The Picture Show

Apologies and Embarassment

2012-01-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

Let me apologize.

And not for not updating this blog more often -- I already apologized for that last time I was on here, a month ago, and I don't want this blog to just become a long string of contrition.

No, this is an apology over this blog's lack of content. Let me explain:

In the last month, as I've been working up the energy (and, primarily, nerve) to jump back on the horse and start writing again, I started looking back at some of my old entries. And I nearly had a panic attack.

I don't think I thought any of these entries were particularly great when I wrote them, but now they seem especially dunderheaded -- clumsily written pontifications by a writer who has stolen most of his good ideas from much better writers. My only excuses are to say that I'm still young (only 21) and fairly stupid (a description I don't believe merits an age based justification) -- so to anyone who might stumble across this blog, as you stumble through the old posts, please keep in mind they're written by someone with more enthusiasm than intelligence or talent...and that that somebody is trying (but not promising) to do better.

That's all for now. Tomorrow I'll be back with a killer (pun! pun!) review.

I'm Back!

2011-12-01T06:50:00.000-08:00

Well, sort of...

I'm sure you regular readers of The Picture Show (well, assuming there are regular readers out there...I mean, this is my own blog, and I can't even keep it updated...) have been wondering "What the heck happened to that opinionated guy who didn't know what he was talking about?" To all nine of you, I can only say:

Life.

I got busy. Busy with schoolwork, busy with various bric a brac, and in the previous six months or so, particularly busy with my own film that I was working on, a 20 minute short. Maybe someday I'll write about it here -- I might even post it.

Anyway, suffice to say, I got busy enough that certain things that were eating up time and energy just had to go on the back burner. This blog foremost among them.

Now I think I'm finally starting to figure out how to balance my time and energy...and as the title suggests, I have every intention of getting back to work.

Just not right away.

Starting in 2012, at least, I'll be getting back to posting here fairly regularly -- perhaps even sooner. (One of the benefits of being a film student is that I have to write my fair share of papers -- which means a fair number of intellectually pretentious essays coming in the near future!) So don't worry -- I'm not dead, I haven't disappeared. This blog will be getting up on its feet again, soon enough.

At least, as soon as I can find the time...

Le Samourai (1967)

2010-12-21T11:17:00.000-08:00

Le Samourai is a thriller stripped down to the bare essentials. Its actors embody archetypes instead of playing characters; its dialogue is sparse and terse; it foregoes exposition for observation. Most thrillers like to hit us with a procession of action sequences. Le Samourai is less interested in violence than in mood; its pace is steady, like a ticking time bomb.

The plot is simplicity itself. Jef Costello (Alain Delon) is a professional hit man who, in the movie’s first act, carries out a contract killing with perfect ease, establishing an airtight alibi and leaving no trace. Almost no trace; Jef is seen by a pianist (Caty Rosier) at the bar where the murder occurred, and finds himself in a police lineup. The prickly police superintendent (Francois Perier) can’t make the charge stick, but he has a feeling about Jef, a sixth sense; his men keep on Jef’s tail, watch his movements. Jef’s arrest has also prompted nervousness in his employers. They fear that the police might be able to get at them through Jef, and so Costello finds himself hunted by both sides…

You can already see what Hollywood (certainly modern Hollywood) would have done with this story. There would have been a procession of chases and escapes; Jef would be a conflicted character, with a loving woman by his side; the music would be pounding and ominous. What’s remarkable about Le Samourai is the way that director Jean-Pierre Melville keeps the temperature down. Melville’s film operates at a low, consistent simmer, instead of a constant boil. While Melville is clearly paying homage to the American gangster films of the 1930s and the film noirs of the 1940s (Delon goes through most of the movie dressed like Humphrey Bogart), he does not bring with him the fast pace of those American crime films.

Here is a thriller almost entirely uninterested in the routine elements of the genre. The occasional spurts of violence, while effective, are brief and perfunctory, not lavished upon. Instead of wisecracks and repartee, we get almost deafening silence; Jef hardly ever speaks, and when he does, his voice is flat and terse. Jef himself remains fairly sketchily drawn, as do most of the characters in the film. Melville is not interested in personalities here – he wants types. There's the vile gang boss (only seen in two scenes), the mysterious witness, the faceless cops. As Jeff, Alain Delon’s face embodies only one expression, passivity; it’s impossible to tell what’s going on behind his eyes – his face becomes a mask, as inexpressive as the trench coat he wears. He has a girlfriend, yes, but both he and the movie seem to pay her little mind. Jef only seems to care about her as a means to an alibi. The only character who emerges as a human being is the superintendent, a hardnosed policeman perfectly willing to break the rules to get results.

Melville, then, is not interested in exploiting the usual genre trappings – he utilizes them, hangs his story around them, but doesn’t play them up the way a more conventional (and lesser) director would. What interests Melville is the parts of crime films we don’t normally see – the procedure underlying the surface tension. The opening forty minutes detail, to an exacting degree, the process by which Jef prepares for the murder – stealing a car, changing the license plates, acquiring a gun, establishing his alibi, ect. Melville is attentive to every little detail. He wants us to focus on the cracked linoleum in Jef’s low rent kitchenette, to listen to the noise of the subway trains, to experience the police bugging of Jef’s apartment in real time. If Melville doesn’t create particularly vivid characters, perhaps it is because he doesn’t want us to identify with a third party – he wants us to feel that we are experiencing this story, that we are Jeff, watched and followed and hunted.

Seeing Le Samourai for the first time last night, I was vividly reminded of Anton Corbijn’s The American from earlier this year, starring George Clooney as a professional assassin who hides out in a small village. The American didn’t find appreciation among mass audiences in America, who found it dull and lifeless. I imagine they would think the same thing of Melville’s film. Le Samourai is a quiet, terse movie; there is no flab here, no wasted moments, no padding. It is as lean and efficient as its main character.

Glenn Erickson's "DVD Savant" Review of Le Samourai - http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1775samo.html

Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" Review of Le Samourai - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F19970608%2FREVIEWS08%2F401010337%2F1023

A Night at the Opera (1935)

2010-12-20T14:23:00.001-08:00

Ever since I was young, I’ve loved the Marx Brothers. I responded to the Marxes with the same fervor I responded to the work of Lewis Carroll, the early films of Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles), Monty Python, the work of the ZAZ boys (Airplane!) and the “early, funny” films of Woody Allen (Bananas). Still today, there’s something liberating about the Marx Brothers’ willingness to be silly for silliness’ sake, to mix slapstick and surrealism, legitimate wit and groan inducing puns. The Marx Brothers weren’t just silly; they were aggressively, anarchically silly.

A Night at the Opera is sometimes listed as the best of their films. I prefer their last three Paramount films – Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup – but really, trying to select one out of several classic Marx Brothers films is like trying to single out a single Bob Clampett cartoon; they’re of a piece. A Night at the Opera, it's true, is “tamer” than their later Paramount films; here, at least, we have something resembling a plot, albeit a sketchy one. The Brothers aren’t quite as anarchic here as they were in, say, Duck Soup. Under the aegis of MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg, they were made more likeable, given pallid romantic leads to support. (In this case, Kitty Carlisle and Alan Jones.)

But this is splitting hairs. A Night at the Opera still proves a wonderful showcase for the Brothers – now only three, having lost Zeppo (who typically played the “nice young man” part that Jones is filling). Chief among the film’s virtues is the fact that it gives the brothers a good title for their lunacy. Who could think of a more pompous, sanctimonious institution than the opera, so nobly represented by sputtering Sig Rumann and imperious Margaret Dumont? (I can think of only one, the Church; it’s too bad the Marx Brothers never did a “religious comedy”, ala Life of Brian.) The Marx Brothers, like Monty Python, were always at their best when they were given a serious target to play against (think of Duck Soup, a silly satire of fascism and war). In A Night at the Opera, they certainly get it. The film’s final act, as the brothers destroy a performance of Il Trovatore, is fall-down funny.

There are numerous other comic highlights. A Night at the Opera is much more carefully structured than some of their earlier films (the plot of Horse Feathers is “the Marx Brothers go to a college, and insanity ensues"), but there’s still enough room in the proceedings for Groucho, Harpo and Chico to do what they do best – make a shambles. There’s the contract negotiation scene (“You can’t fool me – there ain’t no sanity clause!”); there's the stateroom bit; there’s perhaps Groucho’s best introduction in film – as Margaret Dumont waits impatiently for him at a restaurant, she suddenly realizes that the gentleman laughing noisily with a beautiful woman at the table directly behind her is Groucho himself!

Each of the Marx Brothers gets at least one standout bit. Groucho, of course, is a walking one liner machine, so picking out one particular moment is ultimately a matter of personal taste. I’ve always loved his admonition to his carriage driver – “Hey, you! I told you to slow that nag down! On account of you I almost heard the opera!” Chico gets one wonderful, insane speech, posing as a foreign dignitary, where he describes how he and his cohorts arrived on America’s shores. (“Now I tell you how we fly to America! The first time we started we got-a half way there, when we run out a gasoline, and we gotta go back! Then I take-a twice as much gasoline! This time we’re just about to land, maybe three feet, when what do you think: we run out of gasoline again! And-a back-a we go again to get-a more gas!”) Harpo has less to do in this film – maybe his particular brand of lunacy was just too surreal for MGM – but he remains one of the screen’s great mimes, and there’s a magic moment when he drops his clown act and plays a harp solo of astonishing beauty. (Some complain about Chico’s piano solos and Harpo’s harp breaks, but I agree with Glenn Erickson – they’re kind of nice to have as a breather, a lull before the jokes start again.)

I know, I know: a review that just lists a movie’s funniest jokes is more or less useless, but comedies are ultimately the hardest movies to write about, because either you laugh or you don’t. I laughed a lot during A Night at the Opera. No, it doesn’t have quite the insane perfection of Duck Soup; yes, the pallid, sub-Busby Berkeley musical numbers can get annoying. (In the film’s defense, A Night at the Opera’s young lovers are arguably less irritating than in some of the earlier pictures. Alan Jones is bland but agreeable, and Kitty Carlisle, stuck playing “the girl”, is cute and charming – one wishes Groucho would try to steal her away from Jones.) But A Night at the Opera can, for sheer laughs, go toe-to-toe with any film for the title of “funniest film ever made.”

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)

2010-12-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

It’s been said that the most beautiful music in the world is also the saddest. Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (English: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) is like that. With this film, which won the Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or in 1964, Demy fashions nothing less than a masterpiece, a film which manages to combine the florid, even flamboyant aesthetics of the classic Hollywood musical with a new maturity and poignancy. It’s less a movie than an emotional experience; the film works the way that all great music does – on an emotional level, on a gut level.

The film’s first shot is a beautiful overheard view of passerby in the town of the title; it’s a rainy day, and as water drips down onto the streets, we watch a ballet of open umbrellas move in colorful patterns underneath the opening titles. The passerbies just miss each other, don't acknowledge one another in their scurry. This opening shot will be an omen of how the rest of the film is to play out.

We are introduced to Guy (Nino Castlenuovo), who works in a gas station, a man of buoyant, youthful energy. As he talks to his fellow mechanics in the locker room – about how he’s going on a date tonight, to the theater – we notice almost immediately that he expresses himself not through dialogue, but through song. Indeed, there is no spoken dialogue in the entirety of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg; everything is sung, in the style of an operetta. While this might seem like a distracting technique, it is one we quickly grow used to. It immediately heightens the emotional state of the film; we are cut free of the tethers of reality, of plain words and traditional dialogue.

Guy’s beloved is Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve, radiantly beautiful), whose mother owns the umbrella store in town. (Hence the title.) Genevieve and Guy are young and in love – very passionate, a little foolhardy, maybe even a little foolish. As they dance through the Cherbourg streets at night, they sing to one another about their plans for the future – how they will marry, how they will have children, how they will be happy together forever. The operatic quality of Michel Legrand’s glorious score – its willingness to stretch, even overstretch, toward florid emotional climaxes – meshes perfectly with the characters; these are just two kids, who probably see themselves as classical lovers in the Shakespearean tradition. Then Guy must leave, to serve a two year tour of duty in the Algerian War – and the lovers part on a train platform, Genevieve tearfully singing that she will “wait forever” for him to return.

Beyond this, I will say little more – because one of the great pleasures of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is the way its story twists and turns in surprising ways. (Seriously – if you haven’t seen the film, go out and rent it, but don't read on.) In its opening act, Les Parapluies looks and feels like it’s going to be an homage to the Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and 50s, along the lines of Demy’s later, wonderful The Young Girls of Rochefort. We have singing garage mechanics, we have the heedless young love of our protagonists, and most of all we have the décor, which utilizes bright colors and pastels that might have been considered too florid by Vincente Minnelli. As the film progresses, however, and Genevieve’s sense of separation from Guy grows, a melancholy begins to pervade the film – a melancholy Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly never had to face.

A surprising maturity begins to creep in, too. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, which began as a merry romp, demonstrates wisdom about the capriciousness of love that is startling. The character of a rival suitor for Genevieve, Roland, is introduced; but unlike in the classical tradition, he is not a conniving stooge, but a decent man, attractive and gentle, who legitimately loves Genevieve. (Moreover, it is revealed that he himself had a spurned love affair; Genevieve is HIS second choice as well.) Les Parapluies refuses to turn its story of a love deeply felt and then lost into a two dimensional parable; it gives all its characters humanity – which only makes its climax more wrenching.

I know, I know – I’m being too vague. But Les Parapluies is a film that demands to be seen fresh. Having seen the film, I will offer only this question: where does the real tragedy of the story lie? I would argue that in Les Parapluies, the villain (if there is one) is not the rival suitor Roland or even the French government that takes Guy away, but life itself. Guy and Genevieve were once in love, madly in love, passionately in love; maybe some of that love still exists today. But life has taken its course; they are grown adults, and their lives have taken different (and not altogether unhappy) paths. Who are they to say that what happened was wrong?

Glenn Erickson's "DVD Savant" Review of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1168para.html

Roger Ebert's Review of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040402/REVIEWS/404020306/1023

My "Best of 2010" List...

2010-12-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

...is not ready yet. Nor shall it be for awhile.

I know, I know: as we're nearing the end of December, this is the time when everybody in their mother who has a film blog/film website/job as a reviewer starts unveiling their lists of the "10 best films of the year". I am afraid, however, that my list is limited because of availability. Being that I'm a college kid who lives far, far away from a major city, there are a number of big titles -- Black Swan, I Love You Philip Morris, 127 Hours -- that I haven't gotten a chance to see yet, and a number of interesting titles -- Winter's Bone, Solitary Man -- that I should hopefully soon be catching up with on video. I'll be doing up my list sometime early next year, before the Oscars.

