important in your life

The District #2 - Eastern Promises (2007)

2007-09-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

Read it HERE.

The District #1 - Mean Streets (1973)

2007-08-15T14:42:00.001-07:00

I am aware that I have neglected this blog. However, it was not without cause. I have begun a new gig doing some film-writing for The District Weekly, an up and coming Long Beach publication. The first of these (small) pieces, is HERE.

Damnation (1988)

2007-06-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

Damnation is Bela Tarr's first film in what would later become his primary aesthetic, the sort of glacial pacing and extended takes that comprise his masterpieces Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). Unlike either of those films, however, Damnation is essentially a noir (and purpotedly, one of Susan Sontag's favorite films, for what that's worth). Tarr boils the genre down to its fundamentals, and what is left is a film thick with existential angst, breathtakingly expressive black and white cinematography, and a pervading doom.

The film opens with a man being rejected a final time by his married lover, who has decided not to leave her family for him. The man wanders through the bleakest of Hungarian towns in a near constant downpour. Eventually, he is approached by a friend who offers him some sort of smuggling job, which he in turn offers to his lover's husband (in order to get him out of town). The film really has only enough narrative to occupy your mind, so it can occupy your very soul with its formalist experiments (if you can't tell, I am a fan). The dialog wanders quickly from matters at hand to resonant deliberations on basic human existence. While a wise old women recites a lengthy biblical passage on spiritual death and hunger, the camera wanders through the foggy streets to find ragged, stray dogs lapping from puddles. A tramway of some sort passes high overhead, increasing the God-forsaken quality of the town. Damnation seems to be essentially a rumination on a damned soul, damned from first frame to the last by his own self-imposed emotional isolation (pride, essentially). While cinema has a dynamic ability to express change, Tarr here seems fascinated by it's cyclical power to create (here) a doomed stasis.

The genre itself even rejects Tarr's main character: he proves an unforgivable stool pigeon, turning everyone in to the police after being betrayed. He wanders off into a junkyard, fighting with stray dogs. Tarr captures this impending doom in several virtuoso sequences, including an endless take of a conga line in a bar, plodding in joyless circles. The circular movements of the camera, the themes, the characters, all create a hypnotic, near spiritual experience, where the thematic discord and the harmony of Tarr's artistry are given equal voice.

The River (1951)

2007-05-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

The River, an adaptation of Rumer Godden's celebrated novel, is Renoir's first color film and remains one his most loved. Like many a giant of European cinema, late in his career Renoir found himself in Hollywood, void of funding and out of vogue. Unable to generate interest for the film among any of the studios, Renoir eventually found a private financier, an owner of a chain of flower shops who had served in India during the war, and had long hoped to make a film of the novel.

Shot entirely in India in glorious 3-strip technicolor by his nephew Claude Renoir, The River proves a formidable visual rival of The Red Shoes (1948) or Black Narcissus (1947) (also a Godden adaptation). The film primarily concerns the children of the owner of a jute-mill: the adventurous young Bogey, the twins Muffie and Mouse, the "ugly duckling" Harriet, and her beautiful and ferociously misanthropic older friend Valerie. Both of the latter develop a crush on a visiting stranger, Capt. John, a confused young man who has lost a leg in the war. He, in turn, finds himself entranced with a beautiful young Indian girl, who happens to wrestle with her own half-British heritage.

Though there are some faltering performances (partly due to the use of several non-actors), the pain of growing up is expressed with great sensitivity, and the film is filled with unique female energy. As Harriet watches "her first kiss" go to another, Renoir creates one of the finest sequences of his career, following three young women as they run and hide in a grove of palms, each composition as carefully composed and lit as one of his father's paintings. Though the film is classically sentimental, such powerful filmmaking elevates the form to its peak, and illustrates how moving and honest it can be.

Renoir is a master of the sort of high-humanist filmmaking that has enthroned him, The Rules of the Game (1939), The Grand Illusion (1937), etc. The River finds him reaching further, grounding the wistful and sentimental coming-of-age story in more of a spiritual understanding of the world. As is suggested by the pervasive metaphor, the film begins and ends with a sense of ceaseless, gentle flow of life. Excellent observational footage of daily life on the river, fishing and mending of nets, evening prayers and religious ceremonies, all heighten the lyrical, spiritual tone of the film, especially as they are set to hypnotic ragas.

There is much to celebrate The River for, but even if there wasn't, we must laud this film for launching the film career of Indian master Satyajit Ray. Ray, who had been discouraged by several early career setbacks, met and befriended Renoir during his year in India and was newly inspired to make Pather Pachali (1955), which began his Apu trilogy.

The Ninth Configuration (1980)

2007-05-08T13:15:00.000-07:00

The Ninth Configuration is the directorial debut of William Peter Blatty, the novelist and screenwriter of The Exorcist, among others. Previously titled Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, the film concerns a gothic castle full of deranged soldiers, a distraught astronaut, the adaptation of the works of William Shakespeare for dogs, and Stacy Keach as Col. Kane who may or may not be a psychiatrist sent to take control of the institution.

Most of Blatty's work deals directly with his Catholicism, frequently exploring issues of faith, the existence of God, etc. The Ninth Configuration attempts, in an albeit inventive way, to illustrate how the Gospel might be lived out among a suffering population, and how its effect might be curative. The film itself is a bit curious. The synopsis alone had me almost salivating, but it isn't quite the oddity I expected. Blatty's direction is, despite some brilliant flourishes, a tad bland. The visual aesthetic is almost nonexistent except in some wonderfully artificial fantasy sequences, and in a climactic biker-bar brawl. His use of the actors is a bit broad, as is most of the comedy, despite some real absurdist zingers.

Most of the thematic material is worked out between Stacy Keach's Col. Kane and Scott Wilson's unhinged astronaut, Capt. Cutshaw. The best executed scene in the movie comes after Cutshaw's escape to a biker bar. There, a gloriously maned Steve Sandor, resplendent in mirrored sunglasses and (after their removal) raccoon-like eye makeup, abuses Cutshaw mercilessly. In a sort of strange Passion play, Kane goes to every length of sacrifice and humiliation to save Cutshaw from this frightening brood. In the end, however, Kane's "other personality" shows up with brutal force. Blatty won't leave it at that, and in an almost Fire Walk With Me-like (or in that case, Exorcist-like) image of self-sacrifice, peace is restored. All this is folded in a bit awkwardly, and without some of the cinematic snap or mood the material screams for. Still, overall an enjoyable film quite worth anyone's time: sign me up for Blatty's second effort The Exorcist III: The Legion (1990).

Red Desert (1964)

2007-05-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

Antonioni's first color feature, a clandestine fourth entry into his celebrated trilogy (L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse), is a fascinating transitional film. It holds a near perfect balance between the sort of psycho/sociological explorations of his previous films, and the abstraction and ruminations on photographic truth that would follow in Blowup (1966). The film stars Monica Vitti as a Giuliana, woman who has never quite recovered from a traumatic car accident. Her husband (a wealthy factory owner/engineer) is increasingly frustrated with her erratic behavior, but Antonioni makes his industrial existence so oppresive, so airless that the audience quickly find themselves sympathetic only with Giuliana. From there emerge the themes you would expect from Antonioni: the isolation of modern life, existential crisis, spiritual death/life, etc.

The thing that makes Red Desert stand out from his previous films is how Antonioni seems to intermittently lose interest in these themes, dividing his frame with colored lines, shooting the backs of heads in deep focus, shooting industrial machinery through suffocating fog, etc. His viusal methods, (through Carlo DiPalmi's exquisite cinematography) certainly contribute to Giuliana's increasing alienation from her environment, her inability to inhabit the spaces society has built around her. However, Antonioni is after bigger game with his lens, and frequently Red Desert becomes almost an essay film, exploring the ability of the camera to direct, distort, and fragment space. The visual images are simply stunning throughout, frequently shot with long lenses to flatten the space, and with carefully chosen color. The great formal masters of 60's cinema took to color photography very slowly, seeing it as a vast new element of content to be mastered. The colors in Red Desert, as well as the compositions, are chosen with painstaking care, which both helps and hinders the film. In some sense, the emotions contained in the images are transferred powerfully to the viewer. On the other hand, the half of the film that attempts psychological narrative is hindered slightly, as the characters sit uneasily in these meticulous compositions. Red Desert is a unique opportunity to see clearly the tensions that would characterize Antonioni's career, and to see how this tension can create vibrant film-art. Because it inhabits its own skin so uneasily, it doesn't approach the perfection of those that sit on either side (L'Avventura and Blowup), but it certainly is a powerful piece of filmmaking.

The Son (2002)

2007-04-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Son won the Palm d'Or at Cannes in 2002, cementing their reputation as the go-to siblings for consistently excellent realist dramas. All based in nondescript industrial Belgian towns (where the brothers are from), the Dardenne's construct their films with a formal rigor that recalls the (overly self-conscious and short-lived) Dogme movement, and perhaps more favorably, Robert Bresson. Like all of their films, The Son is shot with only available light, handheld camera, and no score.

The less that is known about the plot the better, in order to preserve the rather ingenious narrative structure of the film. It revolves around Olivier, a carpentry teacher at a center for boys who have been released from juvenile detention. His obsession with one boy in particular is completely ambiguous, and rather discomforting. The Dardenne Bros. heighten this uncertainty by shooting relentlessly over his shoulder, rarely revealing his face. The result is fairly compelling, and when all is revealed everything unfolds beautifully (or maybe snaps shut like a trap), and a tad biblically. Here's a hint, the first time he is alone with the boy is in a cave-like locker room; the boy is asleep. The second time, the boy is relieving himself. Shades of 1 Samuel?

The film is really a quite profound example of grace as the only means for peace or reconciliation, in this case grace given from one human to another. In some sense, there is unity found in craft, and a craft that isn't without metaphor, as Olivier quietly teaches each boy the trick to carrying a heavy wooden beam. And boy-howdy do the Dardenne's love them some closing shots, which they frequently mention are directly Bressonian (compare L'Enfant (2006) and Pickpocket). This one does not disappoint.

Naked (1993)

2007-03-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

There are two distinct images of misogyny (and evil) in Mike Leigh's Naked: one inscrutable, and the other...slightly scrutable. David Thewlis plays Johnny, a troubled young man who does little to engender our sympathy, committing rape in the opening seconds of the film. It's to Leigh and Thewlis's credit that a considerable amount of sympathy is built up for Johnny throughout the film. Relentlessly selfish, Johnny is something of an adolescent armchair philosopher, and far too bilious to be even a typical antihero. His over-intellectual cynicism, over the course of the film, is revealed to be a poor disguise for his growing desperation and disgust with the world as he sees it. Seeing himself as increasingly powerless, self-destruction and subjugation of others seems to be as sensible behavior as anything else. While he is brutally selfish and cruel, he is also quite clever and charming in a backwards sort of way, charming several women throughout the film only to crush the relationship emotionally or physically.

Gregg Cruttwell is Jeremy, a scrawny, fast-talking power broker of some sort. Leigh introduces him with a brilliant push-in on him vigorously working a weight machine with his scrawny arms, a look of haughty determination and perhaps boredom on his face. If the film veers towards "social criticism" in the conventional sense, it's the familiar condemnation of the 80's/early 90's bourgeois explosion. Jeremy is far more heartless than Johnny, purposefully seeking out situations in which he can abuse his power and status.

Much of Naked is hard to watch, even psychologically tormenting. It's hard to decide which is more terrifying: our ability to identify with Johnny's desperate and destructive behavior, or our inability to understand Jeremy's opaque sadism. While Jeremy's perpetual sneer may shed some light on certain male pathologies, the most revealing statement of the film is reserved for Johnny when he asks a frenetic, homeless teenager (with utter sincerity) "What's it like to be you?" Then, with typical flippancy quips "It must be hectic," retreating back into his persona.

Leigh gets fantastic performances from everyone, and employs his usual, almost Cassavetes-like methods of improvisation, never revealing to any actor what his/her character would not know, and encouraging them to keep secrets from one another. Though he prides himself on a naturalistic style, Leigh's photography can be magnificently evocative in flashes, almost glowing despite the dark and damp urban locations. With excellent blocking and composition, Leigh is able to capture a shocking depth of space (especially in outdoor scenes), and move his characters through the frame with an intricacy that is sorely lacking in our age of films comprised almost entirely of close-ups. Essentially, the film is a character exercise (with some social critique), but many moments truly achieve a sort of universality that these sorts of films typically fail to realize.

Light is Calling (2004)

2007-03-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

A recent tribute at REDCAT and FilmForum provided Angelinos with a unique opportunity to see the work of Bill Morrison, renowned director of The Film of Her (1997) and Decasia (2002). Bill Morrison functions as a sort of archivist-opportunist, forever searching through decaying nitrate film of all subjects and re-editing it into his own pieces of film art, which in and of itself is an act of guerrilla photochemical preservation. Morrison's love of film includes a love of its physical attributes, especially the unique aesthetics of film-decay. In Decasia, Morrison explored his usual themes of memory, time, and human attempts at permanence by adeptly editing endless loops of deteriorating nitrate film to Michael Gordon's hypnotic score. The result is nothing short of a truly psychedelic experience. The image whirls, flickers, and melts, as human civilization is reduced to the faintest shadow play while attempting to battle time.

The Mesmerist (2003) was a re-edit of The Bells (1926), a Lionel Barrymore film with an ending that Morrison thought could use a moral revision. He edited together a narrative to give Mr. Barrymore a needed comeuppance, and was able to elegantly descend and ascend between levels of reality by having two versions of the film at his disposal: a pristine copy and a heavily damaged copy. Light is Calling (2004), uses the same source footage as The Mesmerist, but never comes up for air to the clean image. Instead Morrison is at his most wistful and formally beautiful. The tinted nitrate image swirls and disintegrates in a wash of golden light. Bill Frisell's score, which came first according to Morrison, is truly in the spirit of the heavily psychedelic enterprise, repetitive, opulent, and progressive in its structure. While this film contains all of Morrison's familiar and complicated themes, it also contains a simple love story: a man and a woman meet on the road, and ride off together. However, in place of a sunset is a surge of molten, ecstatic, golden emulsion. To get personal for a moment, my jaw was on the floor for the entire 8 minutes it took the film to wind from reel to bulb to take-up reel. Before the lights came up, a brief survey of the crowd revealed that I was not the only one.

