing the hope tran­scen­dence through music and drugs to the piti­ful humans on a hell­ish earth. Roeg was beat­ing the drum against mate­ri­al­ist Amer­i­can cul­ture and the soul­less­ness it engen­dered [and still does, in my hon­est opin­ion] and Tevis was explor­ing the exis­ten­tial psy­chol­ogy of mod­ern life in his writing.

This con­gru­ence fits hand-in-glove with my own spe­cific inter­ests: David Bowie, Cin­ema and Sci­ence Fic­tion and I am essen­tially inun­dated with things to talk about in rela­tion to this film. I’ll try to con­cen­trate on the specifics of the film itself.

I’d best get this out of the way right off the bat. This film is full of sex and nudity. Chock full. Rip Torn plays the wom­an­iz­ing professor/scientist Bryce, and must have had an absolutely won­der­ful time rolling around in his bed with at least half a dozen naked nubile coeds. Yet Roeg is obvi­ously more mature than I am, because his uses of nudity, while tit­il­lat­ing, use that tit­il­la­tion to high­light and enhance his cri­tique of Amer­i­can deca­dence. I find it rem­i­nis­cent of Fellini’s Satyri­con in this respect.

Bowie’s char­ac­ter, the alien Thomas Jerome New­ton, arrives on planet with a plan and a goal, but is ulti­mately unpre­pared for the cul­ture which ensnares and destroys him, turns him trai­tor­ous. This progress can be mon­i­tored by com­par­ing him through­out with the deeply flawed char­ac­ters with which he inter­acts. Gra­ham Fuller’s essay [linked below] cov­ers this down­fall very well, so I’ll skip it.

I didn’t par­tic­u­larly enjoy Wal­ter Tevis’s book, but the movie keeps rather well to its plot, and is enhanced and refined by Roeg’s treat­ment and Bowie’s inter­pre­ta­tion. I’m actu­ally pretty taken aback at how much I enjoyed the film as cin­ema and not as enter­tain­ment [which is how I usu­ally like my sci-fi]. Although Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is bet­ter known for mak­ing Earth seem alien to us Earth­lings, Tevis man­ages to make you believe it and Roeg makes you skin-crawlingly feel it.

Roeg’s dis­dain for Amer­i­can cul­ture bor­ders on preachy, but it fits well with Newton’s turn-coat illu­sion­ment; it doesn’t over­whelm the film, barely. I won­der how much of Bowie’s taste influ­enced the pro­duc­tion val­ues of the film as well. The album Low is rumored to be asso­ci­ated with the film, [as the album cover also sug­gests. It is a pretty good album, sort of proto-electronica/ambient], but the Newton’s fas­ci­na­tion with Kabuki and Japan­ese aes­thet­ics hark back to the day’s of Ziggy Star­dust, and Newton’s rude boy appear­ance in pub­lic seems to echo the later stages of the Dia­mond Dogs tour.

The film is def­i­nitely worth a watch. The act­ing is superb on all fronts, espe­cially Candy Clark’s por­trayal of Mary-Lou, and although Roeg still uses the zoom far too heav­ily for my taste, its a beau­ti­ful film in all other aspects.

• DVD Beaver Review NSFW
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Gra­ham Fuller

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #9: John Woo’s Hard-Boiled.

John Woo must like Jazz clubs, because both The Killer and Hard-Boiled fea­ture them, with Woo mak­ing a cameo as the club bar­tender in Hard-Boiled. Rarely have I seen a film with a body count as high as Hard-Boiled. The influ­ence of Melville’s Le Samouraï is still appar­ent, [birds in cages, jazz club] but the vivac­ity of Hong Kong cul­ture once again takes prece­dence. The char­ac­ters and plot are basic action movie fare, com­plete with a tough cop that doesn’t play by the rules, a mega­lo­ma­niac gang boss and rather blunt cri­tiques of bureau­cracy, but while it has the same sort of humor and destruc­tion as Die Hard, there is also a strong sense of wish-fulfillment that isn’t quite as obvi­ous to me in Amer­i­can action films.

What I mean is that films like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are about how Amer­i­cans see them­selves, cock­sure and tough as nails, a tra­di­tional retelling of What it Means to Be an Amer­i­can. In Hong Kong action, on the other hand, those traits are promi­nent but ulti­mately sec­ondary to the emer­gent culture’s need to define What it Means to Be a Hong Kong Chi­nese. Thus we get Tequila Yuen’s [Chow Yun-Fat] trou­bles with his boss/girlfriend Theresa and his dif­fi­culty in being able to afford a decent place to live despite being a sergeant on the police force, Tony/Alan’s desire for a pri­vate place on Guam, and Theresa desire to have a child despite being a hard work­ing woman. Even Johnny the Triad boss’s search for power reflects a young cul­ture wrestling with an old one.

So Hard-Boiled rings with poignancy at odd times, even dur­ing the midst of whole­sale slaugh­ter, when Tony and Mad Dog allow some hos­pi­tal patients to escape before fight­ing, only to have them mown down by the gang boss who has tossed aside all pre­tenses of cul­tural sophis­ti­ca­tion to feed his ambi­tion. So ambi­tion is con­sid­ered a virtue [for the cops], but not when it runs over other peo­ple [the Triad boss]. I’d con­trast this to Amer­i­can action films which pre­serve the sta­tus quo. The char­ac­ters are focused on their imme­di­ate sit­u­a­tion and not really on long term goals exter­nal to it. The mes­sage is “do what needs to be done now, and don’t think about the future” as com­pared to Hong Kong’s “do what needs to be done now, so we can focus on the impor­tant things.”

I’d prob­a­bly say that Ang Lee’s Crouch­ing Tiger, Hid­den Dragon is the mature expres­sion of the new Chinese/Hong Kong cul­ture, and one that prob­a­bly man­ages to rec­on­cile that ambi­tion with the ancient tra­di­tions. I’d say that The Killer is a bet­ter film than Hard-Boiled, but Hard-Boiled is more fun to watch.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Bar­bara Schar­res
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #8: John Woo’s The Killer.

There is some­thing of a direc­to­r­ial dia­logue between East­ern and West­ern film­mak­ers. Few things so appro­pri­ately evince this ten­dency than the rela­tion­ship between Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï and John Woo’s The Killer. Woo read­ily states that Melville is a great influ­ence of his [The Cri­te­rion DVD liner notes for Le Samouraï con­tain an essay by Woo] and Melville’s inter­est in East­ern cul­ture is read­ily appar­ent. Why would a Hong Kong direc­tor be so obsessed with a French direc­tor who made a film called The Samu­rai? And the obses­sion is obvi­ous, for The Killer is rife with homages to Le Samouraï. Both con­cern hit­men who become obsessed with female lounge acts who wit­ness their mur­ders; that very obses­sion results in their destruction.

But where Le Samouraï is art cin­ema, The Killer was meant for a more main­stream audi­ence. Where Le Samouraï is almost myth­i­cal and time­less, The Killer is very much a part of the 1980s. There might be a slight ten­dency toward melo­drama in The Killer, as opposed to the emo­tional aus­ter­ity in Le Samouraï, but by no means should this be taken as dis­parag­ing of Woo’s film. It is nec­es­sary, for Chow Yun-Fat’s char­ac­ter is a killer with a heart of gold, much more heroic and sym­pa­thetic than Alain Delon’s ver­sion of the hitman.

An equiv­a­lent amount of pathos ends each film, despite the dif­fer­ences in tone and con­tent. This is very much enhanced by Peter Pau and Horace Wong’s out­stand­ing camera-work Fan Kung Ming’s edit­ing and Woo’s eye for a shot. There is a sim­ple dolly move that starts an extra­or­di­nar­ily well done rooftop chase sequence that I had to rewind and watch two or three more times. Its tim­ing ramps the ten­sion and pace up smoothly and imme­di­ately. Sim­i­larly, in the final shootout, there is a shot of a white dove smoth­er­ing a can­dle, a bit of fore­shad­ow­ing of the death of the white-suited hit­man. I’m really look­ing for­ward to watch­ing Hard-Boiled, the next John Woo film in the Cri­te­rion list.

• HK Cin­ema review
• Blood Lines: The cin­e­matic senses of John Woo.
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #306: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï.

In a film like Le Samouraï, “never” means “always”. When the police inspec­tor says that he never thinks, we know he is always think­ing and when hit man Jef Costello [Alain Delon] says he never loses we know he’s already lost every­thing. This film is a study in cool; the smooth con­trol that so many of us strive for, and which often trans­fers awk­wardly on film, comes across here as nat­ural and essen­tial. Melville referred to Costello as a schiz­o­phrenic, but to me he appears more socio­pathic than any­thing else. I think the rea­son his cloak of cool is so authen­tic is because of this neu­ro­sis. Melville also said he was try­ing to make a black and white film using color stock and the greyscale of much of the film enhances the coiled equi­lib­rium of Delon’s character.

Dia­logue is as sparse as color, and when color becomes vibrantly present we feel that Costello is in a place he should not be. This is assisted by the fact that he looks like a three day dead corpse in the best of light. That adds to the grave cool­ness. Despite his metic­u­lous pat­terns, he is a sloppy killer. There are 5 wit­nesses to his mur­der, and although is alibi is air­tight, he even­tu­ally faces the music we all know is play­ing for him.

What is really inter­est­ing is the way you can feel the hand of the direc­tor, show­ing, not hint­ing, but ulti­mately as objec­tive and heart­less as the assas­sin. But where it is pos­si­ble to sense tightly reined emo­tions in Costello, Melville seems bereft of them all. The film is defined by what it lacks, it is almost a doc­u­men­tary, it makes no excuses for what it can and can­not show, and leaves it to us to draw our own conclusions.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by David Thom­son
• Roger Ebert essay
• Slant Mag­a­zine Review

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #301: Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table.

Despite being hailed as one of the world's best female film directors, I've been ultimately disappointed with Jane Campion. In regard to the technical aspects of her filmmaking I have nothing but praise, she is quite able to gather the people she needs to make her vision appear and to direct them to her goal, but to me at least, the content of her films leaves something to be desired. Perhaps this is because I'm a man. The Piano is a nearly per­fect fem­i­nist film, but the last ten min­utes cut the legs and a few more fin­gers from all the excel­lence that pre­cedes it. And In the Cut is both a mailed-in thriller and a study in tac­ti­cal misandry. An Angel at My Table is basi­cally a cin­e­matic ver­sion of The Bell Jar and it is based on the auto­bio­ga­phies of Janet Frame, who is essen­tially a Kiwi Sylvia Plath.

In my last semes­ter of col­lege I took a class called “Fic­tions of Insan­ity” which was sup­posed to be an Eng­lish course on how insan­ity as a theme is used in lit­er­a­ture. In actu­al­ity it was a course on how patri­archy dri­ves women mad, taught by a grad stu­dent whose the­sis was on the same sub­ject, only in an even more spe­cific area, how patri­archy dri­ves women mad in the Vic­to­rian Novel. She appeared to read from her the­sis instead of lec­tur­ing. Need­less to say, I didn’t enjoy the class and ended up drop­ping it. I’ve now come to the con­clu­sion that I don’t like it when any –ism focuses more on assign­ing blame than more con­struc­tive actions. I’m not say­ing that fem­i­nism does this, but that some fem­i­nists do, whether inten­tion­ally or not. I think Jane Cam­pion knows bet­ter than to do this, but ends up forced into it by audi­ence con­sid­er­a­tions. I mean that most view­ers aren’t going to find autonomous agency very appeal­ing. That kind of inde­pen­dence is cer­tainly hard to achieve, if it is even pos­si­ble; the ulti­mate fail­ure of any of Campion’s hero­ines to achieve it and their inevitable reas­sim­i­la­tion into soci­ety seems to say that there can be no vic­tory, but there can be peace.