The Fighter (2010)

2010-12-18T11:22:00.000-08:00

If you’ve seen the trailers for David O. Russell’s The Fighter, you may feel like you’ve already seen the movie. Another movie about an underdog who triumphs against the odds? Really? I myself felt some trepidation walking into the theater. Could Russell and his (admittedly insanely talented) cast possibly bring anything new to this story? The answer, I must admit with some astonishment, is that yes, they have. It’s being sold as an inspirational “true story” – which it certainly is – but The Fighter is less interested in boxing and sports moving clichés than in observing its characters, and painting, with very careful and intimate strokes, the social environment that has created them.

In a way, The Fighter’s title is a bit of a misnomer. The film is about “Irish” Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg), yes, but not exclusively; it could just as accurately have been titled “The Family”, because Russel’s drama is foremost about the various relationships within the profoundly dysfunctional Ward clan. The family is presided over by Alice (Melissa Leo), a chain smoking force of nature. Alice’s older son, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) was once a rising boxer, “the pride of Lowell”, but since the days when he punched out "Sugar Ray" Leonard he’s degenerated into crack addiction - an HBO camera crew is filming him for a documentary on drug use. Dicky has been training his half brother Mickey, and Alice has been managing his career; but while they’re well meaning, they have serious drawbacks, notably their habit of signing Mickey up for fights he can’t possibly win. When Mickey starts dating local bartender Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams), he gradually begins to realize how much his family ties are hurting, not helping his boxing career; a schism is beginning to appear in the proudly inclusive family…

I know, I know: this sounds just like any other sports movie, any other boxing movie, any other “inspirational true story”. What’s a little astonishing about The Fighter, then, is the way that Russell makes it all feel new, the way the film grabs us with its raw immediacy. In part, it’s a matter of focus. A lot of sports dramas like to overhype; a football game suddenly becomes the occasion for stirring orchestral music and overripe grandstanding. What’s remarkable about The Fighter is that it manages to keep its focus so intimate. Russell’s movie is not interested in the things normal sports movies are interested in, the “big fight” and the training montages and the inspirational speeches (although it has all those ingredients). It’s much more interested in the family story, the human side that most sports movies studiously avoid. This is a movie that is just as fascinated by – perhaps more fascinated by – the little moments; the way Alice tries to stage her entrance in the gym for the HBO cameras (“Do you wanna do another take?”), the embarrassing first date between Mickey and Charlene where he takes her to see a foreign film so that he can avoid the hometown crowd (“I hadda f_ckin’ read it,” she teases him good naturedly), the verbal sparring between Alice and her brood of heavily coiffed daughters.

Coming expecting to see just a typical boxing movie, we’re surprised by how deeply we get involved with the characters. Undoubtedly, this owes in large part to Russell’s sureness of casting. Mark Wahlberg as Mickey has in some ways the hardest part; Mickey is an understated character, the quiet glue whose boxing career helps hold this dysfunctional family together, compared to the vivid types that surround him. A great deal of the drama centers around the fact that in his family’s eyes, Mickey is almost an accessory; his career seems more important to his mother than he himself. Playing such an understated character is a thankless task, but Wahlberg (who trained for four years prior to playing the role) more than rises to it. This is maybe the best work he’s done since his stellar performance in Scorsese’s The Departed. He underplays beautifully, letting the script and the character do most of the work for him.

The fireworks reside in the characters around Mickey, and in the actors surrounding him. If nothing else, The Fighter should be picking up a few Oscar nominations in the supporting performance categories; there’s a lot of rich work going on here. Amy Adams, typically so bubbly and innocent, is fully convincing as bar girl Charlene, who drinks too much and swears like a sailor but who has a good heart underneath it all and wants Mickey to split off from his loony family before they do him serious damage. Melissa Leo is spectacularly nasty as Alice (as Roger Ebert has written, she’s the kind of woman who likes the way she looks posing with a smoking cigarette), but what’s especially astonishing is the way that she manages to find a heart within Alice’s ruthless ambition, to make her more than just the “trashy career mom.” And Christian Bale is nothing short of astonishing as Dicky Eklund. Audiences used to seeing Bale as dark, brooding types might not recognize him here; as Dicky, he’s all loose, cocaine fueled energy. Bale’s work is doubly fascinating because of the heart he manages to invest in the character. You can’t help sort of loving Dicky, in spite of the fact that he’s a motor mouthed, drug addicted screw-up. He’s got an infectious good nature that makes him impossible to dislike. It’s an incredible performance – Bale manages to more or less steal the film.

What’s perhaps most interesting about The Fighter is the way that it manages to insert humor and humanity into its story. A lot of sports dramas feel kind of sanctimonious, like a sermon – movies that are “good for you”. The Fighter is surprisingly willing to indulge in moments like the one where Dicky, learning his mother is outside the local crack house, jumps out a second story window into a dumpster. There’s a lot of humor in the film – the small audience I saw it with laughed a lot – and it, I think, points to what Russell and his cast are trying to do with this material. They don’t want it to feel like “just another sports movie”; they want to get inside of the material, so that when Mickey does get to that big title bout, it feels like a real emotional conclusion, not just a generic plot development.

Blake Edwards (1922-2010)

2010-12-17T20:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve read that Blake Edwards’ friends nicknamed him “Blackie”, because of his often overcast moods. In the interviews I’ve seen with him, he comes across as a kind of jovial crank, an eternal pessimist but one full of good humor, and certainly full of good stories. Over the course of his long, long career as a writer and director (he got his first big break helping to write Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast, and directed his last film, Son of the Pink Panther, in 1993), he worked with some of Hollywood’s biggest names – Audrey Hepburn, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Cary Grant – and married one of them, Julie Andrews. (They made several movies together, perhaps the most notable being Victor/Victoria – the one where Andrews plays a “woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman” – which earned both Andrews and Edwards Oscar nominations.)

His two most fruitful and famous collaborations were probably with two men, Henry Mancini and Peter Sellers – although their respective relationships couldn’t have been more different. Edwards discovered Mancini when the latter wrote the marvelous theme for the Peter Gunn TV series, which Edwards had created; the two men remained lifelong collaborators, and lifelong friends. Not quite the same could have been said for Peter Sellers. Sellers and Edwards, of course, created the immortal character Inspector Clouseau in the earliest (and by far the funniest) “Pink Panther” films, The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark. The two men collaborated on three more Panther features (The Return of the Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Revenge of the Pink Panther), as well as The Party, a seriously underrated slapstick comedy in the style of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. But while Sellers and Edwards gelled as creative partners – they both had a love of old fashioned physical comedy, for one thing – their personal relationship was rockier; Sellers, hardly the world’s easiest man, had titanic rows with Edwards, and there were times during the shooting of The Party when the two literally relayed messages to each other via a go between. (“Tell Mr. Sellers to move a few feet to the left.”)

The “Pink Panther” films – particularly A Shot in the Dark, which is some kind of comedic masterpiece – are probably what Edwards will be best remembered for, but although some of his later films degenerated into tired reiterations of old slapstick routines, he was far more than just a “comedy director”. It was he who was perhaps most responsible for creating the image that we think of today as Audrey Hepburn by casting her in her signature role, Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He directed several musicals, made Bo Derek famous in 10, infamously got his wife Andrews to bare her breasts in S.O.B. He directed Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, a harrowing examination of alcoholism.

Blake Edwards was 88 when he died December 15th, 2010.

Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)

2010-12-16T13:44:00.001-08:00

Seeing Laputa: Castle in the Sky (English title: Castle in the Sky) for the first time several days ago, I was filled with some of the same excitement as when I first saw Star Wars at the age of seven. What an enchanting, enthralling and magical film it is! I don’t care if it is an animated film; Laputa is easily one of the most visually stunning and viscerally exciting action films I’ve ever seen. This is the rare film that both children and adults should be able to embrace equally; it tells its story with such vigor and good humor that I have difficult imagining anyone NOT embracing it.

The comparisons to Star Wars jumped into my mind almost right from the beginning of Laputa, and I think they’re apt. I have no idea whether director Hayao Miyazaki was influenced by George Lucas’ picture, but the similarities are more than skin deep. Just as Star Wars opens with the abduction of a royal Princess aboard a star cruiser, Laputa begins with the attempted abduction of a young princess aboard a flying airship. In both films, the princess finds an unlikely champion in the form of a young man with father issues who has never traveled far from home (in Star Wars, it’s farm boy Luke Skywalker; in Laputa, it’s young miner’s assistant Pazu). And just like Star Wars, Laputa mostly eschews lengthy exposition; from its very opening minutes, it simply plunges us into its story, and expects us to keep up.

In doing so, we are helped by the fact that Miyazaki’s film is so visually arresting. Whenever we occasionally, in the first act of Laputa, might start to become a little confused, we are kept engaged by the visually stunning nature of the images before us. Remember the old science fiction/adventure pulp magazines of the 1940s, with their covers featuring lurid air fortresses and labyrinthine city complexes? Laputa is chock full of those sorts of images. (I was blown away by the film, and I say that having watched it on a reasonably crummy television set; I can’t imagine what it would be like to see this movie on a big screen.) Because Laputa is an animated film rather than live action, it can pull off this kind of ridiculous scale – an airship that seems to go on for miles, an entire floating island consumed by tree roots. Complementing the lavish visuals comes some of the most exciting action sequences you’ll ever see. Thanks to the limitless potential of animation, Miyazaki and his animators are not bound by the limits of reality the way live action filmmakers are (or should be, in my opinion). Miyazaki concocts in Laputa some of the most exciting action set pieces I’ve ever seen, on the grandest possible scale.

That the film works as it well as it does is also certainly a testament to the strength and simplicity of its storytelling. In Laputa, Miyazaki creates a complex fantasy world incorporating disparate elements (highly advanced robotic technology mixed with Jules Verne-esque flying devices mixed with old fashioned mining towns), but he’s wise to keep his human story fairly simple. The whole film emotionally revolves around the bond between Pazu and Sheeta, who are such winning, adorable heroes that one would have to be heartless not to root for them. The movie also gets a lot of mileage out of a band of “pirates” led by matriarch Dola (she keeps telling her sons/henchmen to call her “captain” instead of “mother”) who help Pazu and Sheeta on their quest and provide plenty of comic relief.

Readers might be shocked to learn this is my first direct experience with the work of the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, who is considered perhaps the modern master of animation, and certainly of Japanese animation (his other films, including Spirited Away, Ponyo and My Neighbor Totoro, have had a healthy life across the globe). Having adored Laputa, I’m sincerely sorry I haven’t gotten around to seeing Miyazaki’s films sooner. This, Miyazaki’s third film, is an utter delight, a rip roaring adventure tale with visual splendor to spare.

Rebecca (1940)

2010-12-12T17:01:00.000-08:00

Rebecca was the first American film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, produced under the aegis of David O. Selznick. The collaboration was not a happy one; Hitchcock and Selznick had radically opposed working methods, temperaments and tastes, and seemed to spend the entire production in a kind of endless conflict. The end result was a film that feels uncharacteristic for both. Rebecca lacks the flippant fast pace and cheeky humor of Hitchcock’s earlier British thrillers, but it’s also more moody and cerebral than most of Selznick’s output. That tension that exists in Rebecca – the fact that it’s not quite the complete vision of Hitchcock or Selznick – has always made it a somewhat controversial title for scholars, who don’t quite seem to know what to think of it, but for this reviewer, it is (regardless of the ego clashes involved in making it) a terrific movie, a kind of modern fairytale with very strange sexual undertones.

The fairy tale allusions are apparent right from the film’s opening credits sequence; the titles play over storybook images of a forest glade, shrouded in fog. It’s a dreamlike atmosphere, supported by Franz Waxman’s lush, romantic score, and that atmosphere carries over into the film’s opening scenes, as a disembodied narrator tells us of how “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderlay again”, and we are introduced (via miniature) to Manderlay, a castle that looks like a cross between “Beauty and the Beast” and Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. (It’s not exactly stretching to speculate that Orson Welles might have seen Rebecca before directing Citizen Kane, and been inspired by it.)

Manderlay is home to Maxim de Winter (Laurence Oliver), who in the custom of all gothic romances is brooding, mysterious and haunted. His first wife, the worldly Rebecca, recently died in a boating accident; as we first meet him, he is looking over the precipice of a cliff in Monte Carlo, apparently considering jumping off. He’s stopped by the cry of a young woman – the heroine of the film, played by Joan Fontaine. It was her disembodied voice that we heard narrating the opening of the film. Throughout the narrative, she will remain an oddly disembodied presence – we never do learn her first name, and de Winter only refers to her as “darling”.

The heroine is currently functioning as a “paid companion” for the stereotypically matronly Mrs. Van Hopper (“I didn’t know companionship could be bought,” de Winter deadpans) but after her first, dramatic encounter with “Maxim”, as she begins to call him, she finds herself seeing a great deal of de Winter, who eventually tells her he loves her and proposes marriage. But does he really love her? One of the interesting mysteries of Rebecca – the element that keeps it fascinating after so many years and so many viewings – is the question of just how Max feels about the young heroine. Joan Fontaine is certainly a beautiful woman, but there’s a strange suggestion that Max really isn’t interested in her as such. In an early scene where they have breakfast, he tells her to eat her eggs “like a good girl” – as if, in the words of historian/critic Leonard Leff, he’s more her father than her lover. Throughout the narrative, Max constantly treats the heroine more like a little girl than a woman; he kisses her chastely on the forehead, tells her to never “wear black satin and pearls”, and when they watch visitors depart Manderlay, he waves her hand for her, like a father would do with a child.

Regardless of what his real feelings are for her, de Winter marries the heroine and brings her to Manderlay. It is here that the fairy tale allusions become really apparent. Manderlay in is a mysterious tangle of hallways and sea coast and sumptuous architecture, too grand to be believed. The heroine is clearly out of her depth here; she scurries fearfully around the house’s servants, particularly the icy Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who is like the evil stepmother of old fables, constantly plotting against the heroine, luring her further and further into a web of lies and deceit.

Hitchcock himself was never particularly happy with Rebecca; he claimed to Francois Truffaut that it was not a “Hitchcock picture”, citing the lack of humor and the meddling of producer David O. Selznick. The collaboration between the two was certainly not easygoing. Hitchcock, who was undoubtedly the star of the British cinema of the 1930s, came to work at the Selznick studios because he was eager to take advantage of Hollywood’s superior technological capabilities. What he found, however, was that that technology came at a price; Selznick was a control freak who had an incorrigible habit of blitzkrieg-ing directors with memos, obsessing over every detail, in essence trying to direct the picture by proxy.