The great thing about Morrison is, despite the incredible beauty of the images he discovers and exhibits, he never quite lets the viewer forget that what they are viewing is, essentially, the rotting process. The sinister thread that runs unspoken beneath all of his films is that old "dust to dust" business. I, for one, think it's a good for the soul. Especially because, for a short time at least, Light is Calling is able to effortlessly elevate it.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

2007-02-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Celine and Julie Go Boating was actually a surprise success for Jacques Rivette, despite its almost three-and-a-half hour running time and somewhat complicated structure. Celine and Julie, women who meet by chance and aren't particularly fond of (or nice to) each other at first, quickly come to share a strange bond: both are able to travel from an abandoned old mansion into a poorly conceived Henry James adaptation. Rivette has loads of fun cutting the bleakest and ugliest of melodramas into his otherwise vibrant film. Soon the girls realize that another female (the young girl in the melodrama) is in danger. They set about finding their way into the story in order to rescue her. Meanwhile, the melodrama's players' faces go ashen, the death of the novel, literary film, and all that.

Along with being a rather clever dose of "meta" without the usual cynicism or intellectual superiority (or artist-self-loathing exercises), Celine and Julie Go Boating is also one of the more interesting depictions of femininity around. With no real male characters to speak of, there is a jubilant girlishness to the proceedings, and I mean that in the most positive way.

Also of interest (and to me most magical) is the seeming contrast between the text and visual style. Rivette opens his film in a sun-dappled park on a lazy afternoon, and for the most part the film retains that mood. Shot almost entirely with available light on 16mm, most of the soundtrack consists of the sound of cars passing, children playing, and the wind in the trees. Meanwhile, without visual fanfare, Celine and Julie are eating hallucinogenic candy, exploring haunted mansions, and brewing a mythical wine-potion from the four elements.

Much of the humor comes from the stilted melodrama, and the real treasure there is Barbet Schroeder's performance as the man-corner of the love triangle. An overly earnest, rubber-faced John Malkovich look-alike, he provides some of the goofiest moments I've witnessed. Turns out, he was the producer of not only this film, but Rohmer's La Collectioneuse (1966), My Night at Maud's (1969), and Claire's Knee (1970). Turns out he was a director in his own right, nominated for an Oscar for Reversal of Fortune (1990). Who knew? I'll still argue that this performance is his greatest artistic achievement.

Rivette and Godard share quite a bit in their interests and style. It just seems Rivette was able to not take himself so damn seriously. No less dense than mid-70's Godard, Celine and Julie Go Boating manages to make fun a priority without suffering intellectually.

Il Posto (1961)

2007-01-18T22:09:00.000-08:00

Many consider Ermanno Olmi's semi-autobiographical film to be one of the masterpieces of Italian cinema. While I can't quite give so historically potent of a response, it certainly is an exceedingly enjoyable film. Paying its dues (loosely) to the Neorealists, Il Posto actually sparkles with the cinematography of the French New Wave. This is a comfortable marriage of style, and creates the perfect cinematic environment for Olmi's frighteningly perceptive exploration of the awkwardness of youth, or rather, the awkward situations said youths are required to navigate.

The film stars amateur Sandro Panzeri as Domenico, a young man recently graduated from middle school and recruited in a mass-interview for a large company in Milan. He gets the job (though a much lower position than he was promised), as does the attractive young girl he meets at the interview, and from thence must negotiate awkward office parties and other embarrassments. The film sags slightly when Olmi turns his focus from Domenico towards the bleak lives of his co-workers and the soul-crushing corporation they work for. The pleasure in the film lies in Olmi's startlingly accurate depiction of the strange little moments that populate any coming of age. Deciding to go into an espresso bar for what is clearly their first time, Domenico and his office crush (Antonietta) smirk at each other nervously, watching others to see how exactly they are supposed to pay, and where to put their empty cups. The care and perceptiveness of the scene immediately calls to mind selected Louis Malle or The 400 Blows.

The climax of the film is a wonderfully photographed New Year's Eve celebration thrown by the company. After attaining his reluctant father's permission, Domenico practically gallops to hopefully see Antonietta at the party. The excitement of rushing somewhere to see that special someone is cruelly deflated as he stumbles into a room empty save a few old couples and a band playing for no one in particular. And it gets better from there. Unfortunately, after this really exceptional sequence, Olmi's film sort of quietly deflates as well. Despite the opinions of much smarter people (who you should probably listen to instead), I found the ending an unsuccessful attempt at social commentary that proved a poor conclusion to the delicately expressed emotions that preceded. Still, this remains essential viewing for its wonderful performances, and thoughtful direction.

2006 in Celluloid (and Pixels)

2007-01-12T20:02:00.000-08:00

Happy New Years, friends.

I am a little late, I know, but I suppose a roundup of the year in cinema is in order. There were a lot of movies that I missed this year, so this doesn't even pretend to be complete, just a few fairly superficial observations cobbled together.

Best Film of the Year:

INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch.

This is proving to be one of the hardest films to write about this year, for everyone. Even the most adulatory reviews seem not to venture much beyond it being, you know, "really weird," man. I can't really blame anyone for a lack of willingness to put themselves out there analyzing a work so formidable. There is certainly the sort of film that can inspire mountains of text, and endless discussion. On the other hand, some of our most powerful experiences in the cinema need to remain that: experiences. They become small and fade under the burden of words. Though I think INLAND EMPIRE (all-caps are demanded by Mr. Lynch) falls decidedly into that second category, I will try to justify its spot on my list.

First and foremost, my great fear was that perhaps Lynch would not fully embrace and utilize the digital medium in a way that was radically different than the usual overly sharp, desaturated, pixelated film imitations we're used to. That fear was immediately put to rest. Rarely in contemporary cinema have I seen such passion for a medium, an exuberant camera that usually only exists in a director's first few films (compare Mean Streets to The Departed). Lynch really set out to see what his consumer-level digital camera could do best, and came up with some shockingly original and beautiful results.

The film, a story of a "woman in trouble," is not exactly the sort of plotless 3 hour sprawl it's being sold as. Per Lynch's working methods, the film belies a strong structure, though it may be the structure of dreams or subconscious realities. In any event, it takes a horrifying dive into the self, down the rabbit hole, and finds blinding white light on the other side. The plot unfolds like a fractal, duplicating itself incessantly into new worlds, revealing new structures, characters, films within films, to the point where it almost becomes an ambient experience. Finally, there is definitive confrontation and redemption, and a sort of glorious celebratory scene including imagery from Lynch's past works. A cinematic redemption, and a real voyage for the viewer who is willing to, Amédée Ayfre might say, submit his/herself to the imagination of another. Some might be tempted to say that this is his most scattered and unfocused film. On the contrary, I think Lynch is narrowing his focus, paring down his style to its most basic elements and goals. Lynch is saying clearly that this is something for which cinema is uniquely suited, this sort of internal exploration. I couldn't agree more.

Biggest Surprises:

Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón.

As most people were, I think, I was completely ambushed by this film. Not only does it contain some of the most technically impressive cinematic feats of the year, it manages to be one of the most gripping and powerful science fiction films in years. The intense action is interwoven with some metaphysical themes that emerge powerfully in the final chapter transcending its "political relevance," exhibiting both the power of innocence to transform the world, and simultaneously the world's resilience to such change. Despite a fairly disappointing and distracting performance from Julianne Moore, everyone else is swallowed into their roles. Michael Caine gives an extraordinary performance.

United 93, Paul Greengrass.

The first thing I'll say, honestly, is that I haven't had such a physical reaction to a film in a long time. Surpassing even the most intense passages of Children of Men, from a cinematic-thrill-seeking point of view this would be worth your time. Problematically, I think all my praise for the film is really a list of the ways it did not go wrong. The film is not melodramatic, the performances are all improvisational and never over-the-top, the film isn't political at all, it has almost no stylistic editing or visual panache to distract (and yet remains fairly attractive). In fact this is the main thing I wrestle with: at the heart of it is a sort of void. The film lacks sentimentality, political statement, or any sort of ideology. It is a catalog of a physical experience, and viewing it is almost nothing more than a physical experience. Most of the running time is spent in the minutiae of the day, confused air traffic controllers, military personnel, airline employees, etc. The film actually never takes time to be about anything but the physical action that occurred in that plane on that day. It never becomes about anything else, or approaches the metaphysical. This may sound like criticism, but I don't see it that way. For one, it keeps the film from being a tool for anyone and their ideology. It's difficult to coopt something like this. Second, it is incredibly affecting.

I guess I don't have problems with films taking on small tasks, or limiting themselves. Greengrass makes some incredible choices, never sensationalizing even the sensational (the gruesome violence is presented in a Haneke-like anti-titillating manner).

Rereading all this, I can't say that I would go run and see it if I were you, humble reader, but I really encourage you to do so. It is such an oddity, so singularly focused, and I really struggle to find anything to compare it to (though a good friend of mine has mentioned the faux-documentary style of Peter Watkins or Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers). If you wonder if movies can still move you physically, I think this one might show you they can. While I won't say I unconditionally loved it, it certainly is curious.

Half Nelson, Ryan Fleck.

Who knew that an interesting film could be made from this premise? In my Statistics class in High School, a large, charismatic jackass managed to convince our aged teacher to keep rewinding Stand and Deliver, claiming, "We havn't seen this yet!" (thinking about it, why we were watching it in an AP Statistics class is anyone's guess). The result? I watched that movie almost 7 times in as many days. Anyways, I wasn't too keen on putting myself in another situation involving under-privileged children achieving dreams they didn't even know they had. Well, thankfully, Half Nelson avoids all this and ends up being quite the revelation. It's chief attributes include, but are not limited to: (1) Wonderful, disorienting, hand-held cinematography. Shot almost entirely in close-up, the camera wanders independently of almost anything else, fragmenting space almost beyond recognition, and leaving the viewer fairly dazed. (2) A top-notch performance from Ryan Gosling (a young man drowning slowly), and from newcomer Shareeka Epps (a young woman whom the world is trying furiously to drown). (3) A grim hand on the tiller. Ryan Fleck steers the film down a dark path, and then with almost Bressonian rigor (and more guts than most first-time directors), pushes it farther.

Biggest Disappointment:

Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro.

Though my hopes were high, Guillermo Del Toro's adult fairy tale is a real mess, and fairly insipid in its execution. I don't mind its simple fairy tale plot, but the editing and music infuse the entire enterprise with heavy doses of boredom, predictability, and (most dangerous to Del Toro's intentions) safety. Perhaps sensing this, Del Toro attempts to push at the boundaries of the box he's in by including gruesome violence and a few shocking moments. Unfortunately, nothing that superficial can move the viewer from their trance. There is never a moment that we feel (as the movie seems to be attempting to show) that anything could happen. Even the most jarring plot twist is nestled into its fairly uninteresting structure, and we watch it on autopilot, feeling safely wrapped in conventions. I didn't hate it, but I found myself simply waiting for it to be over. Though I really appreciate some of the fantasy sequences, even they stayed disappointingly in their boxes, never threatening to spread into the film in a new or exciting way. A few points are awarded for Ivana Baquero's wonderful performance, though. Disappointing. I mean look at that image, for crying out loud! Who wouldn't be excited?

Things I've Watched but Haven't Written About

2006-12-07T23:21:00.000-08:00

Quite a lot of things going on, keeping me from dutifully blogging. Most of them, to my credit, have been fairly dramatic, and keep me merely consuming instead. C'est la vie. In the meantime here is a list of things consumed but not yet processed here (some are second and third time viewings):

Yumeji (1991) - Seijun Suzuki

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2006) - Bros. Quay

Le Corbeau (1943) - Henri-Georges Clouzot

Little Murders (1971) - Alan Arkin

Kagero-za (1981) - Seijun Suzuki

Playtime (1967) - Jacques Tati

The Leopard (1963) - Luchino Visconti

Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Accattone (1961) - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Passion of Anna (1970) - Ingmar Bergman

I Am Cuba (1964) - Mikheil Kalatozishvili

Apology

2006-11-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the lack of posting. All of the sudden, due to a variety of factors, I am quite busy. Things should be calming down soon, though. Check back early next week.

Wild at Heart (1990)

2006-10-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

While it can only harden Lynch's (imperceptive) critics who accuse him of nonsensical "weirdness," Wild at Heart will only strengthen the faith of those who believe deeply in his filmmaking practices. Based on a neo-pulp novel by Barry Gifford, it follows ex-convict Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern) as young lovers on the run from Lula's murderous mother, and is more fantastical than any of his other features. Like Peter Greenaway's The Falls (1980), Wild at Heart seems to burst at the seams with every bit of its creator. Refined of everything but the purest Lynchian moments, images, devices, references, interests, it also can function as a Lynch primer, for here his intentions are sharply defined once stripped of any attempt at realism. Moving more quickly from conception to production than usual, the film seems to rush directly from Lynch's Id. It's like seeing the garish, inner-workings of his films, which are usually smoothed over and sanded down into something less stylized.

The filmmaking of David Lynch is maybe best thought of as a sort of abstraction. Taking relatively simple but powerful truths, Lynch abstracts them into worlds of his imagining. He reflects a basic tale of innocence, temptation (an indulgence of passion), and redemption (the redeeming of that passion) into a world of his obsessions: of teenagers on the lam, of dancing and driving as a cleansing escapist ritual, of car crashes as moral death, and of "Love Me Tender" as the ultimate expression of human love. Lynch's films are fables but not allegories, and they contain metaphors, not symbols. He saves his work from the trite clockwork of allegory by caring deeply for his characters and the world they inhabit; they are not simply the puppets of some ideological system.

The performances here are unforgettable, and stripped of the smooth naturalism required of his less stylized films. Here there are no transitions, nothing but the most basic pyschology: simply raw emotion expressed in reaction to each new situation. When an evil man seeks to comfort Laura Dern, his hug is pure poison, and her reaction is a scream of pure terror. There is no need for anything more, or anything in between. The filmmaking itself follows suit, with the wild shifts of mood accompanied by obvious and abrasive music cues, eliminating any transitional elements.