This all fits in nicely with An Angel at My Table. Janet Frame has the “artis­tic tem­pera­ment” but the demands of New Zealand soci­ety and cul­ture cre­ate a strange child­hood for her, as she is shut­tled through the school sys­tem like a toaster on an assem­bly line and is time and time again set apart from the group. Her desire to be a writer and her obvi­ous apti­tude for the craft are sup­posed to be set aside for a “real job.” And fatherly men are con­stantly telling her what to do. Because she hasn’t been allowed to grow freely, she ends up in an asy­lum receiv­ing shock treat­ments for 8 years. It later turns out that she was mis­di­ag­nosed as schiz­o­phrenic. [If any­one had actu­ally paid atten­tion to the wall­flower they would have noticed she was just a lit­tle shy]. Not until she is allowed bits of free­dom, includ­ing a trip to Europe does she learn that she is quite capa­ble of tak­ing care of her­self, and that it is okay to be who she is. For Ms. Frame, that is enough. After she actu­al­izes, she can hap­pily make peace with her place in the world and finally live as a per­son, not a carrot-topped toaster.

Hey, it looks like a Cam­pion hero­ine suc­cess­fully finds con­tent­ment! Even if her agency is only lightly used as a result of her reclu­sive­ness, at the end Ms. Frame’s satori is still obvi­ous. Apart from being about an hour too long, this was a good movie.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Amy Taubin
• Senses of Cin­ema lec­ture by Sue Gillet

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #297: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balt­hazar.

One would expect a painter-turned-filmmaker to have an eye for com­po­si­tion, and Bres­son def­i­nitely exceeds that expec­ta­tion. Through­out Au hasard Balt­hazar “shots as paint­ings” abound. This is the first film I’ve seen by Bres­son, and before I watched it, I read up a bit on his style. I was some­what leery of the effi­cacy of the spare­ness that was most often used to char­ac­ter­ize his work. Too often you can run the risk of los­ing too much mean­ing by mak­ing the audi­ence work for it. This, of course, is a bunch of hog swal­lop. Bres­son, Bres­son, Bres­son, knows what the fuck he’s doing. The spare­ness empha­sizes and directs, he uses it as a tool, not a gim­mick. It rules.

The story, as it is, con­cerns itself with the life of a don­key named Balt­hazar and with the life of a girl named Marie. They inter­con­nect at times and mir­ror each other at times and ulti­mately [I think] speak of one main theme by using two oppos­ing themes.

The first theme I want to talk about is the one based on the life of Marie. Why? Because she’s hot. Because her story is more inter­est­ing. She grows up in a rather restric­tive house­hold and seems to be both shy and lonely. Her only friend is Balt­hazar until he is sold to the baker help pay the bills. A young punk named Gérard, who deliv­ers bread, wants to pork Marie and accosts her on a quiet road. She wants noth­ing to do with him but even­tu­ally sub­mits and then becomes his steady shag. She then becomes emo­tion­ally depen­dent on his abu­sive com­pany and looks to him to give her pro­tec­tion. The first time she obvi­ously comes to him in need [after being thrown out of her home] he drops her like a dime and gets up with some other girl. She leaves, in the rain, and stops at the miser’s house in search of some­one else to pro­tect her. He ends up offer­ing her his money for sex [implied] and she ends up sleep­ing with him after giv­ing it back. Her child­hood love, Jacques is will­ing to for­give these indis­cre­tions and marry her, even after she is gang-raped [again implied] by Gérard and his min­ions, but Marie lit­er­ally dis­ap­pears from the rest of the film.

Balt­hazar has a sim­i­lar path, being shut­tled around as chat­tel from one bru­tal owner to another. The chris­to­log­i­cal sym­bol­ism is rife. Essen­tially the story is an alle­gory of Christ’s life, but with addi­tional tan­gents that make it into much more than just alle­gory. Balt­hazar is tor­tured, burned, beaten, exploited and his native intel­li­gence is sup­pressed by the dumb brute work that he is sub­jected to. In the end, he dies with the sins of human­ity on his back [black mar­ket goods], a gun­shot wound in his chest, in a shepherd’s field, sur­rounded by sheep.

Balt­hazar and Marie live sim­i­lar lives, with­out agency, at times seek­ing it, but ulti­mately unable to make it stick. Yet in the end, Balt­hazar retains his basic gen­tle­ness and inno­cence and Marie becomes both hope­less and manip­u­la­tive. Like Sword of the Beast we see that human­ity is often eas­ier found in crit­ters than in Man.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by James Quandt
• Mas­ters of Cin­ema Review
• For­eign site with many stills [scroll down]
• Strictly Film School Review

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #311: Hideo Gosha’s Sword of the Beast.

It just hap­pens to be coin­ci­dence that I was read­ing the Hagakure when this movie came in on my hold list at the library.

Naoshige once said, “The Bushido sig­ni­fies des­per­ate death. Sev­eral tens of sane samu­rais could not kill a sin­gle samu­rai [who burns with this mad death].”

Sane men of calmly com­posed mind can­not accom­plish a great enter­prise. You have only to get wildly crazy to the point of death. The moment dis­cre­tion and con­sid­er­a­tion min­gle with your Bushido, you will surely hes­i­tate and lag behind your enterprise.

To the Bushido, loy­alty and fil­ial duty will nat­u­rally fol­low from your mad­ness. Because in this des­per­ate death, both of these qual­i­ties dwell in your actions.

If ever there was a samu­rai who embod­ies the des­per­ate death of Bushido, the char­ac­ter of Gen­no­suke in Sword of the Beast is that man. His tale takes place as the Toku­gawa shogu­nate was dwin­dling, on the cusp of the Meiji Restora­tion [when the posi­tion of samu­rai was abol­ished] and soon after Com­modore Perry’s ships ended Japan’s long self-imposed cul­tural iso­la­tion. Now that you’ve got a bit of his­tor­i­cal con­text and a bit of the cul­tural phi­los­o­phy that dri­ves the actions of the char­ac­ters in the film, it becomes much more than a hack-and-slash samu­rai film.

The recur­rent theme of human bes­tial­ity [not that kind, sicko but I bet that ups my search refer­rals] is nearly con­stant, while Gen­no­suke might behave as a beast at one moment, a breath later he is an hon­or­able samu­rai. At other points through­out the film other char­ac­ters behave in sim­i­lar man­ners. Jurota, the gold seeker, refuses to save his wife when she falls into the hands of bandit-prospectors; opt­ing instead to remain loyal to his clan. The same prospec­tors later rape another woman on the moun­tain and when Jurota’s clan finally shows up, they are bent on killing every­one on the moun­tain, includ­ing Jurota and his wife.

The char­ac­ters believe that gold will ele­vate them, but instead it is what causes their bes­tial behav­ior. Gen­no­suke is actu­ally con­vinced that he is turn­ing into a wolf. Essen­tially what we get is a dis­torted form of Bushido that deem­pha­sizes the clan-loyalty in favor of a more West­ern indi­vid­ual loy­alty. After Gennosuke’s betrayal by his own clan, he rapidly adapts this war­rior code through­out his ronin and by the end of the film has man­aged a makeshift bal­ance between his new path and his old Bushido. His failed ambi­tion is mir­rored in Jurota’s efforts, and Jurota’s pres­ence on the moun­tain acts as the cat­a­lyst to pre­cip­i­tate Gennosuke’s inter­nal redemption.

The use of flash­back does strange things to the con­ti­nu­ity, because the first few aren’t sig­naled very well. Even­tu­ally they turn a bit more stan­dard trick and I won­der if this was another delib­er­ate cor­re­la­tion between beast and man, since the ambigu­ous sequences come deep in the beast phase of Gennosuke’s story. His adapted Bushido would appear very mod­ern to post-WWII Japan­ese, and Gennosuke’s facil­ity at incor­po­rat­ing it into his life mir­rors Japan’s sim­i­lar facil­ity which allowed them to regroup as an eco­nomic power so quickly after their surrender.

I can’t believe I’ve not talked about the fenc­ing yet! It is most excel­lent, very raw, at times grace­ful and at times clumsy, neces­si­ties depend­ing on ter­rain and num­ber of oppo­nents. Gen­no­suke is pretty much a mas­ter of the one-stroke kill, and while the deaths are often hammy, I wanted to see more sweet slic­ing action.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Chris D.
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Patrick Macias
• French review [in French, duh] with screen cap­tures.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #10: Nicholas Roeg’s Walk­a­bout.

It is prob­a­bly just me, but it seems like the 1970s were filled with films fea­tur­ing nubile and naked young Aus­tralian women in Edenic set­tings. Walk­a­bout is one of those films. I could put a full frontal pic­ture of Jenny Agutter’s char­ac­ter here, but instead here is a pic­ture of her father com­mit­ting suicide.

While the nudity is inter­est­ing from a cer­tain point of view [and we’ll get back to that, oh yes we will] the film isn’t really as shal­low as it has some­times been billed. [Check out the exploita­tive play­bills which use black-man-fucking-a-white-girl-jungle-primitivism to tit­il­late, as an example.]

Essen­tially, the ten­sion of the movie revolves around growth into a soci­ety, learn­ing to adopt the roles and rules par­tic­u­lar to each one. Although the young Abo­rig­ine man and the young Aussie girl are as far apart socially as they can be, they are both pro­gress­ing through their own culture-specific lim­i­nal phase. Suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion indi­cates adult­hood. We’ll get back to that as well.

The plot: Daddy takes his kids out on Hol­i­day to the desert, tries to kill them, and then kills him­self. The Nubile Young Middle-class White Woman in her Short-skirted School­girl out­fit takes her Lit­tle Brother into the Desert. They almost die from Expo­sure until they meet the Nearly-Naked Young Black Man [an inter­est­ing paper could be writ­ten about the sig­nif­i­cance of the order of adjec­tives used to mod­ify human-referent nouns] who is Wise in the Ways of Nature and agrees to Take Them Home. Essen­tially it is merely a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the basic nar­ra­tive struc­ture: Two men set across a val­ley, have many adven­tures, and return home safely.

There are two main things that I should write about. The first is the cul­ture gap between the Abo­rig­ine and the girl. To do this, I will start with the lit­tle boy, who makes a rel­a­tively effec­tive bridge between the two, he can com­mu­ni­cate with either of them and also serves to indi­cate that the lim­i­nal phase is some­thing that is only entered at a cer­tain age and under cer­tain con­di­tions. The girl is by turns admirable and annoy­ing. Despite her igno­rance of the out­back, she is deter­mined to save her brother and her­self, and is well pre­pared to keep them moti­vated. Once the black boy shows up, she becomes com­pletely use­less, expect­ing him to do all the work. This prob­a­bly stems both from a racial dis­dain and a cul­tur­ally instilled depen­dence on a strong male fig­ure. She is con­stantly wash­ing her clothes and try­ing to make her­self remain as pretty as pos­si­ble, as if she weren’t in the mid­dle of the feck­ing wilder­ness. This prob­a­bly helps keep her spir­its up, but it def­i­nitely shows how alien she is in her surroundings.