Their collaboration may have been tense, but it (in my opinion) bore healthy fruit, and both men arguably gained something from it. What Hitchcock provided for Selznick was a strong directorial vision, and a gift for visual brilliance that none of Selznick’s “contract directors” like Victor Fleming or Sam Wood could match. Rebecca is full of wonderful Hitchcock visuals: Maxim’s confession scene, as the camera tracks an invisible Rebecca across a room; tracking shots stalking the heroine through Manderlay; the beautiful sequence where Mrs. Danvers shows the heroine Rebecca’s bedroom - one of the great erotic moments in the movies, as Mrs. Danvers runs her hand through Rebecca’s nightgown. (“Have you ever seen anything so delicate? Look – you can see my hand through it!”)

What Selznick provided for Hitchcock was an apparatus – Rebecca is a far more polished production than any of Hitchcock's British thrillers – and also a greater sense of story and character. The conventional wisdom (especially espoused by Leff) is that Selznick, on Rebecca, pushed Hitchcock to greater depth, which is not entirely accurate; just three years later Hitchcock, all on his own, was producing and directing Shadow of a Doubt, arguably one of the deepest of all his films. But certainly Selznick emphasized the idea of a clean, linear narrative to Hitchcock; certainly he pushed Hitchcock to focus on smaller character details, to give both the actors and the audience some room to breathe. There’s a moment, as the heroine enters Manderlay and meets Mrs. Danvers for the first time, when she nervously drops her glove. It’s a small moment, but a telling one, the sort of nice character beat that Hitchcock’s plot driven British thrillers would have breezed over.

The least interesting stretch of Rebecca is probably the last act, which in many respects is the most similar to Hitchcock’s early British thrillers. While buoyed by the presence of George Sanders as Rebecca’s unscrupulous cousin Favell (“I’ve a feeling that before the day is over someone is going to make use of that old-fashioned but somewhat expressive term ‘foul play’”), this whole section takes us away from the dreamlike haze of Manderlay. The film becomes less lyrical; much of the mystical power of the movie’s central sequences dies away, and what we’re left with is more or less standard suspense movie plotting – a terrible secret, a tension laden police inquest, a seedy blackmailer. If Rebecca eventually “descends” into formula, however, we’re willing to forgive it – for the near hysterical pitch of Fontaine’s performance as the neurotic heroine, for the dark magic of Manderlay, and for the iciness of Mrs. Danvers.

David Cairns' Shadowplay: Mr and Mrs de Winter - http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/mr-and-mrs-de-winter/

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

2010-12-11T10:58:00.000-08:00

To even make a movie like Dancer in the Dark might be considered, in the modern commercial climate, a foolhardy act. Who exactly is this film for? Here is a revisionist musical with a score by the Icelandic artist Bjork, shot by director Lars von Trier is a gritty, grimy digital format, which tells a story so openly melodramatic that had it been made in another time period it would have starred Lillian Gish. It is a movie that seems to wantonly defy conventional notions of “commerciality”, that seems to willfully ignore what we expect on the screen. Audiences will either find the whole thing too ridiculous and outrageous to take, or they will find themselves moved on a scale they didn’t think possible. I belong to the latter crowd. Dancer in the Dark (which rightfully created a sensation when it premiered at Cannes in 2000) is an audacious mixture of different elements – musical, melodrama, Dogme ’95 – that shouldn’t go together, but which coalesce here with a kind of beautiful, musical symmetry.

“Musical” is the key term here. Dancer in the Dark contains several musical sequences written by Bjork, who also stars in the film as Selma, a Czechoslovakian immigrant living in the United States in the early 1960s. Selma’s life is hardly sunshine and roses; the factory in which she works – indeed, the area in which she lives – is grimy and rather hostile (never before has digital video been used to make a city look so inhospitable and ugly as here), the hours she works are long and the work tedious, and Selma has discovered that she is slowly, by degrees, going blind – a condition she may have passed on to her young son.

In the midst of all this hardship, the only solace and escape Selma finds is through music – and specifically through Hollywood musicals. The first scene of the film shows her practicing to play the lead role in a local production of “The Sound of Music”; she often attends a local movie theater with her friend and co-worker Cathy (Catherine Deneuve) to see Busby Berkeley films, and throughout the story, whenever life becomes too harsh, she retreats into a mental world of song and dance. Von Trier shoots the musical sequences in Dancer in the Dark differently than the rest of the film; the camera positions become more fixed, the angles more stylized, and the colors become more saturated. (I have to confess that I found the musical numbers the least successful aspect of Dancer in the Dark – they’re more interesting in the abstract than they are in reality – but that may have something to do with my indifference to the music of Bjork.)

Right off the bat, let’s get one thing straight: while Dancer in the Dark is filmed in something resembling a “documentary aesthetic” – grainy, handheld digital camera, with constant use of zoom lenses – it is, in its storytelling, a floridly melodramatic movie. As Roger Ebert mentions in his review of the movie, a heroine who is slowly going blind is the sort of plotline that might’ve been widely accepted back in the days when D.W. Griffith was still directing films. By the early 1960s, when Dancer in the Dark ostensibly takes place (the movie doesn’t make much attempt to clarify when it is set, and indeed it wasn’t until after the film that I became aware it didn't take place in present day), such a story device was more than a little old fashioned, and I’d imagine that, to modern audiences, it could appear downright ludicrous. All throughout, Dancer in the Dark is a film that skates on the very edge of ludicrousness; without giving too much away, there are plot twists in the second and third acts of Von Trier’s film that are so openly, floridly theatrical that they fall apart on close examination.

And yet, as we’re watching it, Dancer in the Dark never seems ludicrous – it never seems ridiculous. Instead, Von Trier’s film is so immediate, so visceral, so heartbreaking, that we quickly give ourselves over to it, quickly find ourselves believing in it. (Or at least I did – I’ve certainly read dissenting opinions.) Most of the credit goes to the magnificent performance by Bjork. Aside from appearing in some music videos, she had never acted before, and indeed she has claimed in interviews that appearing in this film was such a taxing ordeal that she’ll never act again. If this is to be our only evidence of Bjork as an actress, then, it is a revelation: she is a complete natural, sincere and heartbreaking. Without her, the movie might have simply seemed like a silly soap opera; with her, it becomes an absorbing tragedy.

If I haven’t described the plot of Dancer in the Dark in great detail, it’s because this is above all a movie that demands to be experienced fresh, with as little foreknowledge as possible. Besides, if I were to describe in great detail what transpires in the last hour or so, it might just scare you off. Dancer in the Dark’s third act is one of the most emotionally draining of any film I’ve ever seen; on first viewing I thought maybe the movie was a tad too long, but have since revised my opinion, realizing that what I was reacting to was the fact that I’m just not used to seeing a movie that is this emotionally taxing and exhausting. Those who like downbeat movies will want to steer clear of Dancer in the Dark; I imagine they’ll find it tedious and unpleasant, and stumble away from the experience baffled, asking, “What the hell was all that about?” Those who have the patience – and the endurance – may find Von Trier’s film some kind of masterpiece, an emotional assault.

Roger Ebert's Review of Dancer in the Dark - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20001020/REVIEWS/10200302/1023

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

2010-12-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

Sleepy Hollow is a great looking movie with little to recommend it beyond its production design. It’s a film that, unfortunately, suffers from the same basic problems as much of Tim Burton’s work in the last ten plus years – namely, that it seems so interested in how its world looks, it forgets to tell a story, with characters about whom we care. Fans of flamboyant art direction will certainly find a lot to admire here; and connoisseurs of campy horror films may find themselves amused by the movie’s cheerful willingness to abandon anything resembling logic, to stretch for the heavens of Grand Guignol. For the rest of us, Sleepy Hollow ends up being a surprisingly dispirited and tired ride.

The film’s credits inform us that Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay is “Based on the story by Washington Irving”, but it would be more accurate to say that Sleepy Hollow is very “loosely inspired” by Irving’s classic American tale. Only the barest bones of the short story have been kept: Sleepy Hollow, a drowsy New England town, is haunted by the specter of the Headless Horseman, who rides a tremendous black horse and scours the countryside searching for his lost noggin. The original short story suggested, rather cheekily, that the Horseman was just a boogeyman, a figure of myth; Walker’s screenplay, however, makes the Horseman vividly real – as the story opens, he has taken at least three lives, lobbing off the heads of his victims in gruesome fashion. (Burton seems to take an almost fetishistic glee, throughout the film, in finding new and creative ways of decapitating people.) The murders have necessitated the arrival of Constable Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), who has come under fire in New York for his use of new scientific methods of crime solving.

Everything Sleepy Hollow has to offer as a cinematic experience is contained in its opening titles sequence, as Crane rides through gnarled, storybook woods to Sleepy Hollow and the credits seem to snake out of the early morning fog. The visuals of this opening scene – the foggy streets where pale faces peek out of darkened windows, the obscenely twisting trees, the Grimm’s Tale atmosphere – are arresting, but they will prove to be the only thing Sleepy Hollow has to offer. Burton has long been accused of being a director who seems more enamored of the worlds he creates than the stories he places in them, but Sleepy Hollow possibly marks the point in his career where that trend finally became a seriously detriment. Earlier Burton films like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands had simple, even sloppy narratives, it’s true, and they got most of their energy from their eye popping visuals; but they still felt engaged, as if Burton was enjoying going on this wild journey with these crazy characters, and wanted us to go along to.

In Sleepy Hollow, by contrast, one gets the serious feeling of a director going through the motions. Burton is clearly trying to ape the campy Hammer horror films of the 1970s – it’s fun to see Hammer veterans Christopher Lee and Michael Gough turning up in small parts – but what he doesn’t seem to realize is that the reason those cheesy horror films were often so funny was because of their earnestness. They wanted to be rip snorting horror tales, with lots of gore and guts and barely repressed sexuality. In Sleepy Hollow, everything feels like it has quotes around it; the film is a “horror movie”, with “gore” and “blood”. Watching it, we feel oddly dislocated. The movie doesn’t take itself seriously enough to work as a fright fest, but it’s also not quite loony enough to work as a spoof or homage in the vein of Young Frankenstein. What we’re left with instead is an oddly unsatisfying hodgepodge of tones.

The actors acquit themselves well enough. As Katrina Van Tassel, Ichabod’s love interest, Christina Ricci is exceedingly stiff (she seems to have been directed by Burton to do nothing - nothing – but look wide eyed, pale and vulnerable), but the town elders give Burton ample room to bring in some fine British character actors to spice things up: Richard Griffiths, Michael Gough, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Gambon and Ian McDiarmid manage to chew the scenery without ever quite going over the top, and Miranda Richardson is a hoot as the scheming Lady Van Tassel, who is not so demure as she appears. Johnny Depp also turns in solid work, playing Ichabod Crane as less a traditional leading man than a goofy fop, gangly and awkward. (One of the movie’s best gags is the effeminate manner in which Ichabod chops his way into the tree of the dead.) If there’s a problem with Depp’s performance, it’s that, much like in Burton and Depp’s later collaboration Alice in Wonderland, Depp’s tics aren’t really given a character to find root in. Ichabod Crane is an exceedingly two dimensional figure, and as such, Depp has little to do but add eccentricities. The same could be said for a movie as a whole. Burton and his designers manage to add a lot of clever visual flourishes into Sleepy Hollow (a tree that bleeds, a forbidding forest, a nighttime fog that snuffs out warning candles), but they can’t quite overcome the fact that the script they’re working with is awfully shallow.

Roger Ebert's Review of Sleepy Hollow - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19991119/REVIEWS/911190303

Hunger (2008)

2010-12-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

When Hunger premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, the screening encountered both walkouts and a standing ovation – an ovation, that is, by those members of the audience who were able to stand. Anyone who has seen the film will not be shocked that it had such a visceral effect. Director Steve McQueen’s (no relation to the actor) debut effort is a harrowing film that uncannily evokes the physical ordeal of its characters. Yet for such a visceral film, Hunger is remarkably subtle. Although it deals with highly political subject matter – the struggle between the British government and the I.R.A. – Hunger is not a polemic. It is an immersive experience, forcing us (in often excruciating detail) to see what its characters see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel.

The film dramatizes the “Irish hunger strike” of 1981, where a group of I.R.A. prisoners, led by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) protested the British government’s refusal to treat them as political prisoners by embarking on a fast that resulted in the deaths of ten men, Sands among them. One can easily see how this story might’ve been transposed into an easily digestible “triumph of the will” story – but Hunger is remarkable in the way it avoids easy pigeonholing as a Hollywood style biopic. While the film is ostensibly the story of Bobby Sands, he does not actually appear until about 20 minutes into the film, and is introduced almost as an extra. Up to then, we have primarily been following the stories of one of the prison guards, and of two other prisoners. When we first see Sands, we may think him as just one of many I.R.A. prisoners willing to give their lives for the cause. It is only gradually that we begin to understand his importance.

Hunger, then, neatly severs the conventional ties of the biopic – which usually follow the story of “one great man”. Indeed, Hunger is far less about following a narrative than about living within an environment. McQueen’s background as a video artist is evident in the way he often stubbornly holds shots, forcing us to watch in great detail, for example, as a starving striker tries futilely to catch a fly on his finger. The austerity of McQueen’s images – his deliberate slowing of pace, his focus on small movements, small details – is enhanced by the sound design. Hunger has virtually no score, and very little dialogue (with one major exception; more on that later). What this “reduction” of visual and aural “noise” does is focus our eyes and our ears. We are trained to observe small details, to live within this environment, instead of watching passively from the outside.

This focus on the immediate reality of the prisoner’s lives neatly bypasses making judgments. Hunger is clearly a political film, but it’s a credit to McQueen that, while he sides with Sands and the strikers, he does not make the British officials into simplistic goons. In one harrowing scene, as a group of riot geared policemen savagely beat the prisoners, McQueen’s camera captures one young recruit, weeping at the carnage he has helped instigate. The first character we meet in Hunger is a prison guard – for a time we think the film might be his story – and while he perpetuates horrific brutalities on the inmates of the prison, McQueen demonstrates the havoc – both physical and emotional – that those brutalities wreak in his own life.

Indeed, Hunger focuses – in almost monomaniacal fashion – on physical suffering. Early shots show a guard’s bloodied, bruised hands, being washed under a cold tap. Wounds will be an important visual and thematic motif throughout the film – both the wounds that people inflict upon others (the brutality of the guards), and the wounds people inflict on themselves (the horrifying sores that appear across Bobby’s body as his fast causes physical deterioration). Sometimes, the two go hand in hand – as in the prison guard, whose own life is torn apart by the violence he causes at work (every morning, he checks nervously under his car for a bomb).