This is Lynch's most exuberant, frenetic, joyful, and perhaps least self-censored film, delving deeper into the grotesque and perverse at times than seems necessary to his themes. It also appears to be one of his most hopeful films. I have always been one of the minority who take Lynch completely at his word, and refuse to see his films as containing even an ounce of irony. However, he is a shrewd and observant man, and though the redemption and love at the end of the film are genuine, they stream directly from rock and roll and the Wizard of Oz. This is probably one of the most quintessentially American films ever made (tapping directly into the American myth), and while it might be easy to see a cynical side to these references, Lynch seems to just accept them as mythic signs of redemption and salvation within the world he is exploring. As is repeated throughout the film, this is a lesson, a moral tale. We are not to judge the methods or substance, but to apply it's conclusions to our lives.

Lola (1961)

2006-10-16T22:16:00.000-07:00

In Lola, Jacques Demy strikes the perfect balance between his cotton-candy romanticism, and the New Wave roots he shares with his contemporaries. Miraculously, the cinematography of Raoul Coutard manages to be both. Handheld in mostly natural light, it also somehow manages to glide smoothly with the assurance and catchy framing of a Hollywood musical. Demy marries CinemaScope to the New Wave, seemingly opposing forces, in the same way that he marries the fluff of musicals with the existential angst of the period. His characters agonize in their search for love, some finding it in implausible cliches, and others are left bitterly searching.

It seems easy to write off Demy as a stylist and a romantic, a sort of lesser brother to Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, and the rest. By the end of his career he may very well have become that (I think he did), but in Lola, his romanticism is also a joyous exploration of (and attempt to stretch) genre, giving you easy answers and no answers simultaneously. While Godard was deconstructing and fragmenting film genres without ever fully engaging them, here Demy did the same while giving them a chance to work their magic. Clearly, Demy aims for the emotions, but masked in his opulent exterior is a real substantive core, worthy of intellectual investigation. Like Truffaut and Malle, Demy takes great pleasure in carefully observing the eccentricities and contradictions of youth. Annie Duperoux gives a hilarious performance as Lola's (Anouk Aimee) younger doppleganger, perfectly capturing the simultaneous reckless passion and generally unimpressed nonchalance of teenagers.

This is a much better film than the lovely Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and belongs beside Breathless (1960) and The 400 Blows (1959) (with an equally wonderful carnival sequence), as one of the great pieces of New Wave cinema.

3 Women (1977)

2006-09-25T23:25:00.000-07:00

"You don't do anything you're supposed to!" Every line of logic running through Altman's Hitchcock-ian exercise revolves around Milly's desperate assertion. Containing perhaps Shelly Duvall's best performance, 3 Women follows her as a devastatingly clueless woman, her overt simplicity a mask for some rather complicated emotional issues. Learning almost everything she knows fom McCall's, and frequently cooking the monstrous meals found in Reader's Digest and like publications (most involving canned cocktail wienies), Milly reveals herself as infuriatingly blank. Sissy Spacek (Pinky), an over-earnest young women soon befriends her at the hospital they both work in, and eventually becomes her roomate. Claiming that Milly is "the most perfect person [she's] ever met," Pinky latches onto Milly in oddly obsessive and destructive ways, reading her diary even when she is sure to be caught, and even giving Milly's social security number as her own. This befuddling behavior continues until a crisis forces the two women, and a mysterious painter (Willy) into a sort of metaphysical conflict of Persona-like intensity.

The photography, always excellent in Altman's films of the 70's, is where Altman conveys the primary content of the film, setting up a rather complex syntax involving reflections, dream sequences, and shooting through water. Here the transformations and outbursts that defy narrative logic are given thematic importance. While the film's end really has no narrative purpose, it follows directly from these themes and brilliantly draws them to a satisfying conclusion. From there, it can take on a number of different narrative reads, all of which are equally interesting. This is one of Altman's great films, and his most mysterious. Surreal and frightening paintings, and music cues directly referencing Hithcock create a pervasive spook.

I Vitelloni (1953)

2006-09-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

Fellini's third feature, I Vitelloni, is a roughly autobiographical sketch of an arrested development in a little seaside town. Five friends listlessly postpone manhood, living at home and each finding a unique way to excuse his inaction. Alberto is ineffectually defending his family honor by looking after his wayward sister, Leonardo is a playwright sure to become Ibsen's successor, Riccardo is the city's resident tenor, and Fausto is newly a family man (not by his choosing). Moraldo is the blank slate, wandering the streets at night, Fellini's cipher. Swept along (or rather stagnating) with his friends, the film's real decisions belong to him.

It's comforting at least to know that this theme of a severely prolonged male adolescence is not new. We can trace a line from I Vitelloni, through Mean Streets (1973), Stranger than Paradise (1984), Bottle Rocket (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), and the picture that emerges seems to illustrate a fundamental phenomenon of a middle-class. Fellini's observational powers are tuned precisely to the subtleties and absurdities of the young men, only as a former vitelloni's could be.

Already visible here are Fellini's many and grand obsessions: a carnival, a vibrant but small Italian town, and a performer who may be both a truth-teller and a charlatan. Fellini (still a young and fresh-faced director) presents here the most tightly constructed of all his films, exuding equal energy as his later works but lacking their epic sprawl. The result is a highly condensed experience, sparkling with stunning photography, deep emotion, and boundless enthusiasm.

Diabolique (1954)

2006-09-12T21:39:00.000-07:00

Henri-Georges Clouzot followed the excellent Wages of Fear with this fairly commercial, but subversive and horrifying tale of suspense. Generous portions of sexual intrigue, murder, and the supernatural congeal into an imperfect but truly enjoyable experience.

Headmaster Michel Delasalle is ugly enough to his chronically-ill wife and his spurned mistress to drive these two opposing forces together. In a spirit of female empowerment (and to do the world a favor) the two ingeniously plot Michel's murder. Unfortunately for them, the corpse disappears, and chilling messages begin appearing. Echoing the complaints of Macbeth (that corpses just can't stay in their graves), Clouzot's camera haunts the boarding school with some inspired photography and editing, cutting suspense into the most banal of circumstances (a mid-day geometry lesson, for instance).

While it suffers from equal amounts of uninspired cinematography, Clouzot methodically unfolds truly frightening sequences, and ends the film with an image of horror so unexpected that it's effect remains as potent as anything in contemporary horror cinema. Three times in the film, Clouzot bends the fairly realistic world he has carefully set up almost to the breaking point, cleverly giving an explanation that snaps all back into place, away from the supernatural. Four years later, Hitchcock (their influence was mutual) would perfect this tried-and-true technique in Vertigo. Like most of Hitchcock, the center of Clouzot's film is a crisis of identity: a fear of not truly knowing the self, or not understanding the rest of the world and one's place in it. This is primal ammo for Clouzot's mis-en-scene, and helps to maintain Diabolique's place as one of the most rewarding of its genre.

This Sporting Life (1963)

2006-08-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

Lindsay Anderson, partial instigator of the Free Cinema movement in England in the 60's, adapted David Storey's novel for his first feature. Frustrated with the stagnation of British films after the Second World War (and invigorated by the French New Wave) Anderson pushed for a socially conscious and political cinema, earning him the title of the "angry young man" of British Cinema.

This first feature (starring a young and excellent Richard Harris) concerns itself with class exploitation, but thankfully becomes a much broader exploration of mind vs. body and other human limitations, and is popularly seen as a precursor to Scorsese's Raging Bull. Frank is the doomed coal miner turned rugby player, which Anderson depicts as one of Britain's most insidious mechanisms of class expoitation. "Soccer has stars," Frank asserts after a stunning performance in the day's game, "Rugby has people like me." A "kept" body, Frank soon becomes aware of his predicament: he and his working class teammates are owned by the financial moguls who run the town and the team, and paid to be a heavy out on the field. This awareness makes the situation all the more painful. Even as he continually asserts his having gained financial success and fame by "reaching out and taking it," he comes to understand that he is a pawn in a much larger game, and is almost entirely powerless.

Frank rents a room from a slightly older woman named Mrs. Hammond, a widow. He shows a great love for her two children, and continually expresses his devotion to her. Frustrated at her inability to move on from her husband's death, his attempts to move her from her cold intellectual existence into a more physical experience of life become more and more explosive. While his teammates enjoy the company of the many young women who fawn over their exploits, Frank (always conscious of his intellectual and social limitations) spends his time chasing the much older Mrs. Hammond.

Rather than allow their respective limitations to complement one another, the relationship becomes increasingly volatile and abusive. The result is a heart-wrenching depiction of two people desiring to help each other, but incapable of anything but destroying each other. Anderson's films are soggy with nihilism, and he depicts Frank's awareness of his ape-like nature and social restrictions as the worst fate of all, because in the world he has created they cannot be changed. In the final images of the film, Anderson follows an image of Mrs. Hammond as a literal floating head (wrapped in the sheets of a hospital bed like a mummy), with a cathartic act of (futile) violence from Frank.

The film is powerful not only because its themes are powerful, but because Anderson is an excellent filmmaker, understanding how to communicate cinematically rather than narratively. He structures the film with interlocking flashbacks, creating a regressive spiral always promising to break free and move forward, but never quite able to do so. The photography is stunning, particularly the rugby sequences (shrouded in thick fog), which are as visceral and powerful as any sports film I've seen.

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

2006-08-09T21:32:00.000-07:00

In the last twenty years, it has become clear that Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr is a major contributor to the art of cinema. His 415-minute adaptation of Krasznahorkai's novel Satantango gained him the acclaim of those yet unconvinced by his Cassavetes-like family dramas of the 80's.

In 2000, he gifted us with the Werckmeister Harmonies, 2 hours and 40 minutes comprised of a mere 39 shots. The film follows (speaking of Tarkovsky) a classic "Holy Fool" character who wanders through a village on the verge of riots due to economic depression. A circus arrives with a stuffed whale, and a much more insidious character in tandem referred to as "The Prince." Eventually, the unseen midget's apocalyptic nihilism incites the dissatisfied peasants to revolt with torrential violence. Plot is really a sidenote in this exercise, though it is rich in allegory and intellectual puzzles (dealing mostly with music theory). Composed of glorious and astonishingly long takes, the camera swirls for 15 to 20 minutes at a time without cutting, orchestrating hundreds of extras into perfectly executed setpieces.

The atmosphere is thick and Tarr provides dialogue to rival Lynch in creepiness and suggestion, including a ten-minute conversation with a hotel concierge about whether or not the whale is "the cause of it all." Jancos's inoccency is precisely the correct vehicle to explore the intellectual and emotional strings that Tarr toys with. This is one of the finest films of the last ten years, an exquisitely constructed work of art that only yields more riches at each new viewing. Tarr consciously takes up Tarkovsky's lyrical and metaphysical torch. That alone, is worth giving thanks for. Clearly, even at his age (51), Tarr is just getting started.

The Sacrifice (1986)

2006-08-05T01:36:00.000-07:00

It may not be a secret to those who know me that ever since I read Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky's magnum opus on film theory, theology, and art, I have adored him with rekindled fervor. That might be worth noting before you read the following.

Tarkovsky's final film, released the year of his death, is a staggeringly subversive piece of art. Shot with frightening simplicity by the incomparable Sven Nykvist, the film concerns an aging actor named Alexander. His family and friends have gathered at his beautiful and isolated country home to celebrate his birthday. Soon after they arrive, deafening explosions shake the house, and they quickly realize that a nuclear holocaust has begun. Terrorized by this, Alexander prays to God, vowing to give up his family, his possessions, his beloved son (who is temporarily mute due to throat surgery, as Alexander notes: "In the beginning was the Word, but you're as mute as a smelt!"), and take a vow of silence if this horror can be reverted.

What follows could be called controversial, and open to interpretation. Tarkovsky recognized this, and relished the necessity of audience participation. While his film openly ponders the metaphysical and spiritual throughout its length (especially through the classic Dostoevskian "Holy Fool," Otto, the postman), in the end it only presents us with events: a man behaving perhaps absurdly, irrationally, and unpleasantly.

Tarkovsky's message is more than one simply of self-sacrifice (though it is an honest attempt to engage Christ's admonition: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple"). Though the pain and primacy of sacrifice is central, it easy to weigh Alexander's behavior in only those terms. Equally important is that Alexander's behavior is absurd and dangerous in a political sphere. His actions subvert the very basis of the society that has been built in the last 100 years. Tarkovsky is presenting a radical alternative to contemporary values, and not shying from its consequences on all involved.

Lest you you think this is a political film, be not afraid. Tarkovsky examines these themes with his usual cinematic poetry. Though maybe slightly less visually astonishing than his previous films (and definitely "talkier"), The Sacrifice is uncompromising in its artistry. One scene in particular, at the end of the film, captures in a single six-minute take some of the most profound images and emotions of his entire career. He ends that career with a beautiful image of the faithful artist, an apt metaphor for his filmmaking. A young boy, dutifully taking up the task his father set before him: to continue to water a dead tree, waiting in certainty for it to grow.

The Best of Youth (2003)

2006-07-31T23:24:00.000-07:00

A good definition of sentimentality (in the deragatory sense) is the use of a cliche to force unearned emotion. A cathartic device is employed to try failingly to do work the film didn't do. While some might call the last line of Giordana's 6-hour Italian family epic "sentimental," the film has earned it's cathartic ending, and what is generated is true sentiment.

Following two brothers from the early 60's until 2003, the film was originally shown as a miniseries on Italian TV, but screened at Cannes as a feature. While it certainly has its problems, both in pacing and in some technical and aesthetic aspects, this is really one of the most rewarding cinematic experiences of the last few years. Nicola and Matteo pursue wildly different paths through the somewhat tumultuous period in Italian history. It is fascinating to observe how their lives and relationships are shaped by the experiences they share as young men, and part of Giordana's gift is the realism he brings to this endeavor. While the film follows fairly standard (sometimes slightly strained) plot conventions of the family epic, his willingness to reject 1-to-1 pyschological motivations for his character's actions is intruiging and satisfying. He is deft at resolving the characters and subplots to our total emotional satisfaction without needing to explain or justify them.

If it hasn't been clear thus far, this is a feel-good film. Though it gets quite harrowing emotionally, its hard not to walk away loving life, treasuring your friends and family. Tarkovsky says in Scuplting in Time, that "Art has the capacity, ... to plow and harrow [the] soul, rendering it capable of turning to good." While The Best of Youth might lack Tarkovsky's uncompromising artistry, I certainly left it feeling inspired by the cyclical nature of this truth: the power of love and friendship to nurture great art, and the power of that art to, in turn, bring love and beauty into the world.