The Abo­rig­ine, on the other hand, is on walk­a­bout: his six month jour­ney to man­hood, where he must use his skill to sur­vive. He is extremely well-suited to his envi­ron­ment, so well-prepared in fact, that he can sup­port two free-loading white folks and not even slow down. He would be a man already, if only he would acknowl­edge it.

The sec­ond issue con­cerns the rite of pas­sage itself. The Abo­rig­ine feels that he needs to have sex in order to truly be a man and com­plete his lim­i­nal phase. The girl sorta wants to pork him, but doesn’t because she’s a Proper White Girl and he’s a Prim­i­tive Black Man. Her repres­sion and pas­siv­ity seem to be part-and-parcel with the West­ern rite of pas­sage. What rite of pas­sage, you say? Exactly. For us it is such a drawn out affair and vir­tu­ally stripped of rit­ual sig­nif­i­cance. When are you an adult? Oh, when you get your license, or when you can vote, or when you can drink. There is no defined time and affir­ma­tion of adulthood.

This is where the film flexes its mus­cles. The father com­mit­ted sui­cide and attempted to kill his own chil­dren because he was adult by age, but not matu­rity. His soci­ety did not ade­quately pre­pare him for its demands or affirm his posi­tion within it. Bereft of mean­ing and lack­ing vested man­hood, sui­cide is his escape. The Abo­rig­ine boy com­mitts sui­cide because, after weeks of prov­ing his skill at pro­vid­ing a liv­ing for the girl and her brother, abil­i­ties that would have earned him the respect and love of just about any Abo­rig­ine girl, his last, beau­ti­ful and overt sex­ual advances are cal­lously rejected by the girl. His sui­cide is both the result of heart­break and a com­plete and final dis­dain of every­thing he [and his cul­ture] holds dear.

The girl, years later, liv­ing in the same apart­ment she grew up in and fully a part of the cul­ture she yearned for while lost in the out­back, now wishes she had remained with the Abo­rig­ine boy.

So the movie seems to be a pretty scathing cri­tique of West­ern cul­tural cal­lous­ness. [And I haven’t even men­tioned a few rather strange inter­ludes involv­ing weather bal­loons, plas­ter kan­ga­roos, and “big game” hunt­ing] It doesn’t offer the Abo­rig­ine lifestyle as a bet­ter choice, but it does seem to insin­u­ate that even a life where the next meal is a thing of uncer­tainty is bet­ter than the rage or hope­less­ness engen­dered by a life with­out know­ing one’s place in the world.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Roger Ebert
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #4: Fed­erico Fellini’s Amar­cord.

You can get excel­lent broad-spectrum treat­ments of this film by read­ing the review and essay I’ve linked to at the bot­tom of this page. I’m not going to give you a broad-spectrum treat­ment at all, because to me Amar­cord is all about mas­culin­ity from begin­ning to end. The film is def­i­nitely a satire and full of polit­i­cal com­men­tary, but all of it is seen through a testos­terone lens that it becomes one of the most com­pre­hen­sive lists of manly pos­tur­ing that I’ve come across. This is not a bad thing. Film semi­oti­cists like Chris­t­ian Metz prob­a­bly love this film because it can come apart and be reassem­bled in so many dif­fer­ent ways.

There is plenty of male lust, the film opens with a spring rit­ual, where they burn a witch in effigy and men prove their viril­ity [or per­haps hope to keep it] by jump­ing over the hot ashes of the bon­fire. The women know that they are the objects of the scopophilic gaze, but instead of reduc­ing them to objects it puts them in a posi­tion of power, mainly because the men are so horny that they can’t help but be enthralled. Every man stops and stares, [and even most of the women as well] when the new whores are brought to the brothel in town. There’s also Volpina [that means fox] who pretty much acts like a fox and looks like a fox and is a nympho­ma­niac. Most inter­est­ing is Gradisca [a nick­name, which means “What­ever you want” or some­thing sim­i­lar], who has a “rep­u­ta­tion” that no one really believes in, and who is still the object of the most slack-jawed pant­ing behav­ior on the part of the male pop­u­lace of Rim­ini. There is also mas­tur­ba­tion, mas­tur­ba­tory fan­tasies [dur­ing Con­fes­sion no less [!], and at other times], and a rather dis­turb­ing scene where the ado­les­cent Titta [a stand in for Fellini, cf. The 400 Blows for sim­i­lar­i­ties] is almost suf­fo­cated by enor­mous Ger­man boobs. Lust is prob­a­bly the most com­mon theme because the film harks back to Fellini’s own ado­les­cence, but there is more to a man than that.

What else do you ask? Power and vio­lence of course! The “story” of the town takes place while Italy was under Fas­cist con­trol. When the Fas­cists pay a visit we get hero-worship of Mus­solini [includ­ing a male fan­tasy where Il Duce lets the fat kid marry his crush], march­ing about and intim­i­da­tion on the part of the black­boots [not boot­blacks] and even­tu­ally a lit­tle bit of polit­i­cal stron­garm­ing when the Fas­cists pour cas­tor oil down Titta’s father’s throat because he isn’t a card-carrying Fas­cist. Since Italy was con­sid­ered a Father­land at this point, the fact that the entire city goes out to sea to watch the pass­ing of Il Rex [a huge pas­sen­ger liner, the Pride of the State!] adds another lit­tle cor­ner to the mas­cu­line edi­fice of the film.

The most beau­ti­ful and rich syn­tag­matic blah­blah is a scene dur­ing the first snow­fall in win­ter, when a loose pea­cock flies about town crow­ing, lands in the square, and spreads its arro­gant plumage to a large group of men who are watch­ing. I don’t want to talk much about this part, because it is so per­fectly done in the film that any other dis­cus­sion of it makes it less than it is. I’ve already said to much about it.

There are glimpses of man­hood behind the mas­culin­ity, but only glimpses, which is prob­a­bly appro­pri­ate. Titta’s crazy uncle Teo ends up in a tree, anguished and vio­lent, yelling that he wants a woman. When Titta’s mother is ill [pos­si­bly from being out on the sea wait­ing for Il Rex all night], we can see the help­less­ness that his father feels but tries to hide. When she dies, Fellini pulls off another mas­ter­ful piece of film­mak­ing by allow­ing one sob from Titta and a shot of an empty bed before cut­ting imme­di­ately to the funeral. Some things are too griev­ous to be observed, and the lack of obser­va­tion makes the emo­tion all the stronger. Of course, Titta’s mom isn’t even in the ground yet before he is check­ing out one of his dis­tant relatives.

There is also the gen­tle fatherly fig­ure of the Lawyer, who gives us a bit of nar­ra­tion through­out the film, the patho­log­i­cal tale-teller Bis­celin [who once porked in one night 28 out of the 30 con­cu­bines that a vis­it­ing Emir brought with him] and some dude who we never see doing any­thing but rid­ing around on his motor­cy­cle and almost run­ning peo­ple over. There is also a motor-car race [where the fat kid finally gets over his crush, in a totally dif­fer­ent type of mas­tur­ba­tory fan­tasy]. I’m prob­a­bly for­get­ting a few things, but I’m all out of machismo and don’t want to write anymore.

• Roger Ebert Review
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Peter Bon­danella
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #6: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.

At the present moment, a film that goes against aver­age taste gets few book­ings in France, and out­side of some ambi­tious pic­tures under­taken to main­tain pres­tige, pro­duc­tion is almost at a stand­still and the stu­dios deserted. A poet engaged in film work must face another great dif­fi­culty: the imme­di­ate results demanded of a motion pic­ture. A book can wait. A play that has flopped may be revived. A film must please at once, and we there­fore have to devise ways to please and dis­please at the same time. There has never yet been an instance of some­thing new not baf­fling the esthetes, the crit­ics and the pub­lic, lazily accept­ing famil­iar for­mu­las. The least chal­lenge is apt to awaken a bru­tal and unpleas­ant response.

—Jean Cocteau

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Cocteau’s com­plaint about post war France is just as applic­a­ble to film cul­ture today as it was then, and it also pro­vides a good spring­board to the role of the folk/fairy tale as a means of keep­ing things the same as they change.

Beauty and the Beast starts out with an elo­quent plea from Cocteau to his adult audi­ence. He encour­ages them to watch the film as if they were still chil­dren, basi­cally a request to sus­pend their dis­be­lief as they watch the film. I found this to be some­what humor­ous, since Méliès [one of my favorite film­mak­ers] required a much larger sus­pen­sion with­out the dis­claimer. Of course, by the time Cocteau was doing his film thing, the indus­try had actu­ally become an indus­try and audi­ences expected to see films instead of tech­no­log­i­cal trick­ery. So the more things change the more they change. Cocteau

decided to make a film that would be a fairy tale, and when [he] chose the one that is the least fairy-like—which is to say the one that would need to make the least use of mod­ern cin­ema techniques

he essen­tially arrived at a posi­tion where inge­nious use of the­atri­cal inge­nu­ity replaced most cin­e­matic spe­cial effects. There are a few cam­era tricks, of course, but noth­ing that hadn’t been seen before. In fact, at the end, as the Belle et la Bête fly off into the sky, you can actu­ally see the frame over­lays thanks to the restored print. Where the set can be fully con­trolled, the cin­e­matog­ra­phy is out­stand­ing. The musi­cal score got on my nerves, because it seemed a bit over the top. Mise en scene is where the film excels, as well as Jean Marais’s act­ing abil­ity. He really nails the split per­son­al­i­ties of a noble man wrestling with a beast’s nature.

Now we can bring in the story of Beauty and the Beast itself. Like most tra­di­tional tales, it has a moral: you can’t judge a book by its cover; and like most tra­di­tional tales, it serves as a means of per­pet­u­at­ing basic cul­tural val­ues. This is a curi­ous basis for a story that Cocteau assumes orig­i­nated in Scot­land and is mar­ket­ing to an Amer­i­can audi­ence. Why do Beauty and the Beast then? Was it just an exer­cise for Cocteau? Well, maybe, but exer­cise is good for you, and Cocteau is pro­mot­ing the child­like sense of won­der that is so close to my heart.

An argu­ment could prob­a­bly be made that La Belle et la Bête served an impor­tant role in redefin­ing French cul­ture after World War II, but I don’t think all things must be more than they are. I’m will­ing to take Cocteau’s intent as noth­ing more than a desire to enter­tain and amaze. Which, when done well, is a higher order of expe­ri­ence anyway.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Fran­cis Steeg­muller
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Jean Cocteau
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #5: François Truffaut’s Les Qua­tre cents coups

This is only the sec­ond time I’ve seen The 400 Blows. It is pretty much con­sid­ered the ur-film of the French New Wave which means, unfor­tu­nately, that its fresh­ness of tech­nique and sub­ject mat­ter are a bit lost by the vast major­ity of films made in a sim­i­lar vein since. Despite its now-ubiquity as a film class sta­ple, it remains strong, mainly because of the fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ter that is Antoine Doinel.

Doinel is often con­sid­ered to be a stand-in for Truf­faut, which for me per­fectly exem­pli­fies the only real prob­lem I have with most French New Wave films. It shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that the director’s pres­ence is so evi­dent, com­ing hard on the heels of Truffaut’s own devel­op­ment of auteur the­ory; but to me the obses­sion that FNW direc­tors have in mak­ing them­selves auteurs tends to impede the other facets of the film­mak­ing, and almost seems masturbatory.