The ultimate act of self wounding is expressed by Bobby Sands. There are obvious allusions to a Christ like martyrdom here— in one scene, Sands is carried unconscious, a towel wrapped around himself, in a manner that will make any astute viewer think of classic artistic representations of Jesus. As Sands wastes away, as his eyes hollow and his belly distends, we see that his life has become a kind of performance art; the only purpose of his existence is to bring attention to the Irish cause, and if he must die to do that, then so be it.

There’s an additional level of meaning, because the actor playing Sands, Michael Fassbender, went through the physical change himself. (A physician and dietician for Mr. Fassbender are both listed in the film’s credits.) As Bobby Sands used his life and body as an ultimate form of political art, Fassbender has done much the same – albeit under far less dire circumstances. The element of performance art is visible throughout the film, perhaps most vividly in a scene where Bobby is visited by an Irish priest. For a film with very little dialogue, it’s a significant moment: a 16 plus minute unbroken shot, as the two characters suss each other out, talk, argue the rights and wrongs of the cause. The priest feels that what Bobby is doing is illogical, even arrogant; he wants to make a name for himself, wants to die a martyr. Sands doesn’t argue the point; perhaps there is a selfish motivation in his plan. But for Sands, the ends justify the means. If this act of political theater is to be deadly – if it is to be his final “performance” – it makes little difference.

Roger Ebert's Review of Hunger - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090415/REVIEWS/904159995

Zouzou (1934)

2010-12-01T18:41:00.000-08:00

Now here’s an oddity. Zouzou is a French starring vehicle for the American dancer Josephine Baker, released in 1934. It’s a film that manages to pack in a little bit of everything: Busby Berkeley style dance numbers, a Renoir-esque social drama of lives on the fringe, broad comedy, and even a backstage musical story, all served with a dash of casual nudity and sexual perversity. The results are not always entirely successful – Zouzou often suffers from a whiplash effect, as it darts from one tone to another – but the film remains an interesting curiosity.

The story focuses (more or less) on the relationship between Zouzou (Josephine Baker) and Jean (Jean Gabin). They grew up together as children in a circus, and have always thought of each other as brother and sister, although the true parentage of each is never specified in the film. As they have grown older, however, Zouzou has begun to develop romantic feelings for Jean – feelings he does not reciprocate, or perhaps does not notice. Both Jean and Zouzou are “fringe” figures of a kind; Zouzou works as a laundress, and Jean is an electrician at the local theater, where trouble is brewing. The star of the theater’s latest production is a temperamental diva who throws constant tantrums, who refuses to hit her marks, and who finally leaves the show to join her lover in South America. Ehen she leaves, it falls (by sheer coincidence) to Zouzou to step into her place…

I have a feeling the above summary is more coherent than the film. Indeed, Zouzou is stuffed with subplots and side characters. There's Zouzou and Jean’s complex relationship with their adopted father, Jean’s burgeoning love for Zouzou’s friend and co-worker, and the frantic efforts of the exasperated theater director to sidestep the efforts and insistence of the theater patron that his paramour, Barbara, must star in the new show, in spite of her lack of discernable talent. All of this is sort of fun (the movie’s romantic shenanigans definitely benefit from the fact that Zouzou was a European production, and could therefore be much more sexually frank, and even allow for some casual nudity), but along with its many plot strands, Zouzou seems to adopt many tones. There’s broad comedy in Zouzou’s shenanigans (she’s a bit of a hell raiser), and melodrama when Zouzou's father dies, or when Jean is framed for murder. The incestuous aspect of the Zouzou/Jean relationship hints at depths not present in the film’s musical sequences, with their lavish sets and ridiculously oversized props. (I know we’re not supposed to ask this, but really – would it even be possible for Zouzou’s musical numbers to take place on an actual stage?) Zouzou often incurs a kind of schizophrenic feel, as it jars from one tone to the next, with seemingly no transition.

That schizophrenia is emphasized by the performances of the film’s two stars, Gabin and Baker. Little known today, Baker was a fascinating historical figure; a black woman born in Missouri, she eventually expatriated to France, where her talents as a singer and a dancer had more room to flourish than in the still racially timid United States. Baker is said to have been an electric stage performer, and in Zouzou, what indeed comes across most vividly is the aspect of “stage performer”. Baker’s certainly not understated in the film; while she’s clearly talented (the film’s highlight is probably her solo number, which she performs with beautiful eloquence), it often feels as if she is, to use a turn of phrase, “playing to the fifth row.” Baker’s broadness is all the more noticeable because Gabin is so understated. Gabin is like a French Robert Mitchum. He does a great deal without seeming to do anything – arguably the hallmark of a lot of great movie acting. It’s not that Gabin is good and Baker is bad; it’s just that the two are acting in different styles, even different movies.

The divide between their performances is, to some extent, the same divide that runs through the movie as a whole. Zouzou’s problem is that it ultimately never quite decides want it wants to be – melodrama or comedy, musical or drama. That it executes many of these options so well – the musical numbers really have a kind of giddy, Hollywood style sweep, and a lot of the comedy works surprisingly well – only makes the film’s tonal shifts that much more disappointing. Zouzou, then, doesn’t quite work; but if it’s a mess, it’s an interesting and even somewhat admirable mess – a film that tries to pack too many ideas into too little screen time.

In Memorium

2010-11-30T10:48:00.000-08:00

It's always depressing to have to bid farewell to people who helped shape your childhood, but that's life, I guess.

Irvin Kershner, who died on November 27th, had something of an up and down directorial career -- ranging from cult classics like Eyes of Laura Mars to stumbles like Robocop 2 -- but he's probably best remembered for directing The Empire Strikes Back, the darkest and best of the Star Wars movies. What "Kersh" brought to Star Wars was a knack for getting good performances, and a mastery of tonal shifts; I have him to thank for the moment when my 8 year old brain was blown upon learning that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father.

A day later, we lost Leslie Nielsen. For a certain generation, I think Nielsen needs no introduction; while he started out in the fifties as a leading man type (he starred in the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, and did a rather infamous test for the lead role in Ben-Hur later in the decade), he arguably gained immortality in a string of pictures he did for the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker laugh factory -- Airplane!, the shortlived Police Squad! television series, and the Naked Gun films. Nielsen's stock in trade in all these films was to play his insane lines dead serious -- which made them all the funnier.

R.I.P. to ya both.

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

2010-11-28T18:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve always liked the comic book writer Dennis O’Neil’s definition of “camp”: “This stuff was funnier when I was 12.” The entire appeal of camp, as far as I can tell, tends to be a superior attitude toward the material; filmmakers and writers seem constantly to be winking at the audience, saying with a certain smug satisfaction, “Yes, we know this is ridiculous. No, we don’t buy it any more than you do. And no, we don’t actually expect you to buy into this/get emotionally invested.” Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but camp has never held much appeal for me; it strikes me as sort of lazy, as creative entities disguising substandard work by saying, “But we meant for it to be substandard! That’s the whole point!”

Bride of Frankenstein announces itself as camp from its opening minutes, as Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelly hold court in a (wondrously artificial) castle, and Byron describes, with an enthusiasm that approaches mania, the delirious terrors of Mary’s story “Frankenstein”. Images from the 1931 movie of that same name play under Byron’s delirious narration (“How beautifully dramatic! The cruelest savage exhibition of nature at her worst without!”); the film doesn’t even pretend that this sequence is anything other than blatant exposition for those who haven’t seen Frankenstein. Gavin Gordon, the actor playing Lord Byron, delivers his lines so emphatically that scenery chewing doesn’t even describe it; this is scenery chewing-swallowing-digesting-regurgitating-and-re-eating.

Either this style of filmmaking/storytelling appeals to you, or it doesn’t. I have to confess that it does not much appeal to me. I haven’t seen Frankenstein since I was young, but I remember it being scarier than this. It’s quickly clear that Bride of Frankenstein is playing things mostly for laughs; Una O’Connor, she of the shrieking, high pitched Cockney accent, plays her “village shrew” character with the wild, over the top gusto of a vaudevillian comic. The rest of the cast follows suit; Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson), Dr. Frankenstein’s long suffering fiancée, hems and haws and bursts seemingly without warning into hysterics, and the good doctor himself seems mentally unhinged from the start, a writhing, crawling figure. (The actor Colin Clive was apparently deep into the latter stages of alcoholism at the time of shooting, with makes his performance all the more tremulous and hysterical.)

Do I sound a little snippy? As I’ve said before, I don’t have much use for camp, and that’s almost entirely where Bride of Frankenstein resides. Convinced that he couldn’t top his original Frankenstein for terror, director James Whale apparently decided to make the sequel into a “memorable hoot”. The picture’s tone can be gauged in the performance of Ernest Thesiger as the movie’s major new character, Dr. Pretorious. Thesiger is, just in his physical appearance, a kind of grotesque; a tall, thin, elderly man, he is lit by cinematographer John J. Mescall to look like a walking cadaver, with sunken cheeks and long, grasping fingers. Thesiger’s performance is equally histrionic; he abandons all pretense of realism and instead seems to gnaw on his dialogue, like a rat. (Listen to the delirious way he toasts Dr. Frankenstein: “To a new world of Gods and monsters!”) It’s a fun performance, but the problem with Bride of Frankenstein is that the whole movie is pitched at that same level of camp hysteria; even at 75 minutes, the picture feels wearying.

Bride of Frankenstein gets most of its mileage from the art direction and special effects. Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I have to confess I prefer the old days of matte paintings, miniatures, and ridiculous sets. Bride of Frankenstein's first shot is a doozy, a swooping shot approaching the formidable Shelly mansion. That the mansion is a miniature is painfully obvious, but that doesn’t take away from the wonder of the moment. Bride of Frankenstein exists in a kind of wonderful fantasy world, where trees all seem to grow at right angles and where castles seem to reach straight up into the heavens. The world of Bride of Frankenstein looks artificial, yes, but gloriously artificial; it’s like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale come to life.

Maybe that florid production design is the reason Bride of Frankenstein is so fondly remembered, but I have to confess that the picture as a whole left me cold. It seemed ironic to me that after watching the film I found my thoughts straying to Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein – a loving spoof of the Frankenstein films, yes, but also, I would argue, a more successful picture than Whale’s original. Watching Brooks’ film, I’m always struck by the fact that, as silly as the spoofery is, I find myself actually caring a little bit about Gene Wilder’s crazed doctor, about Peter Boyle’s misunderstood monster. The movie has a surprising amount of heart to it.

Bride of Frankenstein is, for the most part, lacking in heart; it all feels a bit self satisfied, a bit smugly superior. The picture’s most successful element is probably Boris Karloff’s performance as the infamous monster. As imitated as he’s been over the years, it’s still shocking to see just how much pathos Karloff invests into the “Monster”, who is portrayed here as more an innocent than an object of fear. The movie’s best scene is probably a beautiful little set piece where the Monster visits a blind hermit in the woods, who thanks God for sending him a visitor, a friend. These scenes have something that so much of Bride of Frankenstein lacks: they have a soul, and some real feeling underneath the camp theatrics.

Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" Review of The Bride of Frankenstein -http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F19990103%2FREVIEWS08%2F401010307%2F1023

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One (2010)

2010-11-21T18:03:00.000-08:00

When I was younger, I only made it as far as the fourth book in the Harry Potter series. This had little to do with the quality of the books, and a lot more to do with my own inadequacies; I read rather slowly, and was what one might call a “distracted” kid, prone to a wandering mind, which made J.K. Rowling’s often 700 plus page tomes difficult to get through. I’d take a break from reading for a week, and find when I came back that I had little idea what was going on in the narrative; and I finally got so frustrated with myself that I quit reading the books. I’d like to do so, but at this point I’d have to start the series all over from the beginning, which seems like a rather daunting challenge.

I write all this to illustrate that, in a way, I’m close to “Potter uninitiated”; my memories of the books are distant enough to be sketchy, and in the last couple of years, my only contact with the (multimillion dollar) franchise has been through the Warner Brothers film series. On one level, this should probably make me better able to appreciate and judge the Harry Potter films as their own entities. I don’t have that terrible, crippling burden that so many fans have, of knowing every story turn and detour before I see the film, and can therefore judge the cinematic offering a little more objectively. And yet with each of the last couple Harry Potter films – particularly with the sixth picture, “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” – I’ve found myself thinking, “Man, I really wish I’d read the book.” The Harry Potter series feels increasingly to me like an exclusive club of which I’m not a member; and I find myself cast a bit adrift in the movie adaptations, often wondering (for long stretches of screen time) exactly what is going on.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One is not really made for me, then. This is a movie made specifically for fans of the book, people who have read these novels numerous times and watched the previous movies continually, and who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the innumerable characters, creatures, places and names that occupy Rowling’s (admittedly fearsome) fantasy universe. I’m not one of them, and so for me, much of Deathly Hallows plays as if it is unspooling its exposition from a tickertape machine. The script often feels like a series of footnotes, asides and parenthesis related to the other stories, to the other films; if you’re not a Potter expert, you’ll be a bit befuddled, and if this is your first foray into the material, you’ll be completely and utterly lost.

The story: Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, basically a guest star here) and his fearsome followers have taken over the wizarding world, in particular control of the Ministry of Magic. First on their check list is to kill Harry Potter, the boy wizard who is the only person to ever survive an attack from Voldemort. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) has set off with his trusted friends, Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), in search of the horcruxes, various objects in which Voldemort has stored pieces of his soul. Their mission is to destroy each horcrux in turn, by extension destroying Lord Voldemort.

If nothing else, the creative team behind the Harry Potter films deserves credit for keeping the same ensemble together. It’s strange to remember Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as cheeky, good natured kids back in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and then to see them older and more mature here. (It’s especially weird to realize that I’ve grown at the same time as these kids – but we won’t get into my aging process…) Even more remarkable is what good actors all three of them are. Unlike many of the previous films, which got a lot of their juice from the great British legends brought in to spice up the proceedings (Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Imelda Staunton, Richard Harris, Kenneth Branagh…), Deathly Hallows almost exclusively on Harry, Ron and Hermione, as they venture into both physically and emotionally dangerous territory. Radcliffe, Grint and Watson prove themselves up to the challenge; they’re more emotionally vulnerable than we might expect, bringing a grounding quality to fantasy set pieces that could all too easily become ridiculous.