Double Suicide (1969)

2006-07-22T10:26:00.000-07:00

Masahiro Shinoda adapts the well-known 1720 bunraku play into a film, and rather than translate the drama into a what one might consider a traditionally cinematic language, Shinoda retains the theatricality and artifice of the traditional Japanese puppet theater and creates (unsurprisingly) an essentially cinematic work of art.

The play concerns a poor paper merchant (Jihei) who has fallen in love with a prostitute (Koharu). Too poor to "redeem" her by purchasing her away from the brothel, he is trapped between the wife and family he is neglecting, and the ridicule he receives from the wealthy merchant Tahei, forever threatening to purchase Koharu himself. Committing suicide together seems the only conceivable way to be together.

Shinoda opens with footage of the skilled puppeteers, clothed in black, manipulating complex and beautiful puppets. Rather than being simply an interesting prologue, the puppeteers put down their puppets and slide silently into the set of the village that glides forward. As the film progresses, the puppeteers manipulate the characters, hand them props, and direct their attention as necessary. The result is a fascinating meditation on fate and traditional Japanese culture, with stunning photography. The film itself is titled Double Suicide, and we are shown the bloody result of this deed in the opening frames. There is little question as to the end of the narrative, but Shinoda's characters spiral downward Ahab-like, pushing at the boundaries that seem to keep them on this path.

In one magnificent scene, right after what was almost a happy ending has been frustrated, Jihei rages around his house destroying it. He easily pushes over the flimsy set walls, in protest of the whole affair. Silently, the puppeteers begin to surround him, a reminder of their control over him and his story. In an act of desperation he pushes over the back wall only to reveal a bloodstained room containing Koharu: even his rage against his fate was a necessary instrument in his bloody end.

Shinoda, like Oshima and Imamura, was a vital part of the emerging Japanese New Wave. While a subtle tradition vs. modernity battle had been surging underneath the surface of Japanese Cinema in the 30's, 40's, and 50's (with Ozu quietly and powerfully preserving tradition, and Kurosawa skewering its flaws), Oshima shocked the country with his bleak portrait of disaffection in Cruel Story of Youth (1960). While the disposal of tradition for modernity was accomplished with ease and frivolity in Western culture, in Japan it is a discussion still alive and well. Shinoda expertly weaves Double Suicide with complex and conflicting feelings about traditional culture. It is both the engine for the bloody and senseless finale, and the genesis of the beautifully crafted story itself.

The Big Red One (1980)

2006-07-20T19:23:00.000-07:00

Samuel Fuller's World War II epic has been called by many "the greatest war film ever made." Frequently it is cited as a precursor to Malick's Thin Red Line (1998) and others. Its latest incarnation (the closest we will get to Fuller's original cut), is a 2 hour and 45 minute film, following the first infantry division (the Big Red One) from North Africa through the D-Day invasion to the liberation of Nazi death camps. Fuller was himself a veteran of the Big Red One, and his autobiographical film takes the form of a series of loosely assembled vignettes, following a central four characters.

Unfortunately, the film is quite overrated. Fuller himself is something of an enigma to me. Certainly a subversive talent (expelled from the "system" proper after his twin transgressions: Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964) ), he has been reclaimed with vigor by cinephiles and critics in recent years. These kind of revisionist efforts have their respective benefits and pitfalls.

The Big Red One is certainly more expertly crafted and interesting as a film than many World War II films, but Fuller's photography (always somewhat dry and unsteady) which was effective in his noir and pulp influenced films is revealed here as gawky and unsure. Though many have hailed the battle scenes as intense, the combination of Hollywood war-film conventions and Fuller's flair for the absurd keep the sequences from ever clearing an uncertain buddy-humor and they never enter something truly frightening or sobering. His handling of truly haunting images (the ovens in the Nazi death camps, a massacre at an insane aslyum) is so laden with the language of the B-film, that they are flat and entirely unaffecting.

That Fuller keeps the film riding this line (between the Hollywood convention and B-film pulp he is famous for, and something larger and more personal) makes the film worth noting and worth seeing. However, viewers looking for something transcending this basic level of interest might be disappointed.

On Hiatus

2006-06-08T23:51:00.000-07:00

Briefly, for marriage. Check back in July!

Kwaidan (1965)

2006-03-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

The great Masaki Kobayashi directs this anthology of four ghost stories from a book written by Lafcadio Hearn (interesting story), who translated them from traditional Japanese texts. Shot almost entirely on lavish, beautifully crafted sets, Kobayashi puts the photography (aided by his training as a painter) at the forefront of the film. The lush artificiality of the forests, courtyards, and oceans that are created on Kobayashi's soundstages are complemented with some of the most complex and intricate lighting I've seen, continually shifting with the changing moods of the narrative.

The most striking of the four tales, Hoichi, the Earless, begins with an incredible, stylized recreation of a samurai battle at sea, composed to match classical paintings of the battle. Hoichi, a young blind musician, is coerced by a ghost of the fallen samurai to play for his infant lord, who died when the whole household plunged into the sea of blood rather than be captured. Unaware that he has been playing for ghosts, the priests in the village attempt to save him by covering his body with holy texts, but they forget his ears.

Kwaidan makes absolutely no concession to western sensibilities. It is ponderously slow, artistically exact in its editing and timing, and scored minimally by the famed Toru Takemitsu. Even in the cold formailty of the filmmaking, the episodes are wholly engaging and affecting. Like much of the great Japanese cinema of the 50s and 60s, it is basically a simple morality tale, told carefully with exquisite aesthetic properties. I join in the chorus with certain others hailing Kobayashi as one of the most currently underrated directors.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973)

2006-03-21T14:02:00.000-08:00

Fassbinder always cited Douglas Sirk as one of his major influences, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is his remake of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. Sirk was famous for his intensely melodramatic Hollywood films of the 1950s, and the middle portion of Fassbinder's career focused on using the Hollywood melodrama form as a platform for intensely personal, political, and artistic statements.

Following these conventions, Ali not only deals with racial tensions, but explores the "everyday fascism" of family and social relationships. The film follows Emmi, an aging housekeeper, who falls in love with a Moroccan immigrant 20 years younger than her. Their decision to marry only crystallizes the racial prejudices that had been growing around them, forcing them necessarily apart and together in an endless cycle as they attempt to fit onto a social structure that won't accept them. It's quite a beautiful film, with Fassbinder not only directing but acting, producing, desigining the sets, and writing the script. His cinematic prowess is evident in the film's heavy, oppressive silence, and careful editing.

The Last Wave (1977)

2006-03-14T09:23:00.000-08:00

Peter Weir followed the wonderful Picnic At Hanging Rock with this film, a pyschological drama with a similar tone. The film stars Richard Chamberlain as a lawyer defending five aboriginal men accused of murdering another aborigini. As you may have guessed, something insidious seems to be up, and our hero becomes obsessed with the deepening mysterious phenomena, soon finding reason to believe that an apocalyptic tidal wave is approaching Australia.

The film opens with an effective and harrowing portrayal of a freak hailstorm in the cloudless desert. From that point, it rains almost continuously through the rest of the film, and Weir provides some wonderful outdoor photography. Much of the ethereal spook of Picnic at Hanging Rock is maintained, though there are a few weak links (moments of subpar writing/acting, some aesthetic decisions) to put up with. All in all, a very interesting and enjoyable film that manages to be more unsettling than not.

Wings of Desire (1987)

2006-03-07T14:18:00.000-08:00

Wim Wenders is an enigma to me. He's an enigma to me because my exposure to his films thus far has been The End of Violence (1997) and The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), both of which feel drastically short of some standard. This is the first of his films of some critical import that I have seen, and it is quite nice. The film allows us to observe angels wandering through West Berlin, listening to the spirits of the humans around them. There certainly is much to bear with, but the pacing, the lyricism, all fall into place quite frequently. I think the payoff at the rock concert (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, no less) is relatively unsteady, but the final moments of the film pull it back together. The inclusion of Homer, and the discussion of the poet and muse is striking and moving. The things that bother me about The End of Violence and The Million Dollar Hotel can be found seeping in a little at the mushy edges, but in such small quantities that it is negligable. I am a fool who has not seen Paris, Texas (1983), so I look forward to that (as I hear) substantive piece of art.

Finally, the thought that Peter Falk used to be angel is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes.

Camera Buff (1979)

2006-03-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

This was essentially Kieslowski's breakthrough film, a perfect instance of his deft political cinema that always pushes inward to become an examination of the soul. For the first hour, every shot is a revelation. Mostly handheld, he glides and shakes through the desaturated concrete and glass structures of Communist Poland, stopping to point out milky lens flares and television transmissions of a classical pianist that seem to be from another universe. The film follows a young factory worker, newly a father, who excitedly begins to make films of his daughter. The eagerness he has to put a lens between himself and the world is contagious enough to have seeped into Kieslowski's mis-en-scene: despite the bleakness of Polish winter, there is joy and vibrancy to the filmmaking that is more exuberant than the studied elegance of his Trois Couleurs trilogy.

Kieslowski proides no easy answers to the relatively common questions posed in his film about censorship, the artist in relation to society and family, the easy destruction artistic eagerness can bring. However, contrary to the popular use of that phrase, he does actually provide answers in abundance: complex ones. The final sequence is both a blessing and a curse to Filip: a sign of vast progress and infinite regression simultaneously.

Time of the Wolf (2003)

2006-03-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

While my exposure ot Haneke is not extensive, this is a film that makes me want to see more. Haneke's film opens as a middle class French family reaches their country home for vacation, only to realize that somewhere during their transit there was a global apocalypse. The film becomes a fairly straightforward chronicle of their struggle to survive, as the world falls into chaos. Despite the subject matter, it is a quiet film with no bombastics. At the same time, it is sometimes unbearably tense, and always harrowing as man's capacity for evil (in usual Haneke form) takes center stage.

The strictly cinematic aspects of this film deserve a standing ovation. While Haneke's visual style has never immediately appealed to me, his understated expressiveness in this film is astonishing at times. An extended sequence occurs in a barn at night as the family realizes the young boy, Ben, is lost. In a country without a single light, the screen is completely black, flaring for a second as a family member lights a fistful of hay, and plunges back into horrifying blackness as she is forced to drop it. It is a virtuouso sequence and there are several like it in the film. Perhaps the most frightening device of Haneke's is his non-responsive characters. As a character pleads for his life to another, making rational and moving arguments, the character with the gun stands staring in wide-eyed fright, unwilling or unable to respond.

The shocking thing, for those familiar with Haneke, is the incredibly strong Christological imagery throughout the film. The final sequence is exceedingly powerful, and difficult to talk about without castrating the experience for anyone who has not seen it. However, Haneke's depiction of sacrifice and its ability to transform the "least of these" is exceptionally beautiful, and oddly sacramental in its demand of absurd physical action. I had spent all day reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and the parallels (specifically dealing with the act of faith and the strength of the absurd) were eerie.

Repulsion (1965)

2006-02-25T23:28:00.000-08:00

*whimper*

Obsession (1976)

2006-02-25T22:33:00.000-08:00

Set in New Orleans and Florence, De Palma's Obsession bears much in common, tonally, with the work of De Sica and some of the classically melodramatic Italian cinema of the 70's. The film is an open homage to Vertigo (1958), conceived by De Palma and written by Paul Schrader. Obsession really exists on its own unique plain of high drama. It's accompanied by a score that recalls Hitchcock, but exaggerates him as well, taking classic Hollywood scoring to an almost absurd level: in the opening of the film, a glimpse of a hidden revolver under a coat is accompanied by a massive orchestral sting.

The level of melodrama never really drops. It swirls and builds until, near the end of the film when the main character finds himself betrayed on a pier, he drops to his knees against the sunset letting out a "YEEEEAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!" for the ages. At this point, the viewer is completely on the film's wavelength: there is nothing humorous or absurd about it. Its really an interesting experience. Not many films do such experiments in tone. While this all may sound extremely self-conscious or tongue-and-cheek, its not. De Palma just creates an internal logic to the tone of the film, so it isn't really questioned after you adjust.

If all this doesn't win you over, how many films allow you to see a full-grown Geneviève Bujold, made child-size with camera tricks, quivering and screaming bloody murder at a stuttering, mustachioed, Southern-accented John Lithgow?

This is really underrated De Palma, very satisfying on most levels.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

2006-02-14T23:50:00.000-08:00

In this deconstruction of the film noir, Altman applies thick layers of his usual cinematic devices: long takes, longer zooms, layering of characters and dialogue. While the sprawl in Nashville comes to much thicker of an emotional bludgeon, The Long Goodbye is content to remain cooler, just sprawl. Or so it would have you believe.

It truly is one of Altman's funnier films, as an excellent Elliot Gould smirks and quips his way as a 40's private eye lost in a 70's Los Angeles that has spiraled far beyond his relevance. The moments of shocking violence (particularly the moment dealt with a coke bottle) are matched equally with moments of total absurdity (a mind-bending, forced recreation of a high school locker-room). Both (as well as his nudist hippie neighbors) are lost on Altman's Marlowe who wanders, teflon-like, through a landscape beyond anyone's moral comprehension. The very genre of the film is underminded by it's setting. The ending is a pronounced judgement by one generation on another (perhaps by art on reality).

Lest we think this is all cynical moralizing, the real star of the film is Altman's camera. His affiliation (or lack of) with Hollywood seems to frequently disqualify him from serious film discussions, but it is hard to think of someone who investigated "cinematic space" more vigorously. Or at least its hard to see why he doesn't deserve a place with the best of them. Endlessly shooting reflections, zooming beyond characters far into the distance, losing all sense of dialogue in crashing waves and overpowering music. The experience of Altman's best is as much an experience of cinema as Tarkovsky or Godard.

Ugetsu (1953)

2006-02-11T23:36:00.000-08:00

Kenji Mizoguchi's film has been called one of the treasures of world cinema. Notably, it has inspired great reverence in Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, among others. Ugetsu is beautiful in its simplicity. Essentially a simple morality tale, it seamlessly combines the supernatural with the real through entrancing fluid camerawork and subtle, circular story-telling. No one really attempts this kind of filmmaking any more, and its interesting to see how this specific time and place (Japan in the 50's and 60's) was uniquely suited to do it so well.