That said, The 400 Blows would not suc­ceed as well as it does with­out Truffaut’s own per­sonal expe­ri­ence to drive and add nuance to the story. There is no doubt that he knew what he was doing, so steeped in the ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion of Bazin [to whom the film is ded­i­cated] as he is. If any­thing would make me like film crit­i­cism more than film-making, Cahiers du cinéma could do it. But I’m still talk­ing about Truf­faut, not the film, thus is the dif­fi­culty of deal­ing with a work that has become more about the man mak­ing it than the work itself.

The 400 Blows is mainly a film about ado­les­cence, but it wouldn’t be French with­out healthy doses of exis­ten­tial­ism and anomie as well. That’s what I find most inter­est­ing. Antoine is the unwit­ting exis­ten­tial hero, striv­ing for his auton­omy against a soci­ety that has no place for him. His very nature belies this quest, because through­out the film he is merely reac­tionary. [When he reaches the sea and runs out of things to react against he finally catches a glimpse of the hor­ror of true free­dom]. It almost seems as if Truf­faut is mak­ing a cor­re­la­tion between exis­ten­tial auton­omy and anomie, and here ado­les­cence enters back into the pic­ture. The teenage years are an extended lim­i­nal period cul­mi­nat­ing [for Antoine] in a choice between exer­cis­ing his will to power or allow­ing him­self to be crushed into a sys­tem that offers all stick and no carrot.

There is a third choice, of course, remain­ing in ado­les­cence for the rest of your life. We’ll see what hap­pens with the rest of Truffaut’s films about Antoine Doinel. I haven’t seen them, but they are part of the Cri­te­rion List.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Annette Ins­dorf
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Kent Jones
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #3: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.

I’d not heard of this Hitch­cock film, which he made while he was still based in Britain, basi­cally to fin­ish out a con­tract with a film com­pany as far as I can tell. The Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion bills it as a roman­tic comedy/thriller, which aren’t my favorite gen­res, but I still ended up enjoy­ing this movie, mainly for the British­ness of the humor, if not for the thriller aspects or the romance.

This is another film that was released on the cusp of World War II and this one is full of not-so sub­tle polit­i­cal com­men­tary on British inter­na­tional rela­tions. Sev­eral times British politi­cians are called brain­less and lots of comic effect is derived from two men who are con­stantly con­cerned with “the sit­u­a­tion in Eng­land” by which they mean a cricket match, a bar­ris­ter is also shot in the back—which seems to be the writer’s and director’s way of pun­ish­ing him for being a cow­ard. I prob­a­bly missed other obvi­ous insin­u­a­tions that weren’t obvi­ous to me because I’m 67 years out of con­text and not British. All of this seems a bit out of place by the end of the movie, when we dis­cover that there is a secret mes­sage that needs deliv­er­ing to the For­eign Office.

There are plenty of plot twists to keep a viewer inter­ested and we find out who the vil­lain is before the heros do. This sim­ple twist struck me as a mas­ter­ful use of plot device to reju­ve­nate the momen­tum of a film that basi­cally con­sists of run­ning from one end of a train to the other again and again. But as I said before, the humor kept me going. The two men who only care about the cricket match are calm and col­lected under fire. One of them gets shot in the hand and pre­tends it is noth­ing but merely asks to bor­row his buddy’s hand­ker­chief. His buddy keeps the straight-man act going by say­ing “think noth­ing of it.” The romance is pretty under­scored com­pared to what you’re going to see in con­tem­po­rary romance sto­ries, the sud­den face-sucking at the end caught me a bit by surprise.

I get the feel­ing that this film has lost some­thing with age. I bet it was quite stronger and dan­ger­ous in its own time. Hitchcock’s cameo comes exactly an hour and a half into the film in the hus­tle and bus­tle of Vic­to­ria Sta­tion. The on-train con­spir­acy strains credulity in its appar­ent com­plete­ness and the lengths the vil­lains go to in order to dis­pose of the van­ished lady are also a bit out there. Despite the skill which Michael Wilm­ing­ton claims Hitch­cock has used to make this a suc­cess­ful roman­tic comedy/thriller I still feel like they are two gen­res that don’t taste great together. But then, I’m already slightly prej­u­diced against them.

• Michael Wilmington’s Cri­te­rion Essay
• Wikipedia entry
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #2: Akira Kurosawa’s Shi­chinin no samurai.

I’ve seen this film four times now, so it’s kind of hard to believe that I haven’t really writ­ten about it at all. This movie is so very very good and very very enter­tain­ing that peo­ple who absolutely hate for­eign films should still give it a try. While Kam­bei [Takashi Shimura, who I’ve seen pre­vi­ously in Inagaki’s ver­sion of The 47 Ronin] is the leader of the rat-tag ronin, the show is always stolen by Toshiro Mifune’s char­ac­ter: Kikuchiyo.

It should be pretty obvi­ous why this occurs. Kikuchiyo is the only char­ac­ter in the film that is com­pli­cated. Kat­suhiro is basi­cally just a horny young man, Kam­bei [who dearly misses his chon­mage] is an old war-dog, Manzo is just wor­ried about his daugh­ter, et cetera. Kikuchiyo how­ever, well, he has unwit­tingly made him­self into an exis­ten­tial hero by his inabil­ity to rec­on­cile his past and his ambition.

So he’s an ex-farmer whose par­ents were killed by ban­dits, and some­how he grew up, for­got his own name, got his hands on a samu­rai lin­eage scroll [sort of a patent of nobil­ity in a sense, I think] got him­self a bigass sword and then tries con­tin­u­ally to become the very thing he hates, a samu­rai. Kikuchiyo basi­cally hates the world, but his per­son­al­ity is such that, instead of being all depressed about it [although he does have manic-depressive ten­den­cies] he fights and fights and fights. His pos­tur­ing and swag­ger around the samu­rai he is try­ing to impress do lit­tle to his credit. His fierce indi­vid­u­al­ity is a lia­bil­ity to the defense of the vil­lage. Yet.

When he for­gets him­self we see his con­sid­er­able strengths. He is intu­itively intel­li­gent despite hav­ing no edu­ca­tion, valiant, and an excel­lent source of moti­va­tion. As an out­cast, he acts as an inter­me­di­ary between the farm­ers and the samu­rai, and his com­pas­sion for the farm­ers is obvi­ous, despite his dis­gust at the life they lead.

His death is nec­es­sary and inevitable. If he sur­vived, Kurosawa’s mes­sage would be over­shad­owed by the per­son­al­ity of Kikuchiyo. In death, the path is cleared for Kam­bei [still sans top­knot] to reflect on the ulti­mate tragedy of bushido. A samu­rai can live with honor, but always fails in his goals. Kikuchiyo’s death becomes a vic­tory then, for it was on his own terms, com­pletely per­sonal, not bound by any code or debt.

• David Ehrenstein’s Cri­te­rion essay.
• Some artist ren­der­ings of shots from the film.
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #1: Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion

via

This movie is a pow­er­ful anti-war film that will nev­er­the­less be a bit dif­fi­cult for me to keep in con­text since its mes­sage today has likely changed sig­nif­i­cantly since it was first shot. At a most basic level, this is a World War I prison escape film. At another level it is an illus­tra­tion of a par­a­digm shift: the destruc­tion of the old world aris­toc­racy and birth of the mod­ern social con­tract. Per­me­at­ing all of this is the Grand Illu­sion itself; that nation­al­ism and patri­o­tism limit more than they spec­ify. This point comes across with the most effi­cacy when Maréchal [Jean Gabin] and Rosen­thal [Mar­cel Dalio] are about to cross the bor­der from Ger­many to Switzer­land after escap­ing from their prison camp. After Maréchal says that he can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between Ger­many and Switzer­land, Rosen­thal states “Fron­tiers are an inven­tion of men. Nature doesn’t give a hoot.” Through­out the film, the ide­o­log­i­cal cre­ations of men con­sis­tently appear to cause more harm than good.

This strong neg­a­tive theme is bal­anced and, I think, ulti­mately out­weighed by the con­sis­tently pos­i­tive behav­ior of unre­stricted human nature. This ten­sion is what keeps La Grande Illu­sion applic­a­ble after all of these years. The film was shot in 1937, on the cusp of World War II, and recon­structed from frag­ments by Renoir after the war. It was a huge hit before the war, but like the liner notes for the DVD men­tion, after the hor­rors of WWII it served as a reminder that the Ger­mans were peo­ple too.

via

Time and time again, between Erich von Stroheim’s crip­pled Capt. von Rauf­fen­stein and Pierre Fresnay’s Capt. de Boeldieu, between the Ger­man widow Elsa [whose entire male fam­ily has been killed in Germany’s “great­est vic­to­ries”] and Maréchal and even between the French Jew Rosen­thal and Maréchal, we see peo­ple that would get along famously if the war wasn’t in the way. Iron­i­cally, they’d never be together in the first place with­out the war, but because of it, duty becomes inex­tri­ca­bly bound with regret. von Rauf­fen­stein is forced to shoot de Boeldieu who is sac­ri­fic­ing him­self so that Maréchal and Rosen­thal can escape. After­ward, he is wracked by regret that his duty made him kill a man he con­sid­ered a friend. As both an honor to de Boeldieu and pun­ish­ment to him­self, von Rauf­fen­stein clips the flower off of his gera­nium, the only flower in the entire cas­tle. [I must admit that I got a bit misty right there. Erich von Stro­heim is such a good actor.] Sim­i­larly, Maréchal must return to France and the fight­ing, leav­ing behind Elsa, with whom he has fallen in love. He promises to return, but in war there is slim chance he will do so.

The Grand Illu­sion is that there is any­thing hon­or­able about war. The only good acts occur when the char­ac­ters act from their hearts, and the bad acts occur when they bow to duty.

•A review of the par­tic­u­lars of the pro­duc­tion val­ues and the Cri­te­rion DVD
•Strictly Film School
•Peter Cowie’s Essay for the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.

Last night I watched The Matrix: Rev­o­lu­tions and The Last Starfighter. They are both pretty shitty sci­ence fic­tion movies, but each had their good points. For exam­ple, Neo’s line about con­tin­u­ing to fight because he chooses to do so was the high point of the movie for me since I wrote some­thing sort of about that back in the day and cited a sim­i­lar exam­ple from the Tao. The rest of the movie sucked.

The Last Starfighter was pretty fucken dumb too. I was 3 when it was released. I do think they need to bring back those short sport shorts that Cather­ine Mary Stew­art was wear­ing. I can live with­out the plas­ticene alien pros­thet­ics, though. Oh yeah, and the evil alien antag­o­nist? Least. Intim­i­dat­ing. Ever. Some­one call the inter­galac­tic wahm­bu­lance on that dumbass.

Don’t watch either of these. This has been a pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment. Tonight I watch Grand Illu­sion.

Ear­lier this year I finally fin­ished a book list from the Sci­ence Fic­tion Book Club, and since then I’ve been search­ing for another list to cut my teeth on. I’ve finally set­tled on one. I’m going to watch every movie issued on DVD by The Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion. To eas­ily keep track of this, I’ve made a page list­ing the cur­rent spines and the dates I’ve reviewed the films. Three or four are already listed. I’m actu­ally already ten per­cent done, as I’ve seen a lot of the Japan­ese films, noir and some of the French New Wave stuff on the list [30 all told]. I fig­ure if I watch one movie a week, I’ll fin­ish the list some­time in the next six years.