That grounded, vulnerable quality certainly suits the story. Deathly Hallows is easily the darkest of the Potter films so far. We’re a long ways away from the days of Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets, which played in comparison like cheeky romps. In Deathly Hallows, the stakes are life and death, and the former warmth and cheerfulness of Hogwarts has been translated in the new film into a cold, dreary visual design. In fact, if anything, I’ll speak a bit of blasphemy and claim that Deathly Hallows is, visually, a bit too dark. I knew we had to be coming near the end of the film when we finally, for the first time, saw sunlight; in Deathly Hallows, every sky is overcast, every illuminated room looks under lit, and every dark room looks positively subterranean. All this visual doom and gloom gets the point across, but after awhile it becomes a bit monotonous. One can’t help but feel that the dark, gloomy interior of Voldemort’s castle might have looked more foreboding were it not for the fact that every single other location in the story is equally dark and gloomy.

As its title suggests, Deathly Hallows is part one of a two part story; while all of Rowling’s other, lengthy books were condensed to fit a close to two and a half hour running time, this story has been split into two movies, which will run almost five hours put together. This allows for a slightly slower pace, which I imagine some audiences members will find interminable. I sensed some people in my theater squirming a little as the film devoted just as much time to dialogue scenes between Harry, Ron and Hermione as to action set pieces. I found the slightly slower pace a relief; it allowed the voluminous amounts of names, dates, creatures, and places more of a chance to register with this poor, baffled viewer than in some past pictures. (I remember, in particular, feeling utterly lost for much of Half Blood Prince's running time.) A little more of a chance, I should specify, because Deathly Hallows is still a lot to take in, at least on one viewing; this is the sort of movie that might benefit from an after screening lecture, with one of the movie’s many British luminaries illustrating on a blackboard just who the hell all these people are, and how they’re all related to each other. Unless you know these stories backwards and forwards, I suggest you bring a pencil and notepad.

More problematic is the fact that, as part one of a two part story, Deathly Hallows is rather inevitably…inconclusive. I know, I know; I shouldn’t complain that a movie with “part one” in its title has no ending, but still: Deathly Hallows doesn’t end so much as it just stops, suddenly. We might as well get a sign telling us, “Come back next year for the rest of the movie, folks!” I’ll admit to being a bit baffled by this whole notion of “continuing stories”, as if the previous however many years of movie history, when an individual film was expected to tell a complete story, are passé and old fashioned. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One is a fun diversion, and it has a couple of especially clever set pieces – an opening chase with a half dozen Harry Potters acting as decoys, and a suspense sequence where Harry, Ron and Hermione sneak through the Ministry of Magic – but it’s ultimately unsatisfying, because it feels exactly like what it is: half a film.

Roger Ebert's Review of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101116/REVIEWS/101119969

Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

2010-11-17T13:49:00.000-08:00

“Everyone says I love you
But just what they say it for I never knew
It’s just inviting trouble for the poor sucker who
Says I love you.”
- Groucho Marx, HORSE FEATHERS

Woody Allen’s humor has always had a hint of existential despair to it. From his earliest days as a humorist, Allen’s stock in trade has been commenting on deadly serious subjects with a flippant silliness. (One of Allen’s heroes is the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman; while Allen also wrote about the “silence of God, it’s hard to imagine Bergman writing lines like, “If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”) That tension that exists in both Allen’s work and in his public persona – the tension between the frivolous and the philosophically dire – finds its way into Everyone Says I Love You, and by proxy into the most unexpected of genres – the movie musical. Allen, an admirer (indeed, one might say a fetishist) of the popular music of the 1930s and 40s, constructs Everyone Says I Love You as a lovely valentine to the effervescent Hollywood musicals that made that music famous – but at the same time he tinges it with a bittersweet melancholy classic Hollywood would never permit itself.

The film begins with a scene straight out of the films of Astaire and Rodgers – young lovers Holden Spence and Skylar Dandridge skip coins into a New York City fountain as Holden sings “Just You, Just Me”. It’s a beautiful day – several shots of central park are stunningly beautiful – and the whole city seems swept up in the giddy enthusiasm of the song. Three mothers with baby carriages, a nurse helping an elderly woman, a beggar on the street – each joins in for a verse, and when Holden and Skylar stop to admire a window display, the mannequins drop their poses and dance along to the music.

Already we can see the tribute Allen is paying to the classic movie musicals, by transforming New York into one giant, wonderful film set. Allen is, of course, one of the great “New York directors” (the other is arguably Martin Scorsese), and it’s no coincidence that he’s an admirer of the music of George Gershwin. For Gershwin, the city was like a giant plaything – a magical playground for his imagination. New York performs a similar function in these opening scenes of Everyone Says I Love You; it’s a blinking, incandescent, marvelously artificial place, where a cast of wonderful eccentrics can act as if they’re appearing in a ‘30s screwball comedy. The fact that Allen is presenting for us an idealized portrait of the city is supported by the selection of music; “Just You, Just Me” is a classic American love song, and throughout the film Allen will be using songs by such composers and lyricists as Cole Porter, Gus Kahn, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby.

There is at least one way, however, in which the opening of Everyone Says I Love You marks a radical departure from the classic musicals – and it’s evident as soon as Holden begins singing. The actor playing Holden, Edward Norton, is providing his own voice, and we can immediately tell; while he’s certainly not a bad singer, his vocal range won’t make anyone forget Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. Using the real voices of actors not known for their singing prowess becomes Allen’s tactic throughout the film. Almost all the actors – Norton, Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn, Julia Roberts, Tim Roth, even Allen himself – are really singing, and while they by no means embarrass themselves, it’s clear none of them are accomplished singers. (Only Drew Barrymore, as Skylar, refused to sing; she ruefully told Allen that she “couldn’t even sing in the shower”, and after hearing a demo recording, Allen agreed to dub her with the voice of Olivia Hayman.)

The decision to cast non-singers in a feature length musical might seem like an odd choice, but it’s crucial to Allen’s approach. The songs in Everyone Says I Love You are popular American songs of the period of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and they’re obviously songs that the characters in the world of the film know. Allen, therefore, is not trying to capture great musical performers at their peak; what he wants is the reality of ordinary people who are so moved by their circumstances that they spontaneously express themselves through song. At his wife’s birthday party, Allen Alda sits down at the piano and plays Cole Porter’s “Looking at You”; when he’s been left by his lover, Woody Allen stands on a Venice balcony and sings with quiet melancholy, “I’m Through With Love”. The sometimes shaky quality of the actor’s singing voices actually adds to the mood of many of the songs. Julia Roberts’ handling of “All My Life” is perhaps not expert, but that only helps to convey the vulnerability her character feels, as she realizes she may have met her perfect man. In shooting the film, Allen actually asked Goldie Hawn to sing worse, because he felt that her vocals would sound too accomplished for a normal person breaking into song; throughout Everyone Says I Love You, Allen wants us to delight in watching a group of ordinary people who are just so enchanted, or despairing, or lonely, or celebratory, that they can’t help but sing.

It helps, of course, that the cast is what we might affectionately call a “bunch of kooks”. In this way, Allen is calling upon the spirit of another great ‘30s genre, the screwball comedy. All the characters in Everyone Says I Love You could easily come from a Preston Sturges film. They’re people who are rich enough to worry almost exclusively – and rather selfishly – about their own happiness, but at the same time eccentric enough to be loveable.

Consider, for example, the family presided over by Bob and Steffi Dandridge (Alan Alda and Goldie Hawn). In their house, they have four children – son Scott, daughters Lane and Laura, and daughter D.J., who is the child of Steffi’s previous relationship with writer Joe Berlin (Woody Allen); Frieda, a German maid who, when questioned about why she refuses to cook sauce with her pasta, barks that, “It’s Bavarian pasta – it doesn’t need sauce! The Italians need sauce! The Italians were weak!”; and elderly Grandpa, blissfully unaware of the passage of time. Joe Berlin is also more or less a member of the family, judging by the amount of time he spends at the house; even though he and Steffi were once lovers, he still comes to Steffi and Bob for advice on his love life, and Bob states with no apparent malice that Joe is “still in love with her.”

The Dandridge family is openly, proudly liberal – in the way that only movie eccentrics can really be. Here, Allen manages to introduce a political dimension – something rarely seen in the movie musical – but it’s a playful, mischievous one. Bob is horrified that his son Scott has inexplicably transformed into a "young conservative Republican”, constantly expounding on the value of “school prayer and the right to bear arms!” It’s an exaggerated stereotype, but Allen doesn’t spare the liberal side of the political spectrum. Steffi is, as D.J. describes her, a “guilty liberal” who has dedicated her life to a well meaning but hilariously naïve crusade for prisoner’s rights. (There’s a hilarious gag where she gives a talk at a law convention, telling a roomful of stone faced cops that incarcerated felons should be allowed to decorate their own cells, “to express themselves.”)

The irony is that, as Allen suggests, the Dandridge’s liberalism may be largely dogmatic. Bob and Steffi are extraordinarily proud when they sponsor the early release of Charles Ferry, a convicted armed robber who would strike anyone with eyes and ears as a dangerous guy. (The scene where he attends a dinner party at the Dandridge’s is a comic highlight; as Ferry insists “no one get behind me!”, ogles all the women in the room, and keeps expounding on the most effective ways to kill prison guards.) They are far less delighted when their daughter, Skylar, ditches Holden for the more “animalistic” Ferry; Steffi exasperatedly tells Skylar that she admires Ferry “as a social symbol – not as an actual person to be with my child!” In Everyone Says I Love You, Allen shows himself perfectly willing to poke fun at both sides of the political aisle. However, he can’t help but express where he himself stands; late in the film, we find out that Scott’s Republican beliefs have derived from a medical condition that “prevents enough oxygen from reaching the brain”, and it’s obvious that while Allen may have his doubts about upper class liberalism, he’d rather throw his hat in with them than the other side.

While it’s handled with a light, almost imperceptible touch, this is still heavy stuff for a musical to be tackling. But Allen doesn’t just comment on politics in Everyone Says I Love You – he also brings death into the equation, and he throws it right in our face. Death, of course, is one of the continuing specters in Allen’s work; it might be argued that love and death are his two major subject matters, making it little wonder that he made a film called Love and Death in 1975. (The last line of Allen’s slapstick comedy Sleeper is: “Sex and death – two things that come once in a lifetime. But at least after death you’re not nauseous.”) In Everyone Says I Love You, it’s a theme that’s introduced early. In the very first scene when we meet Joe Berlin, he’s despondent over having just been dumped, and has decided to commit suicide in Venice. (He’s realized that if he kills himself in Venice he can, with the time difference, get some things done in New York and still die on time.) It’s a wonderful comic bit, but there’s an underlying seriousness to it; Allen, who has said before that he thinks seriously about death every day of his life, is using humor to mask his own pain.

He does much the same thing later, in a wondrous musical number set at, of all places, a funeral home. Grandpa Dandridge dies, but his spirit (joined by ghosts) rises up to tell his surviving family to “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)”. Classic Hollywood certainly never would have allowed for a musical number performed by a group of ghosts; Allen turns the sequence into a comic highlight, but it still carries a melancholy undercurrent, a knowledge that we often wish, only too late, that we had lived longer and more happily.

But as always, the major theme of Allen’s film is love, and its many complications. The classic Hollywood musicals were, of course, almost always built around boy-meets-girl stories; they used the wonderful, magical songs of writers like Irving Berlin or Cole Porter to tell stories of how all obstacles could be overcome by true love. Allen certainly calls some of that spirit to mind in Everyone Says I Love You, both by using those classic American songs and by bringing in the specter of the classic American romantic comedies. This is a film overflowing with sweet, innocent moments of first love, of initial romantic encounter. There’s Holden singing “Just You, Just Me” to Skylar; or the surprisingly tender way Charles Ferris sings “If I Had You” to Skylar, on a terrace overlooking New York City. There’s D.J.’s idealistic love romance with a Venetian gondolier (Joe immediately objects to their planned marriage, telling D.J. that “gondolier rhymes with ‘no lira’”), or the utterly charming – if highly unethical – way Joe uses information from the psychiatry sessions of Von Sidell (Julia Roberts) in order to woo her. Even young love gets its due, as young sisters Laura and Lane Dandridge fall in love with the same dreamy boy down the street.

All this sweetness is tempered, however, by Allen’s own pragmatism – because almost without exception, none of the relationships in Everyone Says I Love You are able to aspire to the idealistic standard set by those classic songs. Joe Berlin’s affair with Von Sidell eventually falls apart because, in essence, he’s too perfect; now that she’s met her ideal, she can move on. The boy down the street chooses Lane, and Laura (a young Natalie Portman) sits at the kitchen counter, crying out with adolescent anguish, “I’m through with love!/I’ll never fall again!” (Steffi levelheadedly responds, “What are you talking about? You’re only fourteen!”) Almost as soon as D.J. comes back from Venice, she runs into another, “adorable” boy at the airport – and wouldn’t you know it, she’s finds that she’s in love all over again! (D.J. will have at least two more suitors in the course of the film – a rapper and, at the end of the picture, a Harpo Marx-lookalike.) Skylar leaves Charles Ferris after he uses a walk in the woods as an excuse to help break some friends out of jail, but even when she returns to Holden, there is a tinge of defeat to it. Earlier in the film, we heard Skylar sing that “I’m a dreamer (Aren’t We All)”, that she always hoped for a knight in shining armor – but she’s willing to settle for Holden, who is a nice, sturdy young man, if a bit of a bumbler.

Love then is, in Allen’s world, a little more complex than it was for Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire, and his characters can never quite find the simple perfection they seek. Allen’s film ends with a beautiful scene where Joe and Steffi sneak away from a New Year’s party in France celebrating the Marx Brothers (Groucho Marx is, of course, one of Allen’s heroes). The two walk down by the same part of the Seine where they first fell in love, and they begin to ruminate wistfully on those earlier days, and what course their lives might have taken. (“Y’know, over the years I often wondered what would have happened if we stayed together,” Steffi tells Joe.) Joe reminds her that she was the one who taught him “I’m Through with Love”, and as she sings the song, the two begin to dance together. Joe and Steffi finally become so swept up in the romantic swell of the music that Steffi literally defies gravity, floating like a swan in midair, almost like Fred Astaire dancing up the walls in Royal Wedding. Love – and the beauty of those old songs – has given her wings, and allowed both she and Joe to return to those days when they were young and in love.

And yet as they kiss by the Seine, and look into each other’s eyes, there is a certain melancholy quality – Joe finally shrugs and says, “Well, we’d better get back”, and the spell is over. Joe and Steffi loved each other many years ago, and Bob may very well be right when he says that they love each other still – but Steffi also loves Bob, who is a good man and a good father, and Joe and Steffi wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt him. What once was can never be again; all Joe and Steffi can do is be happy with the memories they have of past days. Allen is, of course, the man who famously said that “the heart wants what the heart wants”, and in Everyone Says I Love You, he affirms that sometimes those wants clash with reality. Life isn’t as simple as a musical comedy, and maybe, as Groucho Marx asserts, we’re all “suckers” when we try to act as though it is.