Mizoguchi's filmmaking is so essentially Japanese and literary, that it is fascinating and joyful to watch even at its most sorrowful. With long takes and beautiful photography, Ugetsu communicates not only a very non-Western morality (to be over-simplistic: don't follow your dreams), but also becomes a meditation on the great impermanence of human existence. With very subtle, careful (and persuasive!) editing he assembles what could seem like a very disjointed story into a unified and balanced whole. Through some deft artistic choices, Mizoguchi emotively carries the viewer perfectly, priming and preparing him/her for each next moment. A foggy journey by boat is a beautiful, but silently disquieting bridge from one portion of film to another. As Miyagi is assaulted by soldiers, a harrowing moment seems to repeat itself endlessly, emotionally informing us of what is to come long before it is revealed to us. When the truth is revealed, after the peaceful segments that have preceded it, we are prepared, zen-like, for what has happened.

Orpheus (1950)

2006-02-10T13:02:00.000-08:00

Jean Cocteau's second in the Orphic Trilogy is truly the best film of the three. Like the best of Cocteau's work, it has a strange purity and dazzling visuals. It leaves the surrealism of his earlier work for a more straightforward narrative style that, in the end, seems more surreal and magical than his early cinema (as enjoyable as it is).

Set in the present, Cocteau has a great deal of fun creating an unsettling but humourously bureaucratic Hades inhabitated by frightening, goggled death-police. Cocteau's lifting of the narrative from its mythological context allows it to become rather specific in its themes, dealing (like The Blood of a Poet) with the artist and his role in the world.

The best moments are the most unsettling. While the Princess of Death stalks over the body of Eurydice, her young poet assistant sets up an unearthly, flickering telegraph machine and begins to beam strange poetry into the radio of Orpheus's car.

The Blood of a Poet (1930)

2006-01-31T15:19:00.000-08:00

The first in Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, The Blood of a Poet is everything it is always described as: dream-like, expressive, and visually arresting. Cocteau's films are always a treat due to his mastery over visual effects, most of which are more interesting to look at than what we see today. The films in the trilogy all attempt to look at the role and person of the artist. In a lecture he gave upon the first screening of this film, he said (in essence) that he could stand there and dissect each symbol in the film: he could say that the cheating card player stealing the Ace of Hearts from the dead child is the artist reaching into his childhood, rather than deeper into himself. However, to parse the symbols would defeat the purpose of cinema.

Hopefully something beyond these facts is presented through the whole of the film, through the experience of viewing, and I think it is. It is definitely not my favorite Cocteau. His more straightforward narratives seem to have a magic that this looser film doesn't quite acheive. However , it is wonderful to see such an uncompromising artist working so passionately and expressively. I hate to sound like such a cliche, but it doesn't cease to surprise me how accepting the public was to a film like this. I am sure it was mocked by plenty of people, but the fact that the general film-going public in Europe would have sat through this and pondered it is just flabbergasting in an age where a masterful (and straightforward) film like The New World (by one of America's most underappreciated directors) draws jeers and audible derision from audiences.

Black Narcissus (1947)

2006-01-31T15:14:00.000-08:00

This classic Powell and Pressburger film is intensely melodramatic, and gets more interesting the more melodramatic it gets. The film follows the story of five missionary nuns who attempt to start a hospital and school in a small Himalayan village. Photographed in glorious 3-strip Technicolor by the legendary Jack Cardiff, it remains one of the pinnacles of that color process. Most of the film is the classic, sweeping, "Golden Age" Archers visible in the Life and Death of Col. Blimp, among others. However, in the final act, one of the sisters finally snaps and the film becomes almost a thriller, and fascinatingly expressive.

The entire film was created on sets in London, and the times that shows the most are in this final act, as Sister Ruth lurches through a piecemeal jungle of shocking green bamboo and knee-deep fog.

The real gift in this film is the photography, expressive and perfectly crafted to create mood and tone. Even the obvious painted backgrounds seem opulently beautiful, and contribute to the surreal artifice of the classic, Hollywood cinema (which The Archers were trying to prove British cinema could stand up to).

Un Flic (1972)

2006-01-26T12:51:00.000-08:00

Un Flic was Melville's last film and is everything you expect from mature Mellville. It begins with an expertly depicted bank heist. Using more handheld camera than I've noticed in Le Samourai or Le Cercle Rouge, there are some breathtaking moments on the streets of Paris. Some of his shots make simple things like getting in and out of cars into rapturous cinematic moments.

The film is weakened a bit by its large centerpiece: a train-heist sequence. It gets a little silly, involving helicopters, oversized horseshoe magnets, and some poorly conceived model shots. I am still wondering how intentionally self-conscious it is. For one thing, it's hard to regain the chilly, slightly cruel tone the film had up to that point. Alain Delon, as the police inspector, is a true anti-hero, minus the heart of gold. Played with a vacuum where any emotion should be (and a healthy amount of sadism), Delon moves motiveless through the motions of his archetype. There is a sense in which everyone in the movie performs the classic cliches of the film noir with such vacancy, you wonder if its a comment on his own work, or the film noir in general. It goes beyond the vacant, shell-shocked cool of Delon in Le Samourai. He even reuses the club from Le Cercle Rouge. I don't know, the jury is out. Despite all this, you never doubt you are seeing the work of a master of the cinema.

Why do genre directors get disqualified from the canon? Seijun Suzuki and Jean-Pierre Melville are two directors who show an understanding of the language and possibilities of cinema that is every bit as sophsticated as Antonioni, Godard, Fellini, Cassavetes, Herzog, Truffuat, Malick, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Lynch, Eisenstein. Ok maybe not Eisenstein.

Dead Ringers (1988)

2006-01-21T13:10:00.000-08:00

This is a really artful film, more lyrical and poetic than I've seen Cronenberg be. Starring Jeremy Irons playing a pair of prestigious gynecologist twins, it touches on most of Cronenberg's interests in the body, but remains focused on the emotional and pyschological complexities of the male mind. There's plenty to dissect metaphorically, as far as the public self/private self, masculine self/feminine self, warring interior personalities, etc. However, the film is far from an intellectual exercise. It utilizies common mythology and the basic creepiness of identical twins as well as good old-fashioned paranoia to create an emotive experience full of vascillating sympathy and repulsion.

There's always a lurking danger in films that could feasibly be read as a singular, cohesive metaphor. There are several ways to sidestep the film becoming trite or too self-sufficient. Dead Ringers manages to do so by not only involving the viewer emotionally in the characters (through Irons' wonderful performance), but also by creating a strange urgency in the film. The conclusion of the film, if described here out of context, would sound outlandish and repulsing. However, Cronenberg creates an atmosphere and deep sense of internal logic, so that you never doubt the necessity of what is happening. It all must happen somehow. The final, very moving sequence actually becomes deeply satisfying. That's quite a nice trick.

The photography is just ridiculously beautiful. Covered in the gloss of the high-80's, there are so many virtuoso visual moments its hard to point one out. Maybe most chilling is an inebriated Jeremy Irons, being dressed in his blood red surgical clothing. He stares vacantly into a window, arms outstretched, and we see numerous reflections of his attendants buckling and buttoning his coat. Its a deeply frightening moment, like watching the beginning of some occultic ritual.

Wise Blood (1979)

2006-01-12T23:27:00.000-08:00

John Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's powerful and moving novella is simply unforgivable: rife with after-school-special acting, "pictures of people talking" cinematography, and Southern accents from a can. The film systematically destroys O'Connor's masterful pacing, stripping away several of the mysteries that are vital to the action emotionally and completely defusing every bit of tension. Finally, he treats some of O'Connor's most expressive and disturbing imagery (The New Jesus, Gonga) as "zany antics," replete with wacky shenanigan music.

All is not entirely lost however. Hazel Motes, the main character, is perfectly cast. Though he falters a little, Brad Dourif plays him with a stare that burns a hole through whatever it happens to be pointed at. His performance helps you hang on for the first hour, before the grating direction, complete lack of aesthetic attention, and upsettingly poor filmmaking force you to give up hope.

There really isn't much more to say, except don't waste your time. Go read O'Connor instead.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970)

2006-01-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

This late work from Vittoria De Sica bears few of the marks of the Italian Neo-Realism he was instrumental in creating in the 1940's. Poetic and lyrical, it is rife with expressionistic editing, and more shaky zooms per-minute than any film I've watched recently.

The film follows an aristocratic Jewish family living on a large estate in Italy during World War II. As the war worsens, they retreat into their lavish world, using their wealth to shelter themselves from the horror of reality. The transformation of their fantasy world into the harsh reality of the holocaust is as abrupt for the audience as it is for Finzi-Continis. Their intentional isolation and denial is seen as a primary contributor to their downfall. This is a well-crafted, enjoyable film from a director full of life, late in his career.

Interesting enough, it seems to me a frequent occurence for a director instrumental in a stringent movement to deny almost all its tenets late in life, and create some of his/her best loved films. Despite the wonderful, uncompromising exubrance of benchmark Dogme films, Cinema Verite films, New Wave films, or Neo-Realist films, it is equally satisfying to see filmmakers taking themselves not quite so seriously.

Opening Night (1977)

2006-01-05T15:19:00.000-08:00

Part of Cassavetes's unofficial trilogy starring Gena Rowlands, Opening Night lacks the cohesive emotional stab of Woman Under the Influence (1974), but that doesn't stop the viewer from falling headlong into his glorious filmmaking. In the opening sequence, Cassavetes's handheld camera trembles and swings upwards as the curtain to a play rises, and a lens flare consumes the frame. This is why we watch his films. Not only because they are beautiful, but because they impart 80% of their content through these moments.

The movie follows Gena Rowlands as an aging actress, being forced to play her first role as such. After an ardent fan (a young woman) is struck by a car and killed, Rowlands character begins a downward spiral, her sanity breaking as her cultural power as a woman is diminishing. Like most of his films, Opening Night is semi-improvised, and a sprawling two and a half hours. However, only a few times do you feel the length. There are a few scenes that become indulgent, but the magic (I know! Listen to me!) and potency of the images always redeems the overlong moments.

A sequence where Rowlands first sees the dead girl in her dressing room is probably my favorite moment in the film. Completely silent, the camera trembles and swings again through mirrors, makeup lights, finally to see a portion of the young girl's face, suspended in some reflection of a reflection. Rowlands's lip quivers and there is no motion until someone bursts through the door, and the face slides back into some nether-world.

This film is as deeply satisfying as Cassavetes gets, full of beautiful, kinetic cinematography, and incredibly sophisticated writing and performances.

Naked City (1948)

2006-01-03T11:27:00.000-08:00

There's a particular deep satisfaction that comes with a genre picture executed perfectly. This is the last film Jules Dassin made in the USA, before being named at a House on UnAmerican Activities Committee meeting and moving to France to direct Rififi (1955). From the opening aerial shot of New York's 1940's skyline, I knew this was earning a place in my top 5 New York films. The narrator (and also producer!) Mark Hellinger informs the viewer that this is unlike any film we have seen previously. All shot 100% on location, no sets, and a thousand New Yorkers playing alongside the cast.

Narrating the entire film, Hellinger adds layer upon layer of interest to the unfolding story of a beautiful blonde, knocked out and drowned in her own bathtub. He gives interior monologues to everyone in the film, and shouts warnings and advice to the detectives and the murderers, alternately. Mostly however, he continually widens the scope of the film from the plot to the city itself. Each establishing shot comes with his introduction: "This is New York's Lower East Side, somewhere here, our culprit lurks." Finally he pulls all the way back in the famous tagline that closes the film: "There are 8 million stories in the Naked City..."

It helps that he is accompanied by William H. Daniel's luminous images of New York, for which he won an Oscar. The film is surprisingly arresting, especially the final chase through Lower Manhattan to the Williamsburg Bridge. Dassin gives some very personal and affecting touches other director's might have skipped, including interesting treatment of the victim's parents. As many have noted, the bitterness and guilt in the victim's parents is contrasted neatly with the optimism and joyous presentation of Detective Jimmy Halloran's home life.

The innovation most people credit Naked City with is the interest it shows in the detective's personal lives, and the weaving of that material into the narrative. Obviously, a quick look at any detective film or TV show from the last 50 years will show that this is an idea that has stuck. In this film, an excellent performance from Barry Fitzgerald as the hardened but kindly old Irishman helping his up-and-coming detective son adds a humanity to the story that keeps it from being a flat genre-exercise.

Cure (1997)

2005-12-26T14:57:00.000-08:00

Unlike some, I'm not hugely interested by slasher films. Occasionally I am coaxed into thriller territory, and usually I am glad to the coaxer. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure is one such instance.

Cure begins by following fairly conventional serial-killer outlines, albeit with some fantastic stylistic flourishes. The opening murder sequence is as surprising and disturbing as any I've seen, in the most nonchalant and soul-needling way. Murder after murder occurs, unconnected except by a curious "X" shape carved into the necks of the victims, and the confused, passionless sanity of the upstanding citizens committing them. Soon it seems that a drifting amnesiac may have a part in it all.

Several times my smart-aleck self got restless with the film as I "figured out what it was doing." On cue, each time Kurosawa sidestepped my expectations and deepened the film, both cinematically and narratively. In contrast to how relatively uncreepy the first half of the film is, the second half is quite spooky, sliding sidelong into occultic rituals and non-linear editing.

The final scene is incredibly satisfying, showing the strength in Kurosawa's visual subtlety and editing.

Cul-De-Sac (1966)

2005-12-23T15:54:00.000-08:00

Roman Polanksi's absurdist black comedy falls neatly in line with the better of his absurdist thrillers (especially The Tenant), if not spiraling further out of control than most of them. The film revolves around two wounded gangsters who hold an eccentric (to say the least) couple hostage in their own home, which happens to be a castle only accessible once a day when the tide is out. The plot points fall into the classic screwball comedy catalog (having to pretend the gangsters are the butlers when company arrives, etc.), but Polanski expectedly tightens the screws so that the experience of watching the film is something akin to going slowly insane.