I’m also con­sid­er­ing that I might start to read all of the lit­er­ary col­lec­tions pro­vided by the Library of Amer­ica, which is a non-profit preser­va­tion pub­lish­ing com­pany. I’ve looked over their cat­a­log and it seems to be a quite var­ied selec­tion of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, much of which is unfa­mil­iar to me. If I start work­ing on that list and have a goal, I’ll be much more likely to buckle down and read some Her­man Melville or William Faulkner. I believe they only have about 155 spines in their cur­rent cat­a­log, so I think I should be able to go through that in a sim­i­lar amount of time as the Cri­te­rion list. I must be crazy.

I received a post­card in the mail the other day from Into the Fire, the flick I worked on in NYC a cou­ple of years back. Turns out it showed from Sep­tem­ber 23 through Octo­ber 6 at Landmark’s Sun­shine Cin­ema on East Hous­ton. I got the post­card post facto. Oth­er­wise I might have been able to force you NYC friends of mine to go watch it. You could have told me whether Sean Patrick Flanery’s per­for­mance was as wooden as it seemed from my side of the cam­era. It is quite creepy to see the sets I worked on through a lens of spec­ta­tor­ship instead of art depart­ment mule. Man that was a fun two months. Now I’ve got to scrounge up access to the movie, and find a DVD of it some­time. Maybe I’m cred­ited, but I doubt it. It is get­ting okay reviews on by the aver­age joe’s at IMDb. Not so good on Rot­ten Toma­toes. Hell, just Google it, there is plenty of stuff to read…

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #104: Akira Kurosawa’s Shinjû: Ten no ami­jima.

I was hav­ing a dis­cus­sion the other day about Japan­ese the­atre: kabuki, noh and bun­raku, and was rec­om­mended the film Shinjû: Ten no ami­jima [Dou­ble Sui­cide], by Masahiro Shin­oda. It is an adap­ta­tion of a bun­raku [pup­pet the­atre] play, with kabuki act­ing. I was told it was done in noh style, so I was expect­ing some­thing par­tic­u­larly aus­tere, per­haps like Mizoguchi’s Gen­roku Chushin­gura. I basi­cally went into this movie blind, I’d for­got­ten [if I ever knew in the first place] that Shin­oda was part of the Japan­ese New Wave, and was pre­pared for the oppo­site of kabuki melodrama.

The film/play is about a poor paper mer­chant named Jihei who has thrown away his honor for a geisha named Koharu. He has sworn to buy her free­dom, but instead spends all his dough pork­ing her. He’s got a dog-ugly wife named Osan and two zom­bie chil­dren, a nag­ging mother-in-law and a father-in-law who was prob­a­bly oil­ing his wakaza­shi when Jihei first came to court Osan. Osan is his cousin, by the way. The lovers swear to elope together and then com­mit sui­cide. I’m pretty sure this is because they are being ground between their love for each other and their oblig­a­tions as mem­bers of Japan­ese soci­ety, but seri­ously, some­times Japan­ese honor and eti­quette makes no sense to me. After lots of wig­ging out by Jihei and vis­its by all the afore­men­tioned par­ties to wig out at Jihei, he ends up elop­ing with Koharu, they pork one last time in a grave­yard and then he chops her up Beni­hana style and hangs him­self with her obi.

So that’s the plot. How was it shot? Shin­oda starts out self-reflexively, with the bun­raku pup­peteers, called kurago, set­ting up pup­pets for Shinjû: Ten no ami­jima. A dis­cus­sion of how the cemetary sex should pro­ceed is inter­spersed with these shots. I’m not sure if it is Shin­oda on screen dressed as a kurago [a cin­e­matic pun that is car­ried through­out the film] but it is def­i­nitely his thought being expressed, in terms of fetishism of space and the poignancy of the death scene, which they don’t want to be a typ­i­cal kabuki death. Once every­body is all set the play part of the film begins, in period, in cos­tume, but with the black masked kurago omi­nously shad­ow­ing and direct­ing the action. This use of kurago is what makes the movie. Their pres­ence is the sym­bolic hand of the direc­tor and the hand of fate, with echoes in my mind of Death in The Sev­enth Seal. They also serve as reminders that this is based on bun­raku, that the actors are not much more than pup­pets to the will of the direc­tor and just about any other func­tion you’d care to ascribe to them. In some ways the actors’ melo­drama is nec­es­sary to reduce the impact of these still, black-clothed mys­tery men.

Jump­ing back to the Shinoda’s fetishism of space. He really pushes the frame in a lot of shots, and uses his misé en scene and shot place­ment to cre­ate rigid senses of entrap­ment. A wardrobe will split the frame, keep­ing the actors pressed to one side while a kurago sits at his ease on the other, or a rack focus will reveal a dresser, emp­tied of kimonos to pay Koharu’s debt, that weighs heav­ily on Osan. Chaotic set dress­ing is the norm when rigid­ity is absent. Smears of paint on a wall, enraged faces painted on walls and floors seem to reflect the emo­tional states of Koharu and Jihei, while also con­fus­ing the eye. The sets could also be dis­as­sem­bled to reveal ear­lier sets, and there are rotat­ing walls and other hoo-ha to cre­ate a wholly new type of immer­sion. Instead of the viewer being immersed in the story, Shin­oda strikes a bal­ance where the viewer can walk in the story, but the char­ac­ters can also walk out­side the fourth wall. For me this is sup­posed to be a reminder that while this might be a play, shit hap­pens in real life too.

Visu­ally the film is a treat, but the story didn’t do a whole lot for me. The sex among the tomb­stones did do some pretty good fetishism of space, I guess, but it had a healthy dose of voyeurism along with it with the [more active at this point] kurago sit­ting around watch­ing the action. The death scene was in kabuki style [or maybe bun­raku, which I’m not as famil­iar with] but didn’t have the [for lack of a bet­ter word] glory of a kabuki death. Their deaths didn’t seem cheap either, but full of pathos. It might be worth a watch for cineastes, but prob­a­bly not your aver­age viewer.

Fur­ther Read­ing: Claire Johnston’s excel­lent essay. [Although I think her phal­lic bell might be a bit of a phal­lacy.]
NY Times review of the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion DVD.

Link of the Day: Lat­eral Think­ing Puzzles

I had been mean­ing to see Sin City since I first watched a trailer for it back in 2004, and last week I got the DVD from the library. I sure waited long enough, didn’t I? The movie is a series of char­ac­ter vignettes and the char­ac­ters tend to cross each oth­ers’ paths pretty con­sis­tently. All are from Frank Miller’s Sin City graphic nov­els. You’ve got your basic aging but hon­est cop, your basic vig­i­lante tough guy, your basic hit man, your basic katana-wielding pros­ti­tute and your basic yel­low smelly ser­ial killer. No one really has super pow­ers, although some of their skill lev­els and sheer tough­ness approach that level. All in all, it is very vio­lent and beau coup noir.

I know vir­tu­ally noth­ing about Frank Miller’s style, but from what I’ve seen and what I felt in watch­ing Sin City, I believe Robert Rodriguez did a great job in the trans­fer. There is a heavy dose of celebrity in the film, with Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Beni­cio del Toro, Brit­tany Mur­phy, Jes­sica Alba, Rosario Daw­son and a few more girls who can’t act but are easy on the eyes. Mickey Rourke’s char­ac­ter, Marv, stole the show for me. He’s the tough guy vig­i­lante. His vignette was third in the movie, after the hit man [Josh Hart­nett] and the cop [Willis] and once his story got going I really got immersed in what Sin City is like, and really started to notice the excel­lent cin­e­matog­ra­phy and dig­i­tal mas­ter­ing that gave the film its well-known styl­iza­tion and tone. So many of the shots looked like stills from a comic book [see links at the end of this post] that I became seri­ously impressed with the amount of plan­ning that must have gone into it. Quentin Taran­tino appar­ently guest directed at one point [I think I know which one] but the kind of grace­fully sud­den vio­lence that I’ve known from Rodriguez in El Mari­achi and Des­per­ado works great in this format.

The word you are look­ing for is chiaroscuro. Vir­tu­ally the entire film is desat­u­rated, with key bits of vibrant color tossed in to accen­tu­ate and insin­u­ate cer­tain scenes and themes. It should also be men­tioned that Rodriguez did a lot of the music for Sin City and it is a pretty heavy set of post-industrial tunage. Worth check­ing out on its own merit. I’ve added this movie to my heav­ily updated wish­list, so you know I find it worth watch­ing over and over and over again.

Fur­ther read­ing:
Graphic novel ver­sus film shot com­par­i­son
Yahoo! still com­par­i­son
Wired arti­cle on Rodriguez

Gril­lions of peo­ple told me to watch this movie, Cidade de Deus, and while the plot didn’t do much for me [Brazil­ian Boyz in the Hood], the tech­ni­cal skill of the film was def­i­nitely impres­sive in a few ways. Struc­tured in jour­nal­is­tic vignettes, the film tells us about Cidade de Deus [Rio’s Trench­town] by chart­ing the rise and fall of its var­i­ous inhab­i­tants.
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Sky Cap­tain and The World of Tomor­row is just like most reviews you’ve read of it. 100% pulp. Granted, it has that fan­boy­ish nos­tal­gia for the golden age of sci­ence fic­tion, and it works in the retroart­deco hip­ness that has been pop­ping up lately, so pulp should be expected. Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Bur­roughs don’t hold up so well in the 21st cen­tury. Or more to the point, you can’t make a sci­ence fic­tion movie that hap­pens 70 years in the past.
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This is movie-watching week for me. Last night I watched La Cité des enfants per­dus [1995]. My rather over­sim­pli­fied review is past the jump.
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A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #182: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs

If ever there is a movie that ful­fills the maxim “Beware the wrath of a quiet man” Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs [1971] [don’t miss the essay from a real film critic] is it. One of the many things Peck­in­pah does well is vio­lence. After all, he is the man who at first shocked, then pop­u­lar­ized mod­ern graphic vio­lence with The Wild Bunch. Sam isn’t one to have vio­lence merely for vio­lence sake, though. It served a higher pur­pose in The Wild Bunch, and it does the same in Straw Dogs, albeit more ambigu­ously. This movie is a tough read. It is no sur­prise to me that it was banned for years in the UK. Spoil­ers cer­tainly past the jump.
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Baraka, a Sufi word some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of “bless­ing” is vested with just about as much mean­ing as arete. So when I checked out Baraka [tons of screen­shots] from the library, I expected a com­pli­cated movie. It is com­pli­cated in the fact that it is and isn’t com­pli­cated.
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I’m a big dum­b­ass for not think­ing De-Lovely, a movie about Cole Porter, would be a musi­cal. Of course it was a musi­cal, you big dum­b­ass! Not you. Me. I don’t par­tic­u­larly like musi­cals, so bear that in mind as I review this one.
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As far as movies about abor­tion go, Vera Drake [Leigh, 2004] seems eas­ier to under­stand in the con­text of British class issues than the con­tem­po­rary abor­tion debate. I guess the whole movie is about con­text, really. So I’ll try to make my way through some of it past the jump. Spoil­ers ahead.
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I finally saw Gar­den State, and didn’t like it at all. I can for­give the sloppy edit­ing, but for me the char­ac­ters were all absolutely life­less, and the story was like stale arti­fi­cial sweet­ener. I think the movie inspired dead­ness in me because I in no way con­nected to the lives or prob­lems of any of the char­ac­ters. I’ve never been in love, so the love story seemed trite [per­haps this rea­son is why I don’t like romance movies], I’ve never been med­icated with mood-adjusting chem­i­cals, so I can’t con­nect there, I’ve never been estranged from my high school bud­dies, no con­nec­tion there; I’ve never done drugs, no con­nec­tion… And that is just super­fi­cially. Every main char­ac­ter seemed paste­board cut-out high school fresh­men. At least, if it is con­sid­ered a coming-of-age story for a 26 year old then per­haps that is why it seemed like every­one was so imma­ture to me. I grew up a long time ago. Maybe I’m just grouchy too. In any case, didn’t like the movie.