Roger Ebert's Review of "Everyone Says I Love You" - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19970117/REVIEWS/701170302/1023

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)

2010-11-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an airless, oppressive film, and an almost overwhelmingly intense cinematic experience. Much of that intensity derives from the film’s simple, unforced style, its quiet disregard for commercial considerations or audience pandering. 4 Months deals quite openly with the issue of abortion, but as director Cristian Mungiu has said, it is not about abortion. Hollywood might have taken this story of a young girl who seeks an abortion, and the friend who tries to aid and support her, and turned it into a heavy handed “message movie”, assaulting the audience with pithy platitudes. Mungiu avoids all that; his film is ultimately not about the relative rightness of abortion, but rather about the stifling nature of political oppression, and the desperate (and sometimes futile) need to break free of that oppression. In its understated yet visceral way, the film traps us, forcing us to feel the same fear and panic as its two female leads, as they struggle to live under a heartless political regime.

That regime is the Ceausescu regime in Romania – a fact that the film implies, rather than states. Indeed, within the body of the film, Mungiu makes virtually no direct references to the Ceausescu regime. A more conventional film might have begun with text, or at least some exposition, to give viewers a feeling for the world they are entering. Aside from a few company names, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days does not even begin with titles; all we are given is a time and a place – “Romania, 1987” – and then we are launched into the story.

It’s a distancing, confusing effect, even an upsetting one – and it is an effect that the movie will put to good use for its first act. For the first third or so of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, we in the audience are not sure exactly what is going on. We are introduced to two college roommates, Otilia and Gabriela; they are packing in preparation for a journey of some kind, but their dialogue is coded, as though they are talking around the subject rather than about it. As Otilia spends the morning doing favors for Gabriela – buying cigarettes, borrowing money from her boyfriend, booking a hotel room – we become increasingly suspicious, and increasingly nervous. Maybe Gabriela and Otilia really do just need a quiet place to study, as Otilia asserts to one hotel receptionist; but the cryptic way that Otilia hides information from her boyfriend says something more suspect is going on. By the time Otilia is meeting a strange man, Mr. Bebe, on a deserted street, we know for certain that something dangerous is occurring.

Already Mungiu is stirring up his audience, bringing us into the same confused state as his characters. The Ceausescu regime ruled, like all political regimes, through fear, and Mungiu makes that fear palpable in the way the two women scurry around fearfully. A sense of dread invades the narrative; we are terrified of what these two young women, clearly in over their heads, might be getting themselves into, and we fear what the revelation of their secret might entail. By the time we finally learn what their purpose is – by the time we have discovered that Mr. Bebe is an abortionist, set to "perform a service" for Gabriela – we are locked within an emotional vice grip. Gabriela’s abortion is the Hitchcockian “bomb under the table” for the first act of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, but when that “bomb” finally goes off, we feel little release. Indeed, we have a sneaking – and correct – suspicion that things are only going to get worse.

Mungiu creates this apprehension not just through his narrative strategy, but also his shooting style. For the most part, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is shot in a series of very simple and unobtrusive long takes; one has the feeling of being a “fly on the wall”, observing events, impervious to change them. Because the shots are so static and in a way sterile, they have an entrapping effect; the characters become like bugs under a microscope, and by proxy, the camera forces us to stare mercilessly at them. Rarely has a film conveyed such an intense sense of claustrophobia; most of 4 Month’s story takes place is dorm rooms, or hotel lobbies, or the shoddy little hotel room where Gabriela’s abortion occurs. That claustrophobia not only locks us in with the characters, but puts us inside their fragile emotional state; as Otilia talks to Gabita following a mutual experience of sexual abuse at the hands of Mr. Bebe, the camera watches her intently, and we almost feel like we’re inside her head, reeling along with her.

Even when the characters leave these cramped spaces, they (and we) are granted no release. Otilia leaves Gabriela in her hotel room in order to visit her boyfriend Adi’s house - but the house is a crowded, unfriendly space, and Adi’s family snobbish and unwelcoming. The dinner becomes a black farce; Mungiu’s camera forces us, like Otilia, to sit and squirm as the family makes idle small talk, our minds while flashing back to the hotel, fearing the worst. Even when Otilia leaves, she is confined, within dark alleyways and the structure of the city.

Mungiu’s unflinching attitude also makes the physical horror of the abortion that much more palpable. Mr. Bebe’s “examination” of Gabriela, and the way he inserts a tube into her womb, is shot in a clinical, sterile manner. This only makes the physical horror of the procedure more palpable, more disturbing. Like the films of David Cronenberg, 4 Months makes us flinch not because its medical details are exaggerated to guignol extremes, but because they are presented so directly. After Gabriela has successfully had her abortion, Mungiu’s camera stares, with heartbreaking passivity, at the bloody, lifeless fetus. It seems so tiny, so fragile, wrapped in a towel on the bathroom floor. At first, we even have difficulty recognizing what it is – but as we do, a shudder ripples through the entire audience, regardless of their political beliefs on abortion. 4 Months shocks us by forcing us to look – just look – its central dilemma right in the face, without hesitation, without relief.

Otilia and Gabriella stumble into this dilemma almost completely unequipped. Gabriella, in particular, is a shockingly passive figure. Otilia refers to her with a shortened nickname, “Gabita”, which renders her a little girl – and indeed, the comparison is apt, because throughout 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Gabita remains irritatingly incapable of taking responsibility for her own actions. We’re a little shocked that she’s managed to make it this far in life, because based on the evidence in the film, she seems incapable of making decisions herself; little wonder she’s found herself with an unwanted pregnancy. Throughout 4 Months, it is Otilia who gets things done. It’s no wonder that the first time we meet them, Gabriela seems slow, while Otilia buzzes around with purpose. She is the motor that is keeping things, and she – booking the hotel room, meeting Mr. Bebe, and ultimately disposing of the fetus.

Mungiu surrounds these two vulnerable young women with no supportive authority figures – and certainly no helpful male figures. Mr. Bebe (notice any symbolism in the name?) is the prime example. He at first glance seems like a sensible, even rational man; he’s middle aged, he has a wife and children, and he wears a very homey, comfortable looking sweater. After he picks up Otilia in the street, he stops to speak with his mother, whom he watches over. He seems all around like a very reasonable man, and we’re more apt to sympathize with him as he states, with a certain calm annoyance, that this is not a game, and that these two women have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. He had given Gabita only two instructions – book a room at a specific hotel, and meet him in person – and she has failed to do both. All throughout this central scene where he meets with the women, we slowly begin to realize that his quiet logic has a darker undercurrent to it. He knows that these two women don’t have any many – but he is willing, he says, to work something out. His dispassionate manner makes the way he sexually abuses Otilia and Gabita all the more chilling. He’s “just a professional”, just a man doing a job. While he is working outside the political system – abortions are a very illegal and very dangerous business – he is, in a way, just as much a part of that system as any government bureaucrat; his position is based on putting others in an inferior, supplicating position.

Adi isn’t much better. When Otilia belatedly tells him what’s going on, he’s still serving self interested motives. He’s angry at her for embarrassing him in front of his parents; when she asks him what he would do if she got pregnant, he dumbly answers that he would marry her, and it’s clear that he answers that way not because he believes it, but because he believes that that’s what she wants to hear. He apologizes “if I’ve said anything” that might have hurt her – implicitly shifting blame over to her instead of himself. At best, Adi is a kind of befuddled, useless figure; he cannot comprehend what Otilia is going through.

In this sense, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days can be read as a feminist tale, where two young women, oppressed by men and by extension the political system (the camera is constantly either behind Otilia, stalking her, or in front of her, anticipating and implicitly observing her), enact the only rebellion they can – the power to control their own bodies. The act of abortion is seen, however, in a sad, destructive light. At the end of the film, Otilia and Gabita sit exhausted and dazed in the hotel restaurant, where they are offered a dish that is a blackly comic assortment of body parts – liver, heart, ect. They, and we, can’t help thinking of the aborted fetus (which Otilia has tossed in a trash chute), and as they stare blankly out the window at passing traffic, the sense of defeat is palpable. Otilia tells Gabita simply and directly that “we will never talk about this again”; there is no catharsis following the abortion, only numbness and dread. The title reads like a countdown – 4, 3, 2 – and as we stagger away from the film, we realize that we have seen an explosion of a kind - an emotionally devastating portrait of humanity at its most crushed and despairing.

Roger Ebert's Review of "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080207/REVIEWS/802070302/1023

Sous les bombes (2007)

2010-11-08T20:53:00.000-08:00

In Sous le bombes (English translation: under the bombs), only his sophomore feature effort as a director, Philippe Aractingi creates a devastating portrait of the horror and sorrow that war can wreak. In doing so, he delicately straddles the (sometimes very thin) line between fact and fiction, between truth and lie. While Aractingi’s film tells a fictional story, it is at the same time a very real and authentic document of a ravaged nation, and of the despair and perseverance of its people. Sous le bombes is then equally interesting both as narrative cinema, and as a careful maintained dance between reality and fiction.

That dance – and the tension contained therein – is evident from the opening frames of the film. The first shots of Sous les bombes show a peaceful looking city in Lebanon; the complacency of the image is shattered by a series of horrifying explosions that level buildings and cue a chorus of terrified screams. If these first images – and those that follow, of citizens running through the streets, screaming with fear – look and feel uncomfortably real, it’s because they are; many of these opening shots were taken by director Aractingi himself, using a home video camera (in some shots we can see a digital display), during the actual bombings. Aractingi uses this documentary footage of the real bombings and devastation throughout the film, interspersing it with footage shot later. It gives the audience a gut punch of reality that no staged footage could possibly match.

That reality is what Aractingi clings to throughout his narrative. Sous les bombes does indeed present a fictionalized “story”, and invites us to journey with two fictional characters – a desperate Muslim woman, Zena, who is looking for her son, and the taxi driver Tony who agrees to drive her – but Aractingi surrounds these creations with a cast of faces and personalities that are all too real. There are only four professional actors in the entirety of Sous les bombes: Nada Abou Farhat as Zena, Georges Khabbaz as Tony, Rawia Elchab as a hotel receptionist, and Bshara Atallah as a journalist. (Even beyond that, only Farhat and Khabbaz are “known actors”; both Elchab and Atallah had appeared in only one film prior to Sous les bombes, and Atallah’s first feature film had, at that, been Aractingi’s first feature film, Bosta.) Every other face we see, every other voice we hear, is that of a non-actor, an average citizen who survived the bombing of Lebanon, and who is telling their story to the camera. Sous les bombes, then, is not just a story; it is a kind of cinematic testimonial, a cry of pain from a decimated nation.

There is, for example, the testimony of mothers who were forced to leave their children behind; we see the tears of parents separated from their offspring, friends separated from loved ones. Their pain is palpable, as is their defiant perseverance; Sous les bombes depicts a war torn nation, yes, but it also depicts a nation that will continue to assert its right to live. On their journey, Tony and Zena will see much death and destruction, but they will also meet many survivors, like the brave old woman who runs a covert gas station. The human face of Lebanon is Sous les bombes is devastated, yes, but not destroyed; it continues to hope.

Sous les bombes shares much in common with the classic American “road” movie. Its entire plot hinges around the idea of two main characters who have “nothing in common”, but are forced by circumstance to work together. The first time we see Zena, it is an almost surreal image - a strikingly beautiful (and clearly upper-class) Muslim woman, in chic dress and heels, stepping into a barren wasteland, a city without hope. Tony, in stark contrast, is of the lowest social class; he drives a beaten up cab that has clearly seen many years and many miles, and though he dreams of escaping to Germany, where his children live, he admits to Zena that he knows in his heart it’s a pipe dream – he’ll never get away.

As Tony and Zena journey across the ruined landscape of Lebanon, searching for Zena's stranded son, they also takes journey into each other’s deepest secrets, and deepest fears. At the opening of the film, it is clear from the first that Tony and Zena have little interest in one another as human beings. Zena only agrees to go with Tony because he is the one cabbie who will venture into the war zone; Tony, for his part, is not so secretly interested in sleeping with Zena, and it’s hinted that much of his “heroism” throughout the film – driving down extremely dangerous roads, getting information, doing much of the legwork as a detective – is done for the purposes of impressing her.

If those are indeed his intentions, they go unfulfilled; the bond that grows between Zena and Tony is not a sexual one, but an emotional one, as they come to know, respect and – dare we say it – depend on one another. On the face of things, these two characters - a Muslim woman and a Christian man - have so little in common; and yet when he witnesses Zena’s cry of pain upon learning that her sister, her son's caretaker, is dead, Tony does his best to cheer her up, playing for her a malfunctioning German language tape and mugging to it. If Sous les bombes is a “love story”, it is an unconventional one in the sense that the two heroes do not physically consummate their love; instead, their bond is forged over a deepening respect for the other’s worries and hurts and intimacies. Tony tells Zena late in the movie, as he begins to confess his secrets to her, that he has “never opened up to a woman before”; we believe him in his awkwardness, and we also believe it when, earlier, he leaves a romantic clinch with a hotel receptionist to answer Zena’s frightened cries, as she wakes from a nightmare. By the end of the film, when Zena and Tony set out on their final, almost suicidal quest across dangerous territory, we fully believe that these two characters are in it for the long run; and when they tearfully embrace over the figure of a young boy, we believe that (at least symbolically) a new family unit has been created.

The landscape that Zena and Tony traverse looks straight out of a post-apocalyptic movie. The images that we see of large scale destruction are almost surreal: a once mighty bridge, snapped in half, like a child would snap a twig; entire cities that have been leveled into rubble; apartment buildings that have been sliced in half, open like a doll’s house. It’s truly a no-man’s-land, a landscape that inspires desperation on the part of the characters as well as the viewers; when Tony has a brief, magnetic sexual encounter with a hotel receptionist, it is a spur of the moment decision, clearly brought about by the feeling that the world could end at any moment, and that pleasure must be grabbed while it can.

What makes this landscape doubly disturbing is, again, the fact that it is all true. Once again we return to the blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction; for while Sous les bombes posits fictional characters against it, the landscape is real, and the film therefore stands as a document of the terrible devastation wrecked by the Israeli bombings. No production designer could possibly come up with anything as potent as the hell on earth that we see here – a horrific vision that is made all the more palpable by the fact that the countryside, from what we see of it, is largely unspoiled. The hills, the mountains, remain beautiful, and seemingly untouched; how fragile and shattered then, in contrast, seem the cities and towns, and by proxy the lives of their citizens.