The movie is quite funny, and full of absurdist touches. The estate is overrun by chickens of all kinds, the tenants seem to eat only eggs, and everyone is constantly drinking some sort of medicinal alcohol concoction that the cryptic French wife of Donald Pleasance brews. Halfway through the insanity, Pleasance's character has a sobbing breakdown on the beach mourning that "no one can tell a story anymore." The classic "Mugsy" character has an incredible child-like quality at the coming of his "boss," heightened only in contrast to his cliched-noir sadism.

The photography, in places, is quite a revelation. Even on a who-knows-what-generation VHS copy, some of the images shimmer with otherworldly beauty. Yes, otherworldly. Some classic paranoid dutch angled close-ups punctuate a scene of a child getting ahold of a shotgun, and hellishly shrill jazz (thanks to the same child's meddling with the record player) scores a few choice scenes. This is definitely Polanski more expressive than we are used to, and its quite a treat.

Elevator to the Gallows (1957)

2005-12-21T13:04:00.000-08:00

Elevator to the Gallows was Louis Malle's first film, directed at the age 24. A meditation on the film noir with an exquisite soundtrack by Miles Davis, Malle finds a way to keep his film surprising at every turn by both unfolding classic conventions of the genre with gusto, and avoiding other conventions for some very inventive alternatives.

Malle touches on enough classic narrative elements (the illicit couple plotting the murder of a spouse) to engage viewers expectations and set them at ease with the film, and fascinatingly he never really returns to the "plot." The film centers around both the mysterious main character being stuck in an elevator after attempting to escape from the scene of the murder he's just committed, as well as the young couple who has (unknown to him) stolen his car and are joyriding around Paris.

The young couple provides most of the great moments in the film: an extremely mature and hilarious critique of youth (especially for such a young director!). Joyriding Paris highways, an impromptu cocktail party, a botched double-suicide pact, cover with great amusement the melodrama, arrogance, and naivete implicit in being young.

The film is beautifully photographed and treats everything with a contrasting levity and earnestness that creates a really great tone throughout. A discovery at breakfast in a sidewalk cafe is one of my favorite sequences in any film noir. The film is on the cusp of the French New-Wave and shows it with some great voice-over and lots of street shooting.

Gates of Heaven (1978)

2005-12-13T14:41:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to avoid saying something about eating my shoe, but my goodness, this is one of the more beautiful films I've seen. Errol Morris's investigation of two pet cemetaries and the families that operate them is an incredible portrait of death, the frailty of humans, and how we cope with it. Despite the oddness of some of the characters, the film transcends all accusations of exploitation and is a profound, touching portrait of human needs and desires. All art that deals with "eccentrics" runs the risk of being, by nature, exploitive, or at least relying more on the eccentric characteristics of the subjects to carry the work, rather than artistry. It certainly toes the line of absurdity, but he always draws a dignity deep within each character, connecting them both to himself and the viewer.

From an image-making perspective, this ranks up with The Thin Blue Line as one of his most succesful films. The small gauge gives it an intimacy that The Thin Blue Line trades for cinematic breadth. What is equally striking in both films is his compositions of the interview segments. Each one is assembled with the same care Eggleston, Winogrand, or any classical photographic portraiture of the era. Each interview with each subject has its own perfectly constructed enviroment, and it is pure joy to see him cut between them, not only tracing themes through the interview dialogue, but also exchanging colors and shapes.

One of the primary themes in the film is that of mark-making: how humans deal with their own impermenance, how we make marks on the earth to remind ourselves and others of our existence. The pet cemetaries clearly fall directly into those themes. Strikingly, so does the breathtaking final sequence of the younger son of the cemetary owner playing electric guitar outside on a hilltop, his sonic mark resonating through the whole valley (after his musing on how the many songs he's written will most likely never be published, never be heard). In the distance, an American Flag waves softly, a slightly more permanent manifestation of the same desire. In the thematic chain, Morris's film is one step farther back, but it fits neatly.

In case anyone is wondering, Christmas time is here.

The Sword of Doom (1965)

2005-12-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

Though this certainly falls into the lesser canon of samurai cinema, Director Kihachi Okamoto rewards the patient viewer amply. Following Ryunosuke Tsukue, the film chronicles how evil has crept from his sword into every corner of his soul. A masterful swordsman, Rynuosuke wades through political intrigue, family life, and the world of samurai honor with equal indifference, killing frequently and skillfully. The film is rather unexceptional and plodding for most of it's length. Besides the final sequence, and an ambush in the snow, the photography is rather unremarkable. However, as is frequent in samurai films, the last 20 minutes makes it all worthwile.

Ryunosuke ends the film in a house thought to be haunted. Confused and frightened at strange appearances, he begins hacking through an endless maze of rooms separated by thatched bamboo screens. Each thrust of his sword is met with a horrific, agonizing wail of someone he has killed. Rather than inspiring some sort of moment of conscience, Ryunosuke instead seems to become possessed by the devil himself: hacking his way through hundreds of samurai as flames engulf the house. They injure him severely, and yet he still pirouettes and staggers through room after room, wreaking bloody destruction. At this point the primary plotline following a good samurai (training with the tsuki thrust to defeat him before more have to fall to his hand) is completely dropped: forgotten and consumed in the heat of the blazing, roaring death Ryunosuke has wrought with his sword of doom. Dun dun dun!

As William commented to me, many of the samurai films of this era seem to be anti-samurai films, or some sort of moral evaluation of the genre.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

2005-12-06T23:17:00.000-08:00

This is a very odd film to me. It's a new-wave classic, and undeniably quite beautiful, but it certainly is much more ponderous (and carefully composed) than many of its French contemporaries. It is involving and arresting, but its political motivations are weakening to the overall impact of the story. Resnais continually attempts to show Hiroshima as a metaphor for the impact (fallout, if you will) of lost loves in the character's lives, but instead of becoming transparent, I found it kept pulling me from the emotive level of the film (rather than augmenting it). The film is much less naturalistic than maybe it intends to be, and some of the voice-over sections are a little stilted or self-conscious.

All that said, it's still a beautiful film, and the photography (not to mention some of the horrifying archival footage of Hiroshima's aftermath) is worth the time. The eventual re-telling of Emmanuelle Riva's tortured past is powerful, and masterfully unfolded through non-linear montage.

I Am Thankful for: Ross McElwee

2005-11-26T18:15:00.000-08:00

THIS IS LIFE, NOT ART!

On this weekend of a uniquely American holiday, it seems appropriate to give thanks for a uniquely American filmmaker. I'm assuming Cassavetes, Malick, Scorsese, all the big hitters can fend for themselves. After a lot of thought, it became apparent to me that the American filmmaker I am currently most thankful for is Ross McElwee.

McElwee is a documentary filmmaker who has made several poignant and vaguely autobiographical films who's subject matter encompasses a high school teacher, a small town news station, General Sherman's march to the sea, the Berlin Wall, and the tobacco industry.

McElwee got a Masters in filmmaking from MIT, and moved to Paris to be a writer and photographer. While there, his experience of the opening tracking shot of A Touch of Evil proved so powerful for him, that he decided to become a filmmaker. While at MIT, he had studied under Richard Leacock, one of the pioneers of the cinema verite. There's a odd contradiction between Welles and the Maysles, but both were filmmakers who had a unique and masterful understanding of very different aspects of cinema's possibilities and power. This tension is really what makes Mcelwee's films so remarkable to watch, and so vibrant for their length.

In an age of "documentary proliferation," where digital cameras and Final Cut Pro have made documentary-making an almost costless process, the amount of documentaries which understand and utilize the power of cinema are growing fewer and fewer. Many current documentaries actually work better when you don't try to view them as films, but as something else. While documentaries have gained press and interest for their subject matter and/or political implications, McElwee's documentaries are still part of a love affair with moving images on celluloid.

My favorite (and maybe his best-loved film), Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, was the result of both a grant to make a film on Sherman's march, and an untimely and devastating breakup with a long-time girlfriend. Utilizing his camera both as a image-maker and (following his sister's suggestion) as a tool to meet women, he documents his travels along Sherman's route, and his experiences with several women along the way. Not only is he able to create poignancy, humor, and interest in his subjects, not only is he able to explore deeper cultural issues of Southern womanhood, the attempt to escape one's past, and race relations, but he also manages to create hundreds of dazzling, uniquely cinematic moments, breathtaking simply for their formal beauty and emotive impact. Old Southern Baptist men raising a cross on Easter Morning, silent cellulite exercises, A moth-eaten Easter Bunny wandering in to a hellfire and brimstone lecture, the cryptic trading of large plastic animals, all are magically transported into a 16mm frame, and flash at 24 frames per second.

Besides his determination never to stop filming (even when giving someone a hug), the most striking of the cinema verite aspects in his films is his deep interest in and reverence for people. A brief moment in Sherman's March, an almost throwaway conversation with a car mechanic about the death of his wife, becomes a devastating and moving scene, simply through McElwee's care with the camera.

McElwee (in his youth) succesfully escaped the South for Brown University, MIT, and Europe. As someone who can most definitely identify with that youthful desire, his artistic interest in the South is of prime interest. While he has commented frequently he feels no necessary need to document only the South, I really cannot think of a filmmaker who does it better, with more care or complexity. In film, the South is often abused or misunderstood. Southern filmmakers that capture the culture with understanding and intelligence are rare, and it almost seems like it's McElwee's tension with it that brings this out.

His latest film Bright Leaves put to rest any thoughts that his youthful Allen-esque self-effacement or unique project was what made his films so interesting. His exploration of the tobacco industry, its relation to the South, and his relationship with his son is as graceful and effortlessly cinematic as anything previous.

Hooray for you, Ross McElwee. Creator of beauty.

Samurai Spy (1965)

2005-11-22T12:31:00.000-08:00

This was my first exposure to Masuhiro Shinoda, after many recommendations. Samurai Spy is a Cold War samurai film. Instead of documenting the epic battle of Sekigahara, the film starts 14 years after it, as the tensions that boiled over there are elevating through frequent espionage. It's basically a film-noir, following classic spy conventions, as each double-cross is double crossed.

The visuals are the biggest treat in the film, with frequent use of gliding, silent action-shots, and (as William mentioned) interesting distant shots of important action. My favorite involved a climactic battle being shot from across a valley as fog rolls by, the camera tracking up and down hills.

Despite the theatrics and beauty of the fight sequences, they remain brutal and bloody. Shinoda consistently shows the killer spattered with the blood of his victim, leaving the viewer wonder who is more to pity. In the DVD interview, he also comments that he wanted to show that killing of this sort is always "following orders" rather than being a crime of passion. He sees the film as being very political, but my experience of it was that the bigger questions (Sasuke's musings on death) were the dominant themes. Shinoda establishes an interesting formula in which, after major action, the characters begin to discuss the philosophical implications quite openly. This sounds horrible, but somehow it works very well, and never seems preachy or over-intellectual. There's an absurdity in the world he creates, but the characters (who participate earnestly in it) are always treated with the utmost respect. It's a very interesting tone.

Death in Venice (1971)

2005-11-15T10:30:00.000-08:00

Released in 1971, this adaptation by Visconti of the Thomas Mann novel was a meticulous, almost obsessive creation. The tone of the film is really unlike much I've seen, though I found odd similarities (visually and emotionally) to Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). The film is like a sustained chord, building a little and morphing a little, but its almost constant pulling of ecstatic emotions from the viewer is quite exhausting and impressive. The film is scored entirely with the music of Gustav Mahler, and Visconti exchanges the semi-autobiographical writer figure of Mann's novel with a composer modeled on Mahler.

The main narrative is only given to the viewer in short, garbled, and dream-like flashbacks. Dirk Bogarde masterfully plays a composer, beset with mediocrity, taking a vacation in Venice for his health. The film, through flashbacks, sets up several interesting polarities, fueling Gustav's artistic crisis: cerebral, mediocre, "lofty" art vs. sensual and insipid art. Secretly, a plague is descending on Venice, but to protect the tourist industry, no one is saying anything. Guests casually disappear without a word, and a man quietly scatters lime across the city. As he begins to suspect the sickness in Venice, we begin to suspect the sickness growing inside him. In his stay, he becomes entirely obsessed with a beautiful young boy. As he observes the boy with growing fixation, we can slowly see his rationalist intellectualism breaking down before the purely sensual. The pain of the realization of his having lied to himself about his own nature is almost unbearable, climaxing as he becomes the sickly figure he reviled early in the film: painting his face white and coloring his lips to appear younger.

It's worth noting that the film is almost entirely silent, and places more text in Bogarde's face than almost any movie I've seen. There's a slow-burning melancholy that grows throughout the film, swallowing it up in a flash at the last moment. The final moments of the film are devastating, mostly for their lack of anything sensational. This is an exceedingly important film, especially for artists. Many great films have captured the pain and confusion of the high-minded artist (or any "high-minded" person I suppose) coming to terms with the reality of the world, which is quite disjointed from their beliefs about it. However, this film distills the theme into an emotional experience in a way that is almost pure in its lack of text or dialogue.

Le Samourai (1967)

2005-11-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai is a gift to the world. It is a perfect film. Melville's meticulous visuals (especially colors) are what push him above the other filmmakers of his generation and genre. The icy photography places the viewer directly into the detachment of Delon, whether or not they wish to be there. Alain Delon is masterful in the role, and his immobile stare is frequently the foundation of the film's best sequences.

In a montage of wonderful interview footage with Melville (provided on the new DVD release), he comments that he thinks gangsters are "pathetic losers." His repeated use of the genre, he states, is an interest in that particular brand of modern tragedy, only expressable through the film noir. In the title of this film, he has certainly made the connection to another genre that has expressed it equally well in cinema history.

Le Samourai, like Le Cercle Rouge (1970), is characterized almost entirely by its overwhelming silence. Melville understands the language of the cinema, particularly genre and commercial cinema, so well, that he is able to communicate everything he means to almost entirely without dialogue. His visuals are painterly, rather than the more montage-based, energetic camera in Hitchcock: he speaks through colors and a more objective mis-en-scene. The dialogue that is in the film is vital, not usually for narrative purpose, but to give insight into the characters.

The ending of the film is quite a shock, and I won't ruin it here. However, in one of the best artistic decisions in the film, a drastic shift in character is played by Delon without the slightest variation in form. The effect is overwhelmingly satisfying. The text from the Bushido that the film opens with both romanticizes and impugns him.