It isn’t often I do a DVD review, but then, when what I’m review­ing is a bunch of stuff from the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tury, I guess you have to make do. I finally sat down and watched all of Méliès the Magi­cian a DVD that has been rest­ing on my tele­vi­sion for quite some time now.
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In the Realms of the Unreal is a doc­u­men­tary on the life of out­sider artist Henry Darger and is cur­rently play­ing at the Cedar Lee. It is a great doc, with great ani­ma­tion and a great focus. Go catch it before it dis­ap­pears.
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Fri­day I went to see The Ani­ma­tion Show at the Cleve­land Cin­e­math­eque. It was really good. Here is what is play­ing in 2005.

Mini-reviews within.
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I went to the Cleve­land Film Fes­ti­val on Fri­day for a show­ing of six short films. Short reviews of each, and spoil­ers of course, past the jump.
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Robots is an enter­tain­ing movie, quite worth tak­ing the kids to see. It is a bit light on plot, but that’s okay. The humor was right up my alley, visual and ver­bal puns were the main course, cracked me up. For instance, at one point all the Robots do The Robot; expected but hilar­i­ous nonethe­less. The cast and sound­track were a bit pre­dictably all-star, I could’ve done with less Robin Williams [I think he’s jumped the shark] and more Tom Waits.
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I finally watched Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind last night. I’ve been want­ing to see it pretty much since it came out, but it was one of those things that I never really got around to doing. In any case, while I want to watch it at least one more time before I cod­ify my thoughts on the thing. The best time to spit it out should be now, while it is fresh in my mind. If you’ve not seen the movie, please don’t go past the jump.
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A Very Long Engage­ment [Un long dimanche de fiançailles] is a very long engage­ment indeed. Way too long. About 45 min­utes too long. Watch­ing the movie is like eat­ing a plain baguette, It is sort of tasty when you start but you get tired of it long before the end.
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I had some friends over on Sat­ur­day for movies. We ordered Big Guy’s Pizza and watched some real rasp­ber­ries in the world of cin­ema. Two reviews lie after the jump. We watched four, but I’m not going to review the ones I’d already seen.
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I went to the Cedar Lee last night and saw Hotel Rwanda. It was even heav­ier than I expected it to be and it def­i­nitely bore a bit of dis­cus­sion with my friend and a bit more thought now. You can lis­ten to an NPR inter­view with Don Chea­dle here. Spoil­ers within.
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Here is a Top 10 list of my favorite movie badasses. These folks are hard­core invin­ci­ble types. No ani­mated char­ac­ters and no super­heros. I have elim­i­nated movies where folks are more than just badass. So if there is some­one miss­ing from the list that you think should be there, it is either because I haven’t seen the movie, had for­got­ten about it, or the char­ac­ter is a lot more com­pli­cated than being just a badass [i.e. Kat­sumoto [Ken Watan­abe] from The Last Samu­rai]
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I saw Ocean’s 12 last night with Liam and Anne. Per­haps the last time I will see them before they move to NYC. Any­way, Ocean’s 12 is all edge and no teeth. If Ocean’s Eleven [O11] is an intel­li­gent, sophis­ti­cated, mys­te­ri­ous and beau­ti­ful French woman, then Ocean’s 12 [O12] is a dumb nympho­ma­niac soror­ity girl. Which is basi­cally to say that both are enjoy­able in their ways, but one has a bit more taste.
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In the mid­dle of the last cen­tury, the United States of Amer­ica was in full swing at the Com­mu­nist Threat Within. McCarthy­ism was rife and Hol­ly­wood was in thrall to the bully­boy tac­tics of black­list­ing. The ram­pant suc­cess of I Was A Teenage Were­wolf [1957] in this time period is sur­pris­ing given its quite obvi­ous den­i­gra­tion of Amer­i­can indi­vid­u­al­ism in the face of author­i­tar­ian con­trol.
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I snagged Logan’s Run from the library because I’ve not seen it in almost a decade. I can appre­ci­ate it [only slightly] more now that I’m older.
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The Bourne Supremacy is not a movie you want to watch from the front row of an ill-designed movie the­ater. I don’t, in fact, know if it is a good movie or not, so I’ll just talk about the expe­ri­ence.
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Ladies and Gen­tle­men, I will now use my film degree for bas­tardized pur­poses. Also, I am grow­ing a beard again.
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A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #64: Carol Reed’s The Third Man.

With the likes of Carol Reed direct­ing, a Gra­ham Greene screen­play and Orson Welles, The Third Man, [1949] which I recently watched, is a very good movie. And since it was a Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion DVD, the good­ies are just as good.
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Finally saw Spi­der­man 2, not that I really wanted to see it, but I wasn’t averse to it either. I didn’t appre­ci­ate it so much for its story as for the auteuri­cal flour­ishes that Sam Raimi brought for me. There might be a spoiler or two to fol­low.
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Screw Mock-a-Blog week. I’ve got more impor­tant things to write on. I watched About Schmidt last evening and it was alright. Def­i­nitely an old person’s movie. It was solidly put together with inter­est­ing shots but noth­ing fancy. Jack Nichol­son made the movie. It is obvi­ous why his per­for­mance got him nom­i­nated for so many awards. Kathy Bates was even nom­i­nated for Best Actress in a Sup­port­ing Role for her per­for­mance. I wasn’t stunned by her per­for­mance but I was stunned by her get­ting bare-ass naked for a hot tub scene. She is not an attrac­tive woman.

Watch­ing About Schmidt got me think­ing though. I’ve got the feel­ing more and more films like this are going to start appear­ing in the wake of baby boomer retire­ments. I’m not and not meant to be inter­ested in films about old age. The demo­graphic is my parent’s. I am sort of inter­ested in how aging and the decline of the boomers will be por­trayed. This arti­cle by Michael Moses appeared in the Jan­u­ary 2002 edi­tion of Rea­son and sort of gets at some of the prob­lems that boomer cin­ema might throw up.

Pretty inflam­ma­tory; but what he is get­ting at finally shows up in his sec­ond to last sentence.

I find this trou­bling because my parent’s gen­er­a­tion has so much clout that it can enforce cul­tural and ide­o­log­i­cal change to a high degree. Its the mes­sage of the 60s aged 40 years. In this way, boomers are still rebelling against their upbring­ing and try­ing to define them­selves. I think I’m uncom­fort­able with this because I feel the same way. I think the boomers are obso­lete and should stop wor­ry­ing about them­selves so much. I think by now they should have come up with some sense of sta­bil­ity. I think they should give it up and let GenXrs come into their own. I don’t want an influx of movies about being old because I want to cel­e­brate being young. At the same time I’m inter­ested in what boomers are going to pro­duce in their evening years.

I sup­pose every gen­er­a­tion feels this way as the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion ages. So I guess my tirade is noth­ing more than the pot call­ing the ket­tle black.

I finally fin­ished watch­ing Gen­roku chushin­gura [The 47 Ronin]. This film is con­sid­ered one of the clas­sic films of Japan­ese cin­ema and was directed by the always impres­sive Kenji Mizoguchi. The film was released in 1942 and was com­mis­sioned by the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment to be a nation­al­ist rhetoric in favor of war to real­ize Japan­ese supremacy blah blah.

What Mizoguchi ended up giv­ing them was the last thing they expected I’d bet. The film is long– 222 min­utes– and moves so very slowly that I had to watch it in half hour incre­ments and then take a break. It is very Japan­ese. I might have missed it, but I can­not think of one instance in the entire film where there is phys­i­cal con­tact between two peo­ple. Bushido is a cen­tral theme and rigid obe­di­ence and polite­ness are always present. It was very hard for me to watch because of this. The restraint was so pal­pa­ble, at times I knew the char­ac­ters were hold­ing back the urge to embrace [or would have been had they been West­ern­ers]. Even when close friends com­mit hari-kiri, no one touches.

Oishi– the main char­ac­ter and cham­ber­lain of the Asano cas­tle at Ako– is the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of bushido. He is the per­fect samu­rai, sac­ri­fic­ing his entire life, his honor and even endan­ger­ing him­self polit­i­cally in order to exact revenge for his lord. He is also so very kind­hearted that the amount of willpower it must have taken him to be so stern is amaz­ing. I’ve never seen such a mas­ter­fully and enig­mat­i­cally por­trayed char­ac­ter as Oishi. He demands respect from the audi­ence. Although the film con­cerns itself almost wholly with vio­lence, there is no vio­lence in the film apart from one sword stroke in the first scene.

The film is absolutely beau­ti­ful to watch. It cuts rarely, most shots are long takes. I think, per­haps, that they only cut when the mag ran out of film. The block­ing is also exquis­ite. The amount of things that can be done with tra­di­tional Japan­ese archi­tec­ture paper doors, screens, open walls and all that let the cam­era move seam­lessly from indoors to out­doors and allow the shot to change shape com­pletely with out the cam­era mov­ing at all. This is def­i­nitely a film worth see­ing. The dif­fi­culty you might have watch­ing it, the patience nec­es­sary; mir­rors quite effec­tively the dif­fi­culty the ronin must have had in plan­ning their revenge. I’m not sure if it was inten­tional, since this is so obvi­ously a Japan­ese film, per­haps I am merely feel­ing this since I am a West­erner, but it works anyway.

• A syn­op­sis of the actual story.
• Wikipedia entry with links to help­ful terms like bushido, sep­puku, etc.
• Good arti­cle on the his­tor­i­cal con­text of the film.

Last night I was sur­prised with a ticket to see 5 Sides of a Coin at the Cleve­land Film Fes­ti­val. Directed by Paul Kell, this too-short doc­u­men­tary con­cerns itself with five areas of hip-hop: rap­pin’, scratchin’, breakin’, beat­boxin’ and graf­fiti. I enjoyed the film for what it was, but I think it was lack­ing in quite a few areas. The film aims for an edgy intel­lec­tu­al­ism bent on debunk­ing the pop­u­lar opin­ion of hip-hop; at least I think that is what it does. The film presents a refresh­ing look at an art­form that isn’t based on mate­ri­al­is­tic suc­cess, vio­lent pos­tur­ing and sex­ual prowess. Instead we have thought­ful, sin­cere tes­ti­monies from the some of the folks who made this kind of music from before it had a name. At least initially.

The film moves on rather quickly through all five sides of the coin with rapid­fire blurbs from many of under­ground hip-hop’s finest. But it seems like these folks were only asked the same ques­tions. What does [insert rap­pin’, scratchin’, breakin’, beat­boxin’, graf­fiti or a person’s name here] mean to you? The most main­stream and suc­cess­ful rap­pers have no forum in this film. Eminem and Tupac are men­tioned once. Snoop Dogg is men­tioned briefly, but only as a stag­ing plat­form to intro­duce the amaz­ingly preachy C. Dolores Tucker. She uses Snoop Dogg as an exam­ple for every­thing that is wrong in hip-hop; specif­i­cally cit­ing a case where a boy shot his three year-old sis­ter pre­tend­ing to be the Doggfather.