Sous les bombes is certainly a political film in the way it depicts war; and yet the film seems less angry than sad, less political than humanistic. Indeed, Aractingi seems uninterested in demonizing one side or the other. What we see in Sous les bombes is a political system that has self destructed, leaving ordinary people like Tony and Zena to wander through the wreckage. The Israeli army has decimated the country, yes, but the Muslim extremists opposing them are not seen in a much better light; as an extremist parade marches through the streets, Zena and Tony watch is quizzically, and when a politically motivated bombing occurs later, Tony rues that it will only ignite more violence. Tony is Christian, and is close friends with a family of Christian soldiers; they seem just as unable – or unwilling – to do anything as the other two sides.

Tony’s own back story reveals a serious ambivalence toward the wisdom political causes; his brother was forced to flee the country after a youthful dalliance with extremism, and part of the reason Tony will never get his visa is because homeland security is constantly asking him questions about his brother. In Sous les bombes, national politics are ultimately a hopelessly confusing mess; what is important is the human journey. It is telling that, in the film’s only voiceover, Zena says that she does not care about sides, about parties, about countries – she just wants her child back. That seems to be Aractingi’s message, too; what is important to him is not rhetoric, but the human cost of war. His bombed out landscape acts as an expressionist set, giving physical embodiment to the shattered emotional state of the characters.

The film builds to a devastating climax where Zena discovers that her child is, in fact, dead – another little boy who watched the son die has been wearing his vest, and been mistaken for Zena’s child. The character is played by a child who himself went through more or less the same experience; Aractingi forces him to relive his trauma in order to purge himself of it, and the film as a whole might be seen as a similar process. Farhat and Khabbaz have both said that making the film was the most important experience of their lives, and for the audience, the journey is equally harrowing and important; by forcing Lebanon to relive, through cinema, the trauma that destroyed it, Aractingi hopes to purge us, and help us eventually to heal.

Pink Floyd The Wall (1982)

2010-11-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

Confession time: I’ve never smoked pot in my life, but in the past I’ve told friends that, having listened to certain rock albums – “In the Court of the Crimson King”, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” – I think I probably more or less know what it feels like. It’s a facetious statement, but I’ve had it backed up by at least one friend who's done both; he told me that with certain albums, like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, you get a strange, disconnected sensation that’s a greater high than anything you could induce chemically.

Pink Floyd The Wall – a film version of the band’s 1979 album – creates a similar sensation. In terms of a movie viewing experience, I think I’d classify it somewhere with 2001: A Space Oddyssey and Apocalypse Now, or with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome; while these are obviously films of ideas, they are – at least on a first viewing – meant to be experienced more than comprehended. Roger Waters, who is really the “auteur” of The Wall – he’s credited with the screenplay and wrote most of the music – has said that both the album and the film were inspired by a period of deep dissatisfaction and disgust. Pink Floyd had been touring the U.S., playing to whole stadiums full of anonymous audience members, and Waters felt increasingly cut off from the people he was supposed to be entertaining. One night, he found himself spitting on a fan who tried to climb up onto the stage; the disgust that he felt in that moment for his music, for his fans, and most of all for himself comes out in The Wall as an anguished, angry howl.

The film features a narrative – albeit an elliptical, non-linear one – about a rock star, Pink (Bob Geldof), who when we first meet him is a burnt out shell staring at a television screen in his hotel room. Images begin to flash at us and (apparently) through Pink’s mind: his childhood growing up in England, the death of his father during World War 2, his formative experiences at the hands of unfeeling teachers, his failing marriage. The conceptual nature of the movie makes it more a 95 minute music video than a traditional “musical"; Alan Parker, who directed the live action segments of the movie, and Gerald Scarfe, who supervised fifteen minutes of truly astonishing animation, are more interested in mood and tone than in logic, and the film therefore has a kind of kaleidoscopic effect.

I suspect that that effect will drive some people mad; they’ll be looking for a story, for characters, for something to cling onto. Here we return to the comparison I made in the first paragraph, because Pink Floyd The Wall plays a lot more like a rock album than a traditional movie. After awhile, we stop trying to comprehend what we’re being shown, and just let the images and the music wash over us. The Wall is, above all, a film about very specific feelings – and those feelings are disgust and anguish, on the part of an artist who hates himself, hates his work, and hates the world for (as he sees it) turning against him.

Pink’s interior state is vividly portrayed by Gerald Scarfe’s animations, which are inarguably the highlight of the film. Scarfe, a political caricaturist, creates animated sequences that are in equal parts stunningly beautiful and horrifying. The viewer is more or less assaulted by images of skeletal soldiers, killed in gas attacks; of a peaceful dove exploding into bloody shards, to be replaced by a hawk like bird of prey. The two most astonishing sequences in the film are done entirely through animation: a sequence where two flowers writhe together sexually, and ultimately violently (notice the symbolism?), and the film’s finale, a mock “trial” in which the various demons assaulting the lead character – his mother, his wife, his grade school teachers – appear as twisting, contorting figures. Pink himself is depicted in this final segment as a small, pathetic doll, which is stabbed and crushed and torn asunder, and finally confronted by a “judge” who is a giant rectum with beady eyes and gnashing teeth.

This doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? Pink Floyd The Wall is certainly a relentlessly downbeat film; it’s hard to imagine what possessed a major studio, MGM, to bankroll a film that’s this experimental, this odd, and ultimately this downbeat. Roger Waters himself found the film “so unremitting in its onslaught upon the senses, that it didn’t give me, anyway, as an audience, a chance to get involved with it,” and I can easily see audience members being turned off by its almost savage disregard for grace or beauty or gentility. I actually found that to be the film’s most admirable quality. If most great rock and roll music is celebratory and liberating – think of Chuck Berry, the early Beatles, Little Richard – I’ve always thought that a lot of great rock feels angry and trapped, lashing out at a cruel and unfeeling world. Pink Floyd The Wall may not be a pleasant experience, but I at least found it a cathartic one; it’s a howl of pain and anguish, comparable in some ways to Munch’s “The Scream”. Sometimes a movie need not do anything more than express a feeling or a concept; and I think in our loneliness, in the way we put barriers between ourselves and others, we’ve all felt a little bit like Pink Floyd The Wall.

Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" review of Pink Floyd The Wall - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100224/REVIEWS08/100229987/1023

Key Largo (1948)

2010-11-06T08:43:00.001-07:00

The same year that they collaborated on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, arguably one of the great American films, writer/director John Huston and actor Humphrey Bogart also worked together on another, more traditional film – a gangster throwback called Key Largo. I call the movie a throwback because, while it’s based on a stage play (unseen and unread by me), it to some extent plays like a reworked version of 1936’s The Petrified Forest – which was, coincidentally enough, Humphrey Bogart’s big break as a movie actor. In that film, he played Duke Mantee, a Dillinger-esque gangster holding a roadside restaurant full of people hostage; here, he plays one of the inhabitants of a Florida hotel, held hostage by the Capone-esque gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson).

Key Largo is perfectly aware that it’s trading on our nostalgia for the gangster genre, right from the moment Johnny Rocco first appears on screen. The first half hour of Key Largo is a slow, careful build-up to that moment, as Frank McCloud (Bogart), a Major during World War 2, arrives at the Hotel Largo, located down in the sweltering Florida Keys. He’s come to visit the Hotel’s owner, Mr. Temple (Lionel Barrymore) and his daughter-in-law, Nora (Lauren Bacall); McCloud served with George Temple, Mr. Temple’s daughter and Nora’s husband, during the war, and after George died has returned to pay his respects.

The hotel should be closed for the season – nobody wants to come visit the Florida keys during the summer, when the heat is palpable – but McCloud finds a small gang of unpleasant looking guys congregating in the lobby, along with Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor, who won an Oscar), an alcoholic ex-saloon singer. The men keep insisting to McCloud that he needs to shove off, while all the time ferrying drinks and news up to a mysterious “Boss”, who refuses to come out of his hotel room. It’s only when a hurricane begins blowing into the keys, and the various characters are all forced to huddle together inside the hotel, that McCloud and the Temples learn the true nature of the “visitors” – they’re gangsters, waiting to deliver a batch of counterfeit money, and then head for Cuba.

That’s when we’re finally introduced to Johnny Rocco. It’s arguably one of the great entrances in movie history, and certainly one of the great entrances in gangster movie history; short, chubby Edward G. Robinson, reclining naked in a bathtub with a cheap fan wafting at him, a cigar clamped between his teeth. (“How come it’s hotter at night than in the day? And when it’s raining than when it ain’t?” he’ll ask later.) It’s obvious that Huston intends us to see not just Johnny Rocco, the great gangster, but to see Edward G. Robinson, the great star of the gangster film, returning to the kind of role that made him iconic.

This becomes more and more obvious as Rocco begins to interact with the other characters. He was a big shot once, we learn; he controlled gambling, liquor and any other number of vices. Lately, though, he’s hit hard times – the United States government threw him out of the country, “like I was a dirty red or somethin’!” It’s clear that he and his men have a certain sentimental attachment to those old days when they were the kings of organized crime; at one point, Rocco and another crime boss talk about how they’re going to “bring prohibition back…it won’t be like the old days – the mobs will work together.”

This element of Key Largo’s story – the fading gangster, still clinging desperately to power, not realizing that it’s already passed him by – is far and away the most successful element of the film, in no small part because Robinson is a powerhouse in the role. Little Caesar is maybe the film he’s better remembered for, but Robinson was arguably never better as a gangster than in Key Largo, where he’s the film’s vulgar, tawdry life center. The days of Johnny Rocco really are over, but he doesn’t seem to realize that; and as he holds court in the cramped little hotel, browbeating his former girlfriend Gaye (there’s a painful scene where he humiliates her in front of the others, all for the promise of a drink), poking fun at the sentimentalism of Mr. Temple, he seems so powerful that we indeed believe him when he says that it “took the United States government to pin a rap on me – and they won’t make it stick!”

The other strand of Key Largo’s story – the inner conflict of the Humphrey Bogart character, a war hero who has decided to “give up on causes”, and his burgeoning relationship with Nora – is arguably less successful. Bogart and Bacall are inarguably two of the screen’s great personalities, but Key Largo doesn’t really show them off to their best advantage. In 1948, Bacall was still pretty early in her movie career, and Nora is a far more passive and powerless character than she had played in, say, To Have and Have Not or The Big Sleep; Bacall just feels a little stiff in the role – we don’t quite buy her as the unassuming wife. Bogart, meanwhile, is certainly a star (and arguably an actor) of Robinson’s magnitude, but unlike Robinson, his character feels a little false. Frank McCloud is supposedly a soldier who has turned into a “coward”, a man who has given up on noble causes, after seeing that all the death and destruction of World War 2 did nothing to rid the world of its great evils. Bogart, of course, immortalized a similar character in Casablanca – but unlike Rick Blaine, we never really buy Frank McCloud’s conversion to “I’m only looking out for myself” cynicism, and are basically just marking time until McCloud transforms into the “take charge” Bogart we all know and love. I think the problem is probably in the writing; while Huston and co-writer Richard Brooks have the McCloud character talk a great deal about his fall from idealism, we’re not allowed to really see it, and as such it undermines the character.

Key Largo’s real strength lies in its supporting performances. Its fun to see Thomas Gomez, best remembered for Force of Evil, popping up as Rocco’s right hand man, Curly. (Watch the way he tries, with forced levity, to convince Bogart that they’re really all there for a fishing trip.) Lionel Barrymore, one of the great Hollywood character actors, is marvelous as the wheelchair bound Mr. Temple; best remembered as the venal Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, it’s odd to see him as the almost saintly old man, who becomes the moral voice of the film. (“We rid ourselves of your kind once and for all,” he tells Rocco; “you ain’t comin’ back!”) Claire Trevor too is terrific as the alcoholic Gaye Dawn; we can glimpse beneath that liquor starved façade the “wildcat” that must have attracted Rocco all those years ago, the talented singer and personality that has been, little by little, drunk away.

But this is ultimately Robinson’s film, and he’s the one who makes it work. At Key Largo’s climax, Johnny Rocco finds himself held down at gunpoint by Frank McCloud. (There’s a certain irony here, in that Bogart spent years being gunned down by Robinson and fellow gangster star James Cagney at the end of various gangster epics; now, a good decade later, it’s Bogart who gets to do the shooting.) “You’re not big enough to do this to Rocco!” Robinson impotently screams. He’s still trying to call the shots, refusing to believe that time has passed him by, that the throne he once sat on rotted away long ago. He’s still “the great Johnny Rocco” – even if only in his mind.

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

2010-11-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

The Kentucky Fried Movie begins with a newscaster looking into the camera and saying, “The popcorn you’re eating has been pissed in – film at 11”, and ends with the same newscaster saying, “I’m not wearing any pants – film at 11.” Is it even necessary for me to write any more? Either you’re the audience for this kind of humor, or you’re not – and I must confess, dear reader, with no scruples, that I am the audience for this kind of humor. The Kentucky Fried Movie is gloriously stupid, marvelously silly, and cheerfully offensive – and I intend all those descriptors as positives, not negatives.

The film was written by three guys from Wisconsin named Jerry Zucker, David Zucker and Jim Abrahams, who would go on to (in various combinations) write, direct or otherwise create films like Airplane!, Hot Shots!, Top Secret! and The Naked Gun. (They also created the TV show the Naked Gun films were spun off from, Police Squad!, a marvelous little masterpiece which sadly only lasted six episodes.) Back in the mid seventies, they were still just a bunch of young guys who had been running the “Kentucky Fried Theater”, a sketch show that poked fun at movies, TV commercials, politics, sex, and anything else they could think of. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (‘ZAZ’ for short) were eager to get out to Hollywood, and so with the help of producer Robert K. Weiss, they shot a ten minute short film of some of their skits, in the hopes of inspiring somebody to make a film based on their stage show. That short film attracted the interest of a young man named John Landis, who had directed a low budget spoof called Schlock but had spent the six or so years after that, in his own words, parking a lot of cars. (Landis would go on to direct Animal House after Universal executive Sean Daniel saw Kentucky Fried Movie, and from then on people would be parking his car.)

The film that they produced together has sort of the look and feel of what you and your buddies might have made with a home video camera when you were in high school – assuming you were talented, of course. Kentucky Fried Movie has literally no plot; the film is just a series of sketches that jump from one subject to another, with several fake movie trailers interspersed in between, and a spoof of kung fu films called “A Fistful of Yen” that is just long enough to qualify as the movie’s “feature presentation.” Aside from guest cameos by George Lazenby, Bill Bixby and Donald Sutherland (who are basically making fun of themselves) the movie has no “stars”. The production values are pretty low – when an actor shows up in an ape costume (actually future makeup marvel Rick Baker), it’s pretty obvious that it’s an actor in an ape costume. That slightly cheesy quality actually adds to The Kentucky Fried Movie; some of the movie’s best bits come from spoofs of cheap exploitation films, disaster movies, blaxploitation pictures, and the low production values and straight faced acting only add to the fun.