Bob le Flambuer (1955), which I understand is more of a 50's crime film comparable to Jacques Becker, etc., is playing at the New Beverly Dec. 14-17th. From what I've read it should make more sense of the oft-given "father of the New Wave" title which the careful and unique visual style of the later films obscures.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

2005-11-09T17:12:00.000-08:00

Luis Bunuel's absurdist comedy follows six bourgeois who's dinner party is repeatedly interrupted by a catalog of real and imagined obstacles: a funeral, military manuevers, an assassination, a terrorist group, a theater audience, etc. It's interesting to note that it is rather light-hearted, as opposed to outraged (like perhaps some of his earlier films). Still political films are political films and it doesn't ever really transcend its politics (though I know some will call me ignorant for that). It's as amusing as descriptions promise, and there are some excellent moments.

He does get in his church-hating scene, and that's probably the scene that best brings out his themes. He hates social mores and religious institutions because he sees them as repressive to human desire. Sometimes he's right, and sometimes I think he's wrong, but its a somewhat interesting theme anyway. The six friends continue to stand on ridiculous ceremony, and it's that ceremony that provides most of the absurd humor and prevents them from ever being able to eat.

He frequently uses blatant stereotypes, taking them to their extremes, both reinforcing them and undermining them at the same time. Personally, though, I find that I like most political films (Medium Cool is in my top ten) despite their politics, rather than because of them. It does keep me from really loving this later Bunuel, as the filmic elements seem to take a back seat.

Shoot the Piano Player (1960)

2005-11-07T01:09:00.000-08:00

Truffaut's classic New Wave-noir film quickly vaults itself to the top of my Truffaut list. Much less serious than the films that bookend its spot in Truffaut's filmography (400 Blows and Jules and Jim), Shoot the Piano Player is one of those films that is bursting with joy and passion for filmmaking. With a loose and improvisational feel, this film, thematically, is the foil to Breathless, released the same year. Using all the signatures of the New Wave, Truffaut doesn't take on the scope of Godard's film (visual truth and whatnot), but merely uses them to pay homage to the gangster B-film, a meditation on genre.

The film is really carried by Charles Aznavour's wonderful, subtle performance as a former concert pianist, now playing at a nightclub to escape his former highbrow life. Also noteworthy is the layered and careful use of voice-over, which can be abused so easily. The film is extremely funny, the gangsters frequently stopping in the middle of their crimes to discuss the most trivial things (sound familiar?). Despite its passionate editing and humor, the film also manages to be incredibly moving, something many directors might not reach for in a film like this. The closing shot is really wonderful.

Bad Timing (1980)

2005-11-07T00:31:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Roeg's film promises much from the outset. Eroticism. Art Garfunkel. Eroticism starring Art Garfunkel. You may remember Nicolas Roeg from the Donald-Sutherland-adorned horror film, Don't Look Now, a film notable for its gapingly awkward non-linear sex scene, and greatly augmented by it's inclusion of midgets and stabbing. Bad Timing has neither midgets nor stabbing, and their lack is felt. What it does have, is a structure based off the aforementioned nudie scene. The film is edited together from the beginning and the end, cutting back and forth throughout, blah blah blah. Somehow it has the Fingers syndrome, and nothing falls into place. There are plenty (PLENTY) of stylistic flourishes that only become more grating as their thematic vacuousness becomes more apparent. To boot, Harvey Keitel plays an Austrian detective who miraculously manifests and accent halfway through the film, and begins to lose his grip on the English language, and indeed, perhaps sanity, towards the end.

The premise of the film requires that both it's leads illicit some sympathy, but unfortunately Garfunkel's co-star just can't (though he is surprisingly good). She gives one of the most irritating performances I've seen in some time. As far as the "erotic" elements, let me remind you of the presence of Art Garfunkel. My fast forward button got used more than it has in a while. If you venture into this film, I suggest you use yours as well. There is much given in intentionally bad taste, that really only makes the whole effort sadder, as if it felt it needed to make up with shock value what it lacked in artistic value. There is a truly unforgivable rape scene (fortunately I was able to skip), that is as mysogonystic as it is (unfortunately for the filmmaker) laughable. It's "connection" to the "themes" is apparently "noteworthy."

Lest you think it was all for nought, I must admit that the visuals throughout much of the film are truly stunning. There is also a very well done scene on a bridge near the beginning of the film, which unfortunately has little to do with the rest of the film. It sits like a piece of a real movie left in a "worst of film school" reel.

I may seem to be overly harsh, and that's because this had every potential of being a good film. The themes Keitel's character introduces near the end of the film are very interesting, and what I presume the film was supposed to be about. However, nowhere in its unforgivable 2 HOURS AND 20 MINUTES, does it explore these themes, visually, cinematically, narratively. This should probably be the end.

Knife in the Water (1962)

2005-11-01T12:07:00.000-08:00

Roman Polanski's first feature film is a tense chamber drama, clearly working out of 50's and 60's Antonioni. The film revolves around the (at first) understated competition between a younger and older man. The young man, a student the married couple pick up on their way to the lake, joins them on their sailing trip. The film gets less interesting when it seems to start to lay some kind of allegorical structure on their conflict. The dilemna seems more interesting when its just youth vs. age, John Updike style.

The performances are pretty good, especially Jolanta Umecka as Krystyna, who is the picture of indifference, and yet possesses all the maturity the men seem to imagine they have. The film is scored with some great, distant jazz that gives the whole thing a beat-vibe.

Overall I can't rate it as highly as many people do, and I don't thnk it ranks very highly with Polanski's other films, but its a solid piece of filmmaking. Like the best of this stuff, its one of those films that makes you want to pick up a camera and go make a movie.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

2005-10-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

Peter Weir kicked off the Australian New Wave with this really stunning film, set on Valentine's Day, 1900. It's most notable quality is its palpable creepiness, which is well-maintained even though most of the action takes place in the middle of the day, in rather un-foreboding settings. The exploding sexuality of the girls is also palpable, as they begin to push through what at first seems like conventional Victorian culture (toasting St. Valentine, semi-pagan pastoral poetry, etc.) and hint at an unsettling, occultish side to their actions. There is, for me, something inherently creepy about the pagan mythology of this period, its very gothic.

The three girls are really well played, as they come to embody purity, eroticism, feminity, etc. It's kind of a Laura Palmer deal. As we see their images over and over (after they have disappeared) those images get filled up with so much impossible meaning that it quickly destroys any sense of them as human beings, and they become eerie idealized spectres. Repeated shots of the rock increase some sort of feeling of primal dread.

The sequence where the girls disappear is one of the most interesting and engaging things I've seen in a while. The milky slow-motion and montage effects create this necessity of the action. You don't know why they are doing what they are doing, but you share their sentiment that what is happening somehow must happen. The mystical connection to a character left back at the college (a Charles Ryder/Sebastian Flyte type romantic relationship between two of the girls) is also really succesful, and adds most of the supernatural elements. Also incredible is a certain scene I won't ruin that takes place in the gym during a ballet class.

Perhaps it's a little long and doesn't quite deliver the 100% of the goods the viewer wants, but I think that's what makes it all the more titillating. Of course the viewer's imagination creates answers a hundred times more eerie than any explanation the film could provide. Weir gives us all the good stuff by inference, providing a few sequences as launching points for the imagination, and never interfering with it again, allowing it to come to fruition in each of our minds.

anyways, The Last Wave, here I come.

On Cinemascope

2005-10-24T21:24:00.000-07:00

In Godard's Contempt, Fritz Lang observes that its usefulness doesn't extend beyond shooting "snakes and coffins." Ran across Roland Barthes' opinion:

On Cinemascope

by
Roland Barthes
translated by
Jonathan Rosenbaum

If, for lack of the proper technical background, I can't define Henri Chrétien's [anamorphic] process, at least I can judge its effects. They are, in my opinion, surprising. The broadening of the image to the dimensions of binocular vision should fatally transform the internal sensibility of the filmgoer. In what respect? The stretched-out frontality becomes almost circular; in other words, the ideal space of the great dramaturgies. Up until now, the look of the spectator has been that of someone lying prone and buried, walled up in the darkness, receiving cinematic nourishment rather like the way a patient is fed intravenously. Here the position is totally different: I am on an enormous balcony, I move effortlessly within the field's range, I freely pick out what interests me, in a word I begin to be surrounded, and my larval state is replaced by the euphoria of an equal amount of circulation between the spectacle and my body.

The darkness itself is transformed: in the ordinary film, it is tomb-like, I am still in the cave of myths, I have a little flame of illumination which flickers far above me, and I receive the truth of the images like heavenly grace. Here, on the contrary, the cord that binds me to the screen is no longer thread-like, it's a full volume of brightness that is established apart from me, I don't receive the image by those long threads of light that one sees transfixing and feeding the stigmatists, I lean forward on my elbows, becoming as horizontal as the spectacle, and out of my larval state emerge as a little god because here I am, no longer under the image but in front of it, in the middle of it, separated from it by this ideal distance, necessary to creation, which is no longer that of the glance but that of the arm's reach (God and painters always have outstretched arms).

Obviously one must occupy the largest space in a new manner; perhaps the close-up will not survive, or at least its function will be transformed: kisses, sweat, psychology may all reinstate darkness and distance: a new dialectic between men and the horizon, men and objects, should come into view, a dialectic of interdependence and no longer one of décor. Properly speaking, this should be the space of History, and technically, the epical dimension is born. Imagine yourself in front of The Battleship Potemkin, no longer stationed at the end of a telescope but supported by the same air, the same stone, the same crowd: this ideal Potemkin, where you could finally join hands with the insurgents, share the same light, and experience the tragic Odessa Steps in their fullest force, this is what is now possible; the balcony of History is ready. What remains to be seen is what we'll be shown there; if it will be Potemkin or The Robe, Odessa or Saint-Sulpice, History or Mythology.

First published in Les Lettres Nouvelles, February 1954

2046 (2004)

2005-10-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

I won't say a whole lot about this, as its old sauce mostly, but I did just get a chance to see this at the New Beverly for the second time (a fantastic theater experience). This is just a brief note to those who found 2046 regurgitated, sleepwalking, confused. You are all full of it. Many people called it appallingly "safe," but I must differ to the highest degree. To unexpectedly take a character you've learned to identify with strongly (in In The Mood For Love), and then to cyclically show his spiritual death in painful detail is one of the gutsier moves I've seen a director make in a series.

Almost anyone else would have ended the film where Tony Leung sits, pen poised over paper, trying to write a happy ending to his story. A perfect, poetic ending, full of ambiguity and a deep cause for self-reflection. However, Wong Kar-Wai takes it 20 steps (and minutes!) further, and continues to push his character into a long, slow spiral back into himself, his destructive behavior, and examines the impossibility of ever escaping from memories, nostalgia, and the past. Through the severe repitition, non-linear narrative, and sheer length of the film, the viewer experiences the story as Leung does. The whole trilogy is an exercise in the destruction, inspiration, happiness, and hopelesness all built into "nostalgia." The trilogy makes you love it, and then challenges your reasons for loving it.

Anyway, Days of Being Wild definitely still is my favorite of the trilogy. But I couldn't have been more pleased with the conclusion.

Fingers (1978)

2005-10-19T23:09:00.000-07:00

There's no way keep this from sounding incredibly arrogant, but in many ways Fingers is the film I'm afraid I would make, if I ever attempted to make one. It is a film built off truly inspired small ideas, liberally borrowed from other 70's filmmakers, that simply doesn't work. Harvey Keitel plays the son of a mid-level New York hustler, and is forced to distract his dream of being a concert pianist with doing "collections work" for his father. Besides that, he is obsessed with pre-rock pop music, ala The Drifters, The Platters, etc. He carries a tape player with him everywhere, blasting his music to "keep him sane" while he brutalizes the debtors who refuse to pay up.

It all sounds very promising, but there are some hard-to-express problems that keep it from ever falling into place. There is a gratuitous amount of "blasting kicky, girl-group music to brutal fight sequences" that seems to scream Mean Streets a few too many times. Its a great trick, but one that very quickly becomes stilted and self-conscious (in a bad way). Some of the performances seemed a bit wooden or just plain bad (Jimmy's Father). The movie is filled with harsh, American 70's intentional ugliness, but the technical flaws keep it just ugly, nothing more. It consistently tries to be bad, but lacks the confidence to pull it off, and kind of ends up feeling like the posturing bully, only copying his older brother. Overall though, it is something ineffable on a technical and stylistic level that keeps the film from ever becoming cohesive.

The saddest part is that, despite its many shortcomings, there are some wonderful ideas brimming under the surface of the film. While definitely not visionary or very original, I am convinced a very good film could have been made from this script, without changing much at all. However, Fingers is not a very good film. The sadder part is that so much of the good being pulled off badly reminds me of my own artistic failures. The closing shot, for example, reminds me of something I would do, and though many may disagree, it totally is not convincing. It reaches for something the film just plain hasn't earned.

Fingers was recently remade by French director Jacques Audiard into what william has told me is a much better film. This interests me.

Husbands and Wives (1992)

2005-10-17T22:14:00.000-07:00

Husbands and Wives, oddly, is a return to the form of his 1969 film, Take the Money and Run. Shot as a docu-drama, frequent "interviews" with the cast dot the film and illuminate, undercut, and interpret the action. The film doesn't cover lots of new ground in Allen's musing on relationships, though it does add a wonderful voice of criticism (a talented, female writing student of Allen's) who gives the film a deeper sense of self-reflection. His usual neurotic ideologies of life and relationships are present, and played for laughs as always, but in a scene of biting satire she lifts the humor and exposes the neurosis for what it is through some biting criticism of the novel Allen's character is writing.

The real revelation here, however, is the camerawork. Shot almost entirely with hand-held (I think) 16mm, the film jerks and jump-cuts expressively. The disruptive, jarring camerawork challenges the romanticism Allen usually slathers (with great success) over his characters and situations in Annie Hall, etc. The violent camerawork effectively mirrors the emotional and intellectual violence the characters do to each other with such flippancy. Clearly a nod to Scenes From a Marriage, Husbands ad Wives is full of the tension that Allen is full of himself: raising the issue, then sidestepping it, being full of romance and cynicism at the same time. The final moment of the film encapsulates this perfectly, but I won't ruin it here. A third-party "narrator" of the documentary helps move the film along with interesting effect. The colors are vibrant and autumnal, Manhattan is, well, Manhattan.