This is fol­lowed up by some guy [they all mashed together after awhile but I believe this one was the most suc­cinct and elo­quent of the bunch] say­ing that he could rec­om­mend some hip-hoppers to her that would prob­a­bly change her mind. Artists with pos­i­tive messages.

Tech­ni­cally the film is very well put together. The music, nec­es­sar­ily dri­ves much of the feel –and is very good. The docu feel is pretty stan­dard and mon­tage is used pretty exten­sively. Some of the mon­tage footage is obvi­ously reused which gives me the impres­sion that per­haps Kell didn’t have as much good con­tent as he thought he did. Also con­tribut­ing to this hypoth­e­sis is the film’s length.

Sud­denly, sev­enty min­utes in, the movie ends. This is my biggest beef. Another twenty to thirty min­utes would have made all the dif­fer­ence for me. It would have pro­vided a chance for Kell to flesh things out a bit more in all areas. Instead of telling me what to think about hip-hop or telling me to think about hip-hop 5 Sides of a Coin leaves me bereft — wait­ing for some sort of clo­sure. While it is great to watch in the end I feel that Kell was more con­cerned with mak­ing the film look good instead of mak­ing the con­tent excel. This is never a good thing when you are doing a doc­u­men­tary. I still had a damn good time though.

• Film Threat review
• Also Play­ing at: SXSW
• Crazy flash site about the film

I snagged For­bid­den Planet from the library this week­end and watched it on Sat­ur­day. I also picked up Fellini’s Satyri­con and Inagaki’s The 47 Ronin.

For­bid­den Planet is an excel­lent science-fiction movie. Appar­ently it is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tem­pest which hap­pens to be my favorite of Billy’s plays. I grabbed it mostly because of the open­ing song in The Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show. Leslie Nielsen [pre-screwball com­edy] and the lovely Ann Fran­cis are the stars.

The film fea­tures the first all elec­tronic score in cin­ema his­tory [or so it claims] and has excel­lent spe­cial effects and pro­duc­tion val­ues. If you see it, keep in mind that it was made in 1956. For­bid­den Planet is heav­ily psy­cho­log­i­cal and makes no bones about it. Per­haps what is most impres­sive about the film is that it makes no bones about any­thing, due to the nature of the char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, every­one gets right to the point. There is no inten­tional arti­fice. Per­haps most notice­able in this respect [at least for me] are the spar­ing ref­er­ences to Chris­tian­ity. For exam­ple, on approach to Altair IV in eclipse, a crew­man makes the com­ment ‘The Lord sure made some great stuff.’ I read this as a 1950s attempt to insert a bit of reli­gion into the film but not in an awk­ward way. The man­ner in which it is deliv­ered [non­cha­lantly] and the sit­u­a­tion in which it occurs [look­ing at a beau­ti­ful corona] let me know that the guys on the ship have a broader view of Chris­tian­ity than just about any­one I know. This is a ver­sion of a reli­gion that doesn’t get in anyone’s way. The dia­logue is always straight­for­ward, almost dar­ing you to judge it.

Other 1950s val­ues are quite present, men take their hats off when they enter a house, rise when a woman enters a room and then imme­di­ately objec­tify her like crazy. Of course, this is Ann Fran­cis role in the whole film: an inno­cent, scantily-clad, nubile temp­ta­tion. Even though she has never had con­tact with men other than her father and has had no con­tact with women, she still pos­sesses wom­anly wiles, most point­edly as a tease. I can for­give all of this though, after all, this was made about 50 years ago.

Other sorts of atavis­tic themes are dealt with as well. The Krell, a race that pre­vi­ously occu­pied the world of Altair IV, had reached a state of near-utopia when they were all mys­te­ri­ously killed in one night. How this hap­pened, what killed the crew of a ship from a pre­vi­ous expe­di­tion and what is killing the crew of Leslie Nielsen’s ship are the main mys­ter­ies to be solved. In the lab­o­ra­to­ries of the Krell it is pos­si­ble to glimpse the glo­ries of the past and also move toward an answer to the mind behind all of this destruc­tion. In the end, free­dom is paid for by the renun­ci­a­tion of power and accep­tance of weak­ness. The film gave me the feel­ing that no mat­ter how close to per­fec­tion human­ity might get, there will always be some­thing lurk­ing deep down within.

Robby the Robot has some remark­able abil­i­ties even though he gives off the rank aroma of a man in an unwieldy rub­ber suit. The edit­ing is pretty stan­dard but is also used cre­atively to get around some of the seams where spe­cial effects fail. The elec­tronic score is meant to be oth­er­worldly and despite the slight overuse of a theremin it does a pretty good job. I don’t par­tic­u­larly think it is a good score but in the end it doesn’t really matter.

If you like old sci-fi films then you should give this one a watch. Its right up there with The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Some Rather Poor For­bid­den Planet links. [the sites are ugly but the reviews are alright]

• Forbidden-Planet.org
• Unof­fi­cial For­bid­den Planet
• Clas­sic Sci-Fi Review

Hol­ly­wood Video has this great coupon gizmo going on where you can rent up to three new releases for the full five days at 99 cents each. last night i rented In the Cut, Lost in Trans­la­tion, and Solaris for 5 days and a measly $3.21. with­out this won­der­ful coupon [a pile of which i have at my apart­ment] rent­ing one of these films would have cost me $3.79 plus tax. adding to this cool­ness is the fact that if i get In the Cut back to Hol­ly­wood Video before mid­night tonight [actu­ally i returned it this morn­ing] i gain $1 dol­lar of credit on my next pur­chase. this might not sound like hot shit to some of you, but when you are poor and like to watch as many movies as i do then it is ver’ ver’ nice.

In the Cut is only the sec­ond Jane Cam­pion film I have seen [the first one being The Piano]. I liked the fem­i­nism of The Piano, but not of In the Cut. Every man seemed a rapist, every look directed toward Meg Ryan was a vio­la­tion. It is hard to tell if any man is a good man until the very end. I’d have to watch The Piano and In the Cut again, and next to each other to tell for sure, but I think Cam­pion might just be rehash­ing the same old thing again and again. [I think she had it right in The Piano except for the very end of the film.]

It seems like only men care about look­ing in In the Cut. Meg Ryan and Jen­nifer Jason Leigh only seem to care about ‘get­ting a dick inside [them].’ The cam­era makes both male and female bod­ies into beau­ti­ful things. In fact, the cam­era makes every­thing it sees into a beau­ti­ful thing. I’ve got no com­plaints in that respect. Cam­pion knows how to pick her peo­ple. There is a lot of hand held, long lens, shal­low depth of field, blurred focus stuff going on that I think is sup­posed to reflect the uncer­tainty of the thriller genre. But for me it also seems to say, ‘I don’t know how to answer the ques­tions I’m ask­ing.’ Of course, Campion’s point could be that the ques­tions can’t be answered.

As a thriller [they don’t do much for me] it reminded me of any Scooby Doo episode. The vil­lain could be any of sev­eral char­ac­ters and ends up being one you never really expected. It was well done in the sense that I never knew who it could be until I found out who it was. Its worth a watch, if just for how pretty it is to look at. I’d like to talk it over with my film the­ory pro­fes­sor. I might send her an email ask­ing if she has seen it. Kevin Bacon is in the film too.

Tonight I watch Solaris.

I spent the week­end work­ing in Med­ina on Save the Day. I ate much food, talked about the three main on-set top­ics [films i’ve worked on/films i’ve seen, drink­ing, and sex]. It was a long week­end, 66 sched­uled shots, many of them involv­ing fight chore­og­ra­phy. I worked as sound assis­tant for awhile, did some light­ing setup, moved a cou­ple of sand­bags and tum­bling mats, and sat around on my ass eat­ing more food.

I fig­ure that I have only eaten one meal at my apart­ment in the last two weeks. All else has been pro­vided for me either by work­ing on set, being fed at work, or being fed at my friend’s or my friend’s parent’s house. I hypoth­e­size that if I can keep a steady gig going help­ing on films that I might not ever have to fix myself some­thing to eat again.

–Adden­dum–

The loca­tion Fri­day evening was a bit weird as fuck. Imag­ine, if you can, a room with two player pianos, a cou­ple of ancient arm­chairs, and every last inch of wall and counter and shelf space cov­ered with taxi­der­mied ani­mal heads and ani­mals, lac­quered cow and goat skulls, stuffed boars heads, a rack of weasel furs, a jack­a­lope head, stuffed squir­rels, snake skins, tanned hides, fish heads stuffed fish, wasp’s nests, a enor­mous moose head, an elk head, a gazelle head, sev­eral deer heads, skunk pelts, beaver pelts, you name a crit­ter and I bet there was a dead one on the wall.

I went to an advanced screen­ing of the new Viggo Mortensen vehi­cle, Hidalgo, last evening. The story story cen­ters around Frank Hop­kins [Mortensen]; his paint mus­tang, Hidalgo; and long dis­tance horse rac­ing. Hop­kins goes to Ara­bia to com­pete in a 3,000 mile Bedouin race across the deserts. A dual review is found below, one praises the movie and one cri­tiques it. There will most likely be spoilers.

I didn’t think it was pos­si­ble for Hol­ly­wood to make movies like Hidalgo any­more. The story itself would not have been out of place any­where in Clas­si­cal Hol­ly­wood. There was no overt sex, lit­tle overt romance, and it was won­der­ful. I shouldn’t need to be shown a sex scene or even a kiss to know that there is some type of chem­istry between two char­ac­ters. I also shouldn’t need to see a char­ac­ter ready to pork at the first scent of seduc­tion. I like to think that I am a bit smarter than that. The direc­tor, Joe John­ston, appar­ently rec­og­nizes that humans have the abil­ity to infer attrac­tion and defer cop­u­la­tion if they apply them­selves to it. Thus, I am glad that Hop­kins does not shag Lady Dav­en­port [Louise Lom­bard], nor even kiss Jazira [Zuleikha Robin­son]. It would have seemed incon­gru­ous stu­dio fiddle-faddle if he had.

The vio­lence is not gore, but of the action-adventure vari­ety. It is enter­tain­ing and real­is­tic with­out being grue­some. It is also not overused. The fight sequences last just long enough to keep a movie about a 3,000 mile horse race from becom­ing boring.

The raid and res­cue sequence at the end of the first third of the movie was prob­a­bly the best placed subplot/sidequest I have ever seen in a movie. Here I am sit­ting in the the­ater think­ing: ‘horse race horse race horse ra..holy shit! Jazira just got kid­napped. Holy Shit! Hop­kins just saved her. HOLY SHIT! HORSE RACE!’

The pro­duc­tion val­ues were refresh­ing. Night shots were under­ex­posed, shots in the hell of the desert were over­ex­posed, but both just enough to add to the scenes, intead of mak­ing them about the cin­e­matog­ra­phy instead of the plot. In a scene in the tent of the Sheikh of Sheikhs which shows a sub­tle sun­rise the char­ac­ters fea­tures go from nearly invis­i­ble to being etched in the wan light of dawn, almost with­out notice. The nor­mal wasn’t always the actor’s face, it was shot like peo­ple see.

The horse doesn’t die. This is key. I hate movies where ani­mals are killed just to make you feel bad. Hidalgo teases the viewer with this but does not fol­low through. The end­ing is, instead, a won­der­ful bit­ter­sweet part­ing of great friends.
I com­pletely rec­om­mend that you go see this movie. As a story and as a movie it is well crafted and a delight to par­take of.

The movie is greatly con­cerned with blood, mixed and pure. In it, mixed blood tri­umphs over pure blood, both in horse and in human. An attempt is made to attribute the vic­tory of mixed blood to a tri­umph of will, but this is faulty for one big reason.

–Since pure­bred ver­sus mus­tang and infi­del ver­sus Bedouin are such a big deal, not treat­ing the mat­ter with more depth makes the per­spec­tives seem racist, even though that might not be the intention.

This opens up a whole slew of mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions. Most notably, since the mixed Hop­kins and mixed Hidalgo win the race on pure gump­tion, the ques­tion of blood is avoided. One gets the sense that if the Prince that rode Al-Hattal had not been such a whiner and dandy and had not felt so threat­ened by Hop­kins, he would have won eas­ily. At the same time the Prince is like a ner­vous pure­bred dog, and Hop­kins is a mel­low, friendly mon­grel. Blood is only addressed in stereotypes.

There might be some anti-Arabic sen­ti­ment in the film as well. My per­cep­tion of this might also be the result of my own skewed mind­set of the ram­pant anti-Arabic sen­ti­ments of our time. Although there is no overt racism directed toward them, they are depicted as bar­baric, oppres­sive, con­de­scend­ing, and resent­ful of Amer­i­can val­ues. The sheikh, on the other hand, appears to want to be an Amer­i­can him­self. Hol­ly­wood can­not seem to make films in which an eth­nic group is con­tent to be them­selves and con­tent to let Amer­i­cans be American.

And a bunch of other stuff: The mas­sacre at Wounded Knee is revised to make it appear as much of an acci­dent as pos­si­ble. Mortensen plays a half-breed, but apart from high cheek­bones, doesn’t really look the part. The Sioux are killed but their horses are saved. We start the movie with dead Sioux, end with their freed horses and we some­how care more for the free horses than we do for the dead Sioux. All women want Mortensen and it is implied that this is because he is rough and strong, and also because he is a mon­grel. It’s a new ver­sion of the old fright sur­round­ing white women and black men. All of that is rather wear­ing and bor­ing. The movie can be enjoyed if it is seen with­out pay­ing atten­tion to any sub­text, intended or inferred. When you try to exam­ine what else might be hid­den in the film, things get mighty con­fus­ing. I’m just going to wind up by say­ing that this con­fu­sion closely resem­bles the way many Amer­i­cans feel toward the Middle-East– diver­sity, mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism ver­sus the melt­ing pot– it offers ideas but no con­clu­sions. i think i’ve might ahve done the same myself. or just the opposite.

I’m some­what back in the sad­dle when it comes to film­mak­ing. For the next two weeks, as my sched­ule allows, I am going to help out on a Super 16mm film called Saves the Day, which con­cerns itself with a boy who thinks his older brother is a super­hero. I’m just a PA, and the posi­tion is unpaid, but this is only nat­ural since no one in the Cleve­land film com­mu­nity has any idea who the hell I am. [and, indeed, who the hell am I when it comes to filmmaking?]

Saves the Day is directed by a first timer — appro­pri­ately googly-eyed over his film, but the D.P. is one of those guys who has been doing the film thing for so long that he doesn’t get ruf­fled eas­ily. Every­one else seems to be the typ­i­cal assort­ment of film folks, some styl­ish, some not, every­one con­stantly talk­ing about sex, insin­u­a­tion and innu­endo galore. The sound guy acted like every other sound guy, the gaffer was more inter­ested in hit­ting on the girls and find­ing crafty than replac­ing a burned bulb or find­ing a scrim. The cam­era assis­tants were like tribal shamans, aloof and privy to the mys­ter­ies of the cam­era [although I think every­one there was at least some­what famil­iar with the Arri­flex being used]. I was imme­di­ately at ease, since these are my people.

I have had a few ideas start to crawl ashore from the pri­mor­dial ooze that is con­stantly slosh­ing around in my head. Whether or not their prim­i­tive lungs and flip­pers will per­mit them to evolve toward real­ity is another thing alto­gether. I am now get­ting the chance to see what other film­mak­ers are think­ing about. It is nice nice.

I saw Ghost in the Shell last night.
The Matrix can suck eggs.

“A ghost-hacked human is a piti­ful thing.”

“A copy is just an iden­ti­cal image. There is the pos­si­bil­ity that a sin­gle virus could destroy an entire set of sys­tems and copies do not give rise to vari­ety and orig­i­nal­ity. Life per­pet­u­ates itself through diver­sity and this includes the abil­ity to sac­ri­fice itself when nec­es­sary. Cells repeat the process of degen­er­a­tion and regen­er­a­tion until one day they die, oblit­er­at­ing an entire set of mem­ory and infor­ma­tion, only genes remain. Why con­tin­u­ally repeat this cycle? Sim­ply to sur­vive by avoid­ing the weak­nesses of an unchang­ing system.”

“Over­spe­cial­iza­tion leads to death.”

I’d heard noth­ing but bad about The Last Samu­rai. I saw it last night and was enter­tained. What brought it down the most was Tom Cruise. The direc­tor, one Mr. Zwick, ended up putting a bit too much empha­sis on Cruise, in nar­ra­tion, diegetic dia­logue, and photo-montage. I got the dis­tinct impres­sion that the movie was mainly filmed as another chance for Tom Cruise to play dress-up and over­come his own per­sonal demons on the way to con­quer­ing some real life bad­dies. [just like Top Gun, Far and Away, Minor­ity Report, etc.]

The bat­tle sequences were sweet, although the final bat­tle wasn’t quit as epic as it was bor­ing. I can only watch peo­ple get mowed down by muzzle-loaders, Gatling guns, and how­itzers for so long before I start to yawn. I was most impressed with the per­for­mances by the actual Japan­ese who played samu­rai. Cruise did a poor job fak­ing an under­stand­ing of the Japan­ese world­view. In typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood fash­ion, every­thing was a dichotomy. This doesn’t work too well when cast into an Asian set­ting. The clash between incom­ing West­ern cul­ture and tra­di­tional Japan­ese way of life does not really come through. Of course, you can see it por­trayed but I don’t buy it. Tokyo is mod­ern­ized but the vil­lage Cruise fights for look com­pletely unchanged.
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I saw Return of the King [RotK] last night at mid­night. I got to bed around 4ish and was at work at 7. I am writ­ing this at approx­i­mately 20 past 9 a.m. on 17 Decem­ber 2003. I am a zom­bie, so bear with if at times I sound a bit inco­her­ent. There are also prob­a­bly spoil­ers ahead.

The movie was damn good. I am most glad that I saw the extended Two Tow­ers before RotK, because the extra flesh­ing it pro­vided was quite help­ful. I won’t delve into the stan­dard huz­zahs for the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, CGI ren­der­ings, WETA cre­ations and all that. Every­one already knows about how sweet that shit looks. Instead I’ll just touch on the high lows and instances of ‘I gotta think about that before I make a deci­sion.‘
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I finally got around to see­ing Adap­ta­tion, which has been rec­om­mended to me for about the past year as a flik I should see. It was pretty good, I was amazed by Chris Cooper, impressed with Nicholas Cage but not really with Meryl Streep. As an added bonus, the lovely Judy Greer was in the film as well. I believe I have a slight crush on her.

It is a movie about mak­ing a movie about mak­ing a movie about flow­ers.
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This is the sum­mer of sci-fi for me. Last year was the beat gen­er­a­tion, and distopias. Philip K. Dick could some­how qual­ify in each of those cat­e­gories. What I find most inter­est­ing how­ever, is the ease with which his sto­ries are con­verted into films. Blade Run­ner is based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?; Total Recall is based on the short story ‘We Can Remem­ber It For You Whole­sale;’ Minor­ity Report and Imposter are based on short sto­ries of the same titles; and Scream­ers is based on his short story ‘Sec­ond Vari­ety.’ All of which I have now read.

It has been said that the dif­fi­culty in con­vert­ing a story to a screen­play and then a movie lies in the inevitable loss of detail and nuance that is present in the writ­ten form. The rea­son it seems that Dick is so eas­ily con­verted to film, is not because his work is shal­low, far from it, but the fact that he pro­vides impli­ca­tions for his read­ers to pon­der. The open-ended themes point to a feel­ing in Dick’s writ­ings that the sto­ries are not book­ended, what he writes about is some­thing that is always con­tin­u­ing. This allows a great deal of manip­u­la­tion to be present in the con­ver­sion from writ­ten to visual, while keep­ing Dick a pres­ence. I’m glad I’ve read him, it has given me a few insights into both writ­ing and film. hoo-eee!

The sec­ond entry, and then I must needs say no more about matri­ces till November.

As a film, The Matrix [orig­i­nal] was authen­tic in its raw­ness of mise-en-scene, tight plot, char­ac­ter con­struc­tion and phi­los­o­phy. The Matrix: Reloaded, has the mangy paw of Hol­ly­wood over­pro­duc­tion and overengi­neer­ing all over it.
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I’ve seen The Matrix: Reloaded twice now. Fit­tingly I will give it two entries, one on phi­los­o­phy and one on its cin­e­matic qual­i­ties. This is the philo one. Most likely they will both con­tain spoilers.

To start out, those who say that this sec­ond film lacks [in sub­stance and thought pro­vok­ing mate­r­ial] are idiots.
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I had this dream the other night, where I was in this goth club just mind­ing my own busi­ness lis­ten­ing to some kick­ass dark­wave, when some dude started some­thing.
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Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs tril­ogy is quite a master’s piece. Begin­ning with Bleu through Blanc and on to Rouge all three films deal with man­i­fes­ta­tions of love: quite poignant, and some­times whim­si­cal but always com­pli­cated. The direc­tion is smooth but firm and for those ini­ti­ated into the films, on a sec­ond view­ing, the hand of Kies­lowski — masked before — becomes quite appar­ent. Inside jokes abound but serve to heighten the mean­ing instead of dis­miss­ing it. redemp­tion is needed through­out by all the actors and is finally obtained in Rouge. Lib­erty, Equal­ity, Fra­ter­nity — Blue, White, Red — the art direc­tion (espe­cially in Rouge) calls con­stant atten­tion to the title, and lends to viewer to appre­ci­ate the col­ors in all of their beauty. Shot selec­tion is on a high scale that Hol­ly­wood often dis­misses for mere seam­less­ness — but allows art cineastes to truly revel in the visual plea­sure cin­ema is meant for. Damn good movies.

after see­ing Y tu Mam Tambi n last evening i decided to go with a song by non­point called orgullo. that’s span­ish for pride. the whole song is in span­ish, so i only under­stand one word in ten but it still kicks ass. as for the movie, its been awhile since i’ve seen unortho­dox edit­ing and hand­held cam­era work so well in a film with­out call­ing too much atten­tion to itself. per­son­ally, i thought the movie was great. an aquain­tance of mine who was also there thought it was hor­ri­ble. too much sex and curs­ing and noth­ing hap­pen­ing. he asked if most for­eign films were like this. i told him they were usu­ally much more frank about life in gen­eral, includ­ing sex, than amer­i­can films, but that you’re mom too went a bit far­ther even for that. my com­ing of age was never like that.