All the humor is spot-on, and there are some incredibly poignant, perfectly expressed human moments. Excellent to me, is when the young, dense aerobics instructor Sydney Pollack's character has left his wife for begins to embarass him at a party of his intellectual peers. The walls of denial Pollack has built up against what he is actually doing crumble spectacularly: he realizes the cliche he has become. Allen's ability to conjure these universal human pathologies is really a gift. Even if you've never behaved like some of his characters, no matter how depraved or neurotic their behavior, you can almost always instantly recognize that attitude in yourself.

Though not in league with Manhattan, Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, or others, this film does have an ineffeable something not present in any of his other films. An excellent accomplishment.

Music Moments

2005-10-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

So. Kind of a cliche, but I thought it would be fun to try to decide on my top 4 film music moments. They won't be a surprise to those of you who know me, mostly because they unsurprisingly come from my favorite films. They are picked for sheer emotional impact. Here we go, in ascending favoriteness:

4. At the end of Altman's Nashville, after the 7th or 8th chorus of "It Don't Bother Me," something inside me just snaps. We keep zooming out wider and wider, and thousands of people, after the traumatic shooting we just witnessed, are singing together "you may say, that I ain't free, but it don't bother me..." The handheld, out of focus crowd shots just hit something deep in me. I'm not sure how else to describe it.

3. In Blue Velvet: I define it as the precise moment that Ben sings the chorus: "In dreams, I walk....with you." Up to that point, your pysche has been strained to the breaking point, and as soon as the almost goofy, mariachi-like backing band kicks in, and Dean Stockwell does his little shuffle-dance-move, it all rushes out of you in one breath. This is it. The world is ending. And Roy Orbison is there.

2. A few frames into Mean Streets, Harvey Keitel's head hits the pillow, and you're wondering about the theological anxieties his statement embodies. Before you can make any progress, there's that overpowering kickdrum-snare intro, "Be My Baby" starts, and you are immersed in 1970's Little Italy in all its super-8 saturation. Ecstacy.

1. There a love for New York that can only grow inside someone who has never lived there. The complex and poweful mix of devastation/optimism that is acheived in the final shot of Allen's face in Manhattan is just beyond the scope of my descriptive abilities. However, even forgetting the incredibly emotive experience you've just had, that final shot of the skyline, as that slow, unbeatable portion of Rhapsody in Blue blares, has indeed done a disservice to people like me. He has encapsulated all my fantasies too perfectly: every ounce of my love for that city is expressed in that incredible combination of image and sound. Now he has assured me that I can never acheive what it is I long for in New York. He has created a fantasy too huge and overpowering for me to ever escape from. Every experience I have with that city from that moment on will be an attempt to recapture something that doesn't really exist. The way that weaves its way through the themes of the film is just incredible.

Kanal (1957)

2005-10-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

The second* in Wajda's WWII trilogy, this harrowing film follows a small company in the Polish resistance as they fight against the inevitable occupation. Though a formulaic war movie setup, the characters in this film are not the heroes of its American counterparts. The fighting is acknowledged from the beginning of the film as futile, and only for posterity. A record keeper reminds them consistently, that the records will be all that's left of them. The Polish people were hungry for heroes in the face of the invading Nazi's, but few emerged, and none do in this film.

The entire second half of the film follows the company's retreat through the filthy, excrement-filled sewers. It's not a great film to watch in the morning in your home: the screen is almost entirely black throughout. The cinematography is exquisite in most of the film, especially in the caged second act. The effect is claustrophobic and terrifying, climaxing in a horrific scene of civilians trampling each other into the muck to get away from Nazi gas (which is only in their imaginations) as one of the recently mad characters begins to recite excerpts of Dante's Inferno. When they reach the light, they are only greeted with snipers and more ruined city. The film ends questioning its classically heroic characters as mad, or noble, or both. Wajda doesn't shrink from the difficulty of discerning moral behavior in wartime, in fact raising these questions seems to be his primary goal. The mood evoked alone, however, is enough to call this film a great success.

*the first, A Generation, isn't yet available on DVD, but Criterion is releasing the whole trilogy later this year

City Lights (1931)

2005-10-07T00:13:00.000-07:00

Since we're being all "sentimental," I'll weigh in on the Keaton vs. Chaplin debate. How about they both win? I admit that Chaplin can be saccharine if one were to view multiple films in a short amount of time. But upon my viewing of City Lights tonite, I began to feel very strongly that if this was as far as film got, if this is all it ever accomplished, it would be enough. This has got to be one of the most consistently satisfying viewing experiences in every way.

Much is made of the ambivalence of the final shot: that famous smile. In my mind, I must confess, it has such a strong relationship with the closing shot of Manhattan that I have a hard time thinking about it objectively. I can't help but see it as a brilliant hinge-point, turning the viewer from the laughter to a reflection on what it is they have been laughing at. Look at a plot summary: a homeless man saves a millionare from committing suicide, and instead they get drunk, throw destructive parties, and get in fights. The homeless man is continually rejected and misunderstood. In the process, he falls in love with an impoverished blind girl. And where does the humor come from? Almost always from social class prejudices. The movie is about being poor, misunderstood, and rejected. I have to admit, in my mind (for my emotional well-being) The Tramp goes home with the Flower Girl, but I'm just not so sure he does in Chaplin's. The intersection of the reality we have been relentlessly laughing at and the fantasy we have constructed to help us ignore it is strained almost to a breaking point in that one brilliant facial expression. and we are left that way, to decide which to believe. I've already made my confession.

La Strada (1954)

2005-10-06T23:45:00.000-07:00

What do you say about La Strada that hasn't been said? Well, the often misguided Netflix description calls it a "powerful rumination on love and hate," but its nice that it ends on love. In the Criterion version, a wonderful introduction by Scorsese is included. One very perceptive observation was his attention to the Franciscan elements of the film, that every living creature deserves our compassion, even the most horrible ones. Though Zampano is not "loving" at the end of the film, he at least is able to grieve the lack of it in himself, and more importantly, we the viewers are moved to feel compassion for him through that wonderful closing shot. I'm very interested in a film that can do this without being false.

These Franciscan elements are clearly visible in Mean Streets, and Scorsese even mentions that Johnny Boy is partly based of The Fool of La Strada, the character that always has to say just one more thing. Probably some of the most exquisite photography to come out of Fellini, pre-8 1/2, just enough fantasy to keep his Neo-Realism bursting slightly at the seams. Screw all you people who hate Fellini.

A History of Violence (2005)

2005-10-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

I walked into Cronenberg's latest having seen most of the trailers, and my expectations were entirely subverted. The premise was intruiging to me, and so I expected most of the interesting thematic material to revolve around the "are you who you say you are?" pyschological side of the story. The concept of being married to someone blissfully for twenty years, only to find out later that they are someone vastly different is deeply disturbing, and taps into some very primal fears (that you can't really ever know or relate to anyone else. I used to have dreams when I was little that everyone else in the world, even my parents, were monsters).

Anyhow, I should have known better. These aspects of the film were almost beyond marginal to Cronenberg's true (usual) interests: the body as an enemy (or obstruction to our abilties to relate), and whether or not we are capable of truly controlling our animal desires. Cronenberg toys with us relentlessly, showing us scene after scene of brutal, realistic, and "intimate" (his words, on Fresh Air today here) violence. Each time our reaction to it cycles through responses of exhileration, horror, disenchantment, etc.

One thing I thought particularly well-executed was Cronenberg's intentional refusal to "carry" the viewer emotively. Many scenes that were standard fare narratively were labored and intentionally awkward by his direction, keeping us almost constantly in a state of reflection, and never letting us get swept away with the film, except perhaps in Tom Stall's first act of violence (which is meticulously crafted to be exhilerating). Being able to present what seems like cliched material, but keep the viewer entirely on edge and in a state of reflection on what they are seeing is really an impressive feat. The results are very effective, and it really does force reflection on the viewers concepts of violence and human nature. Especially effective was the satisfying but then shocking retaliation Stall's son has on the high school bully.

As Nate Bell observed after the film, watching a Cronenberg film can be kind of like watching the film of a religious fanatic, strongly convinced of a particular worldview and rarely straying from it. Whatever you think about his musings on human nature, the film as a work of art was quite effective, though not quite the most exciting thing I've seen recently. Aesthetically it was pretty disappointing to me (as compared to some of the images in Videodrome), but it definitely is worth your time.

Tattooed Life (1965)

2005-09-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

About halfway through this movie (after the perfectly choreographed opening sequence has faded from memory), you begin to wonder if Suzuki really directed it. Pretty standard yakuza-trying-to-escape-the-yakuza fare. A younger, artistic brother of a yakuza hitman kills another gangster to save his brother, and both must flee the vengeance of the family.

The older brother attempts to hide the fact that he is "White Fox Tetsu" and covered in tattoos. Eventually, as might be expected, Tetsu's yakuza past catches up and the younger brother pays for it. Suddenly Suzuki bathes the lone Tetsu in a theatrical spotlight, he drops his black robe to reveal a white one underneath, and rushes off to avenge his brother, armed only with an umbrella.

He eventually gets a sword from a one-armed swordsman, and what follows is possibly one of the most satisfying, incredibly stylish one-against-50 fight sequences i've seen. The half-bored reality Suzuki built utterly disintegrates, and the color palette explodes into the bright reds, blues and yellows of Tokyo Drifter. Finally we are on a sparse soundstage and luminescent rain pours on our hero. It's a ten minute finale worth waiting for, and one of Suzuki's best formal pieces.

Though nowhere as expressionistic as Branded to Kill, this film again reminds us of Suzuki's brilliance, borne out of a firm understanding of the possiblities of film, and a purposeful disregard of conventions. The Russian film-ethos, that the brain will find a connection between montaged images, seems to be partly Suzuki's methodology. Branded to Kill is not complex or convoluted the way a film like Mulholland Drive is complex (that is, narratively). It's merely built off the question: why not string a film together like this? What is gained emotively? Stylistically? Can the brain make sense of the experience? Obviously the answer is yes. If more filmmakers had the excitement about the medium that this man did, a mere "B genre director," well....there would be more good movies.

thanks, to the director who always reminds us:

Bed and Board (1970)

2005-09-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

The fourth in Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series is my least favorite so far, but still a good film. There's quite a lot of odd tongue and cheek formalistic humor with the soundtrack (big stings and dun dun dun's) and some slapstick. Interesting though, is the kind of chilling humor that can be really poingant: like when Antoine confronts Christine's father on the stairs in the brothel. It's handled with humor but the effect is sobering.

The visuals are just a joy, as they have been throughout the series. And despite whatever shortcomings, it really has quite a few excellent thoughts on married life.

The Silent Aesthetic Revolution

2005-09-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

Here's something. In my opinion (and I can have peculiar taste) there was a kind of silent, ineffable aesthetic peak reached in the 80's. Say, 85-89 it peaked. Three films that I think capture this are three films that thematically, could not be more different. And yet, despite their extremely diverse creators, somehow share this almost inexpressable aesthetic bond: Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (83), Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts (85), and Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (88). I'm not sure if there was a specific film stock in use during those years that could account for some of the similarities, but there is something of a stylistic thread that runs through these films, as if they've all tapped into something unspoken. Maybe slightly sterile? I'm really grasping at straws here, and maybe I'm just crazy. But I don't think so. It's also kind of a transluscent quality to the film, and light blue tinge. As well as, stylistically, lots of brightly colored lighting (blues and reds) used in odd places (particularly in ZOO and The Thin Blue Line), and mannered compositions.

Demme's Stop Making Sense (the Talking Heads concert film) could fall into the group too.

As quickly as it came, it went, and I really haven't seen movies that look like this anywhere recently. Even Greenaway's stuff looks different. What a brief, mysterious aesthetic era. I name it the Cameron Era.

The Last Laugh (1924)

2005-09-21T23:24:00.000-07:00

F.W. Murnau's visual sense may not be strictly expressionistic, but it comes close in The Last Laugh. Though its pointless to traffic in "firsts" (someone else was always first), this is one of the earliest commercial examples of handheld camera work. And it's certainly as dazzling to watch as it must have been in 1924. The opening shot, a vertical tracking shot through an elevator is just astonishingly beautiful, and visually it's only uphill from there. What appears to be a slightly slower frame rate really lends an otherwordly quality to most of the motion, especially in the "masterwork" tracking shots. Though Murnau uses montage in an entirely different way from Eisenstein and the Russians, his montage effects here are very beautiful (particularly where the revolving door is layered onto the shot of the doorman's head). Also, the sheer scale of the sets were incredible: numerous 12 or more story buildings, all built on a soundstage and shaded in art-deco style.

As scholars have noted, Murnau's camera does not see all, as the camera of the Russians did. He was no realist, but his more expressionistic compositions reveal the structure of the space as it is, they do not add to it. In this film, even more than in Sunrise, Murnau incorporates his character's pysche into that same pictorial space, and the camera is entirely a tool of exploration into him. The pathos created is genuine and completely engrossing. The studio-forced happy ending reads as just that, but hey, I was grateful to leave the doorman elsewhere than that bathroom. This film easily falls into my favorites of the silent era, and really is a "spectacle" in every positive sense of that word.

Stolen Kisses (1968)

2005-09-21T15:43:00.000-07:00

"Charm" is something I think of being exceedingly difficult to do well in film. Not only that, but many a terrible film is justified to the public by its "charm." I also shy away from wanting to describe something by one of my favorite filmmakers as "charming," as it seems almost pejorative in reference to film, communicating that the work is of no real importance. However, I really can't think of a better word to describe the third in Truffaut's Antoine Doneil series. Jean-Pierre Léaud's performance is easily the most entrancing aspect: "charming" you might say, but also bewildering and full of the anxious energy of youth. The film's autumnal visuals are equally hypnotic, bathing the action in bright orange faux-wood paneling.

Truffaut's films may seem to some (people without souls) unconscionably sentimental, but their deadpan humor and lack of apology for character behavior I think shields them from such accusations. It's a miracle that Truffaut could emerge out his critical background to create the body of films he did. Could contemporary "film criticism" create a filmmaker of his passion and energy? It seems hard to imagine.

thanks Bazin!

Welcome!

2005-09-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

I watch movies and then I write something about some of them. That's it!