The skits themselves cover a wide range of territory – especially considering the movie only runs about 80 minutes. There’s the phenomenally tasteless “United Appeal for the Dead”, in which Henry Gibson, as himself, offers (rather horrifying) reassurance that death is not the end. There’s a spoof of courtroom dramas, where puns abound. (It’s especially fun to see all three of the “ZAZ” boys pop up – David Zucker plays a plaintiff, Jim Abrahams is the authoritative television announcer, and Jerry Zucker plays, of all people, the Beaver.) There’s “Cleopatra Schwartz”, a hilarious spoof of pictures like Foxy Brown. Perhaps most infamously, there’s the wondrously dirty “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble”, which promises us “the truth about what happens when girls stay out after curfew!” (“Never has the beauty of the sexual act been so crassly exploited!” the narrator intones.)

I know, I know – a review should not be a list of jokes, but with a movie like this, what more is there to say? The Kentucky Fried Movie is stupid, tasteless, and probably offensive to anyone with a pulse. Either you laugh, or you don’t. I laughed myself silly.

Brother Orchid (1940)

2010-11-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

Edward G. Robinson, like fellow Warner Brothers star James Cagney, is best remembered for playing gangsters, but a closer look at his filmography reveals that he played very few “serious” gangster roles. Everybody remembers him as Caesar Enrico Bandello in Little Caesar, or as diminutive Johnny Rocco in Key Largo. Aside from his wonderful performance in Double Indemnity, those are the films that most people remember Edward G. Robinson for – but Robinson in fact spent much of his career spoofing that gangster image, playing racketeers and crooks in comedies like A Slight Case of Murder and Larceny Inc.

Brother Orchid is one of Robinson’s gangster comedies, a slight little confection about Johnny Sarto, a successful criminal who quits the rackets to go find “class” in Europe. When his efforts prove fruitless – Johnny ends up buying race horses that lose by a mile, and “French antiques” made in Cincinnati – he returns to the U.S., only to find that his old gang doesn’t want him around anymore. Johnny furiously decides to build a new mob to take back power – but through a series of double crosses too complex to relate here, he is shot in the back, and takes refuge at, of all places, a small monastery (!) just outside New York.

Brother Orchid is a patently ludicrous little movie, but then the film never demands that we take it seriously. Earlier, seminal gangster films like Scarface or The Public Enemy had searing pulp immediacy. Brother Orchid makes it clear right from the beginning that it’s more a spoof on the gangster genre. Johnny Sarto may be a racketeer, but he’s not a bad guy; he quits the rackets when he finds out that some of his men have – god forbid! – killed a rival gang member, and there’s not one scene in the film where Johnny uses a gun, either offensively or defensively. The stakes aren’t particularly high in Brother Orchid; it’s clear that the filmmakers are just hoping that we have a good time.

The problem with Brother Orchid is that, while the movie isn’t tough enough to qualify as a great gangster picture, it’s also not quite zany enough to work as a madcap spoof. The movie is just a little too tame to really work as a raucous comedy; the movie basically just casts Eddie Robinson as a gangser "type", and expects that simple fact to generate the laughs. Brother Orchid, then, is ultimately only mildly amusing. The movie’s cast certainly gives it the “old college try”, in spite of the fact that the characters they’re playing barely have one dimension, much less two. Ralph Bellamy is, once again, stuck playing the dopey country bumpkin. You may remember him in basically the same part in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday and Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, and he’s just as good natured about being a dolt here. Robinson is always excellent, and almost makes us believe the ridiculousness of the plot turns, and Ann Sothern is a scene stealer as his “girl Friday” Flo. Flo is essentially a “dumb blonde” type, but Sothern plays her with such energy and good humor that the part never seems mean spirited. Also showing up is Humphrey Bogart as Sarto’s rival Jack Buck. Bogart spent 4 or 5 years at Warner Brothers playing second banana tough guys; in Brother Orchid, he’s playing basically the same character he played in Bullets or Ballots, or Angels with Dirty Faces, or (maybe most successfully) The Roaring Twenties, and it’s clear here that he’s going through the motions, hoping for better scripts.

By the time Brother Orchid reaches its titular gimmick – by the time Robinson’s wounded Sarto is stumbling onto a monastery that is somehow located just outside the Big Apple – the audience has more or less given up on taking the movie seriously, and is just coasting along, enjoying the ride while it lasts. I watched Brother Orchid with my brothers, and after it was over, I asked the youngest what I thought; he told me it “wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad”, and that about sums it up. Brother Orchid is hardly a lost classic of the gangster genre, but it’s an enjoyable piece of fluff, engaging enough for the 90 minutes it takes to watch.

Hereafter (2010)

2010-11-03T08:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard complaints from some people that they were “disappointed” by Clint Eastwood’s new film Hereafter, finding it slow and unsatisfying. I’m inclined to think that their reactions are similar to the dissatisfaction people have expressed for Anton Corbijn’s excellent The American from earlier this year - namely, frustrated expectations. The ads for The American sold an action movie when the film itself was an intense, moody character study, and likewise people might be surprised to find that Hereafter, which is being sold as a sort of cheesy “important picture” about life after death is really more of a quiet, delicate little film about people’s need to understand death, and to come to terms with it.

The story features three different strands. We meet Marie Lelay (Cecile de France), a French journalist who survives a tsunami, and believes she had a “near death” experience – seeing the white light, ect. We meet Marcus, a young boy who is devastated when his identical twin is struck down by a truck. (Real life English twins Frankie and George McLaren play the brothers, with no “Hollywood child acting” in sight.) And we meet George Lonnegan (Matt Damon, marvelous) a former psychic who is now a blue collar worker because he desperately wants to lead a normal life – when his brother (Jay Mohr) tells him that he should be using his gift, he snaps back, “It’s not a gift, Billy – it’s a curse.”

If you’re going to see Hereafter in the hopes of getting an answer to “what happens after death”, I have a feeling you’ll be disappointed. Eastwood has said in interviews that the film’s screenwriter, Peter Morgan, does not believe in life after death; indeed, I’m not really sure whether Eastwood does, either. The film really doesn’t spend much time on the “great beyond”; aside from a few shadowy glimpses of blurry figures standing in backlight, Hereafter more or less shuns depicting the hereafter. What the film is instead about is our curiousity about an afterlife – and, as the critic Roger Ebert puts it, our need for there to be something after death.

The film is, above all, about emotions – about the fear and apprehension that people feel about the possibility that there’s nothing else after the “lights turn out.” After his brother is killed, Marcus, who was always the shyer and more reticent of the two brothers, living in his sibling’s shadow, desperately seeks some kind of answer. He meets with a whole series of quack psychiatrists and doctors (Eastwood gets both humor and pathos in this segment, playing the ludicrousness of “highly attuned psychic microphones” off the pained and confused face of the little boy), all of whom are quickly revealed as frauds and posers. Their job is to convince people there is a life after death not because they believe it to be true, but because it makes people feel good and hence makes money.

The film presents us with only two characters that are honest about the subject of the afterlife. Marthe Keller plays a doctor Marie visits who has collected evidence of shared visions and over the years from near death survivors; while she’s hardly religious, she insists that they must be sharing something in common. The other character who might have some insight into life after death is the psychic, George, but it’s not insight he’s quick to share. Being a psychic has made him into a “freak”; whenever he touches someone’s hand, makes a “connection”, he immediately knows private, personal things about them that should have remained secret, and there’s a painful scene where a possible romantic encounter with a flighty young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard, wonderful) ends in pain and embarrassment for both parties. George truly seems to have a gift, but even that doesn’t give him full insight into the mystery of death. When at the end a character asks him “you’ve done all those readings…shouldn’t you know?”, George can only sadly reply no.

I imagine that kind of quiet inconclusiveness will be frustrating for a certain audience member. The entire film, indeed, is a test of patience for today’s attention deficit audiences. In Eastwood’s capable hands, the story is not played for big, sweeping drama; aside from the sound and fury of the opening tsunami sequence, Hereafter is content to be a quiet, thoughtful film, and its three storylines (which don’t finally intersect until almost the very end) stay at a pretty low boil. I, for my part, was charmed and touched by the film, which suggests that even if there isn’t a life after death, it may be necessary for us to believe that there is. There’s an interesting moment late in the film, where it’s implied that George is lying to another character, telling them of a communication with the beyond that may or may not be occurring. Ask yourself – is his lie an act of cowardice, or of compassion?

Roger Ebert's Review of "Hereafter" - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101019/REVIEWS/101019979

Roger Ebert's Journal: "Your new age, and mine" - http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/10/your_new_age_and_mine.html

"The Most Exciting Drama of Our Times!"

2010-11-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

Public interest in the cinema is hardly a modern phenomenon. Surveying issues of the St. Cloud Daily Times from July 1932 makes clear that, even in relatively rural Minnesota, Hollywood glamour was as much an enticement for readers then as it is today. To be sure, there are obvious differences; many of the ads and stories of 1932 no doubt look hopelessly quaint to modern readers in their attempts to peddle Tinsletown glamour. But it might be argued that these differences are really only skin deep. As much as thing change, they stay the same – and in many ways, movie marketers still rely on the same glamour, spectacle and even sensationalism to lure in audiences as they did seventy eight years ago.

Seventy eight years – it seems ages ago, doesn’t it? Indeed, for modern readers the world of 1932 seems like a different dimension. The nation was mired in a “great depression”; prohibition was still the (hotly contested) law of the land, with a July 1st article stating that “the drys (sic) will war without compensation” (p. 1). Yet for all these obvious differences, 1932 had eerie similarities to our present day. At a time when the nation was facing severe economic crisis, the Democratic Party stepped in and took political power. Will Rodgers, the popular humorist and film star, had a nationally syndicated column at the time, and on July 6th he joked that constituents could vote “both Democrat and also Republican (if anyone was humorous enough to run on such a ticket here)” (p. 1). Indeed, virtually no mention is made of Republican candidates in the July issues of the St. Cloud Daily Times – the only times Republican president Herbert Hoover was mentioned, it was in critical headlines like “Hoover Declines to Grant Interview of Vet’s Spokesperson” (7/16/32, p. 1). The Democrats, by contrast, had become overnight stars; the July 1st issue of the Daily Times devoted much of its copy space to detailing the democratic caucus, and page 12 of the July 2nd paper consisted almost entirely of photos from the same event.

On a more local level, the St. Cloud of 1932 was a very different place from that which we know today. It was a time when the city was still relatively rural; Minnesota was a farming state, and St. Cloud was still small enough that the July 19th school board race was deemed worthy of a front page headline. Under the church news bulletin, only six churches were listed – all Christian denominations, of course. Far from today’s glut of cable channels, only two radio stations – WCCO and KSTP – were listed, and when the Al G. Barnes Circus came to town, promising the “Monster Lipped Ubangi Savages from Congo Africa” for only 50 cents general admission, it was a big attraction (7/1/32, p. 5).

The times, then, were simpler – and the movie going experience was also simpler. In the modern age of the multiplex, when we open the “Arts and Entertainment” section to a sea of movie listings, 1932 looks like an entertainment wasteland. This was a time when the entire paper was 16 pages – approximately the length of one section today. The movie ads were plunked next to the “Dear Dorothy” letter column, usually on page six or seven; ads were typically only placed by two theaters – the Paramount and the Grand – with the Strand occasionally chiming in. Rather than a wide selection of films, each theater would play one movie for a two or three day run, finally leaving to make room for the next bit of studio product. The Paramount Theater advertised two shows a day, one at 1:45 and one at 7:15, for a quarter and thirty cents respectively. That money got you not just a movie, but a newsreel and several short subjects as well. (This is one practice theater owners, with their ridiculously inflated ticket prices, really ought to bring back.) It was a time when the fact that theaters were air conditioned was a major selling point, with the State Theater inviting potential viewers to “Enjoy our washed air cooler” (7/2/32, p. 6).

In many ways, what audiences looked for when they went to the theater in 1932 was just as different as the movie going experience. Unlike today, when studios sell mostly sequels or films cashing in on trends, stars were the major attraction for film goers of 1932. People went to see personalities on the screen as much as stories, and the ads of that July are emblazoned with them. An ad for the James Cagney starring vehicle Winner Take All, for example, doesn’t give the slightest indication of what the film’s story is about. It doesn’t even print the actor’s full name; it simply announces “CAGNEY”, in bold letters, accompanied by a picture of the actor’s face in a Public Enemy-style grimace. By 1932, Cagney was a major rising star with a set persona – brash, energetic, sometimes ruthless, sometimes violent – and the tagline for Winner Take All played off that image, saying of Cagney’s character: “He’s a blonde crazy fightin’ fool with ‘sock appeal. He woos ‘em with wallops – and they love it!” (7/5/32, p. 6). Clearly Warner Brothers felt that audiences would respond more strongly to Cagney’s screen persona than to a plot summary; the ads for Winner Take All promised that, regardless of the story, audiences would be getting plenty of the qualities that had made Cagney a household name.

This approach – selling the star rather than the story – was typical. Warner Brothers sold Two Seconds as “the dramatic sensation that will carry” the film’s star, Edward G. Robinson, “to the peak of screen greatness” (7/1/32, p. 6); starlet Kay Francis was “more daring, more devastatingly beautiful than ever” in Street of Women (7/5/32, p. 6); The Washington Masquerade showcased star Lionel Barrymore as “the screen’s idol in his greatest role since ‘A Free Soul’” (7/26/32, p. 6). Today, when there are arguably only a few actors with the power to sell a movie (Johnny Depp and George Clooney jump to mind), it’s strange to think of a time when stars were the whole package; people came out in large part because of the name on the marquee.

Those names needn’t have necessarily been big stars; back in 1932, even supporting actors were listed in ads for movies. Character actor Guy Kibbee’s name was listed on ads for Winner Take All, and supporting players Mae Marsh and Ralph Bellamy were prominently named in promos for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. While Hollywood supporting players never achieved the status of Grant or Garbo or Gable, they still were granted a certain prestige. These performers typically specialized in playing certain “types” – Kibbee, for example, portrayed many a rotund comic figure, and Bellamy was especially good at playing dopey country boys – and when audiences saw their names, they looked forward to seeing them on screen as much as the stars. Those names meant something; in the 1930s, presences and personalities were what sold movies, much more than high concepts or catchphrases.

It’s important to note, however, that those “presences and personalities” were carefully crafted and maintained by the studios. Hollywood was selling glamour, not reality; the ideal was always to keep movie stars slightly out of arm’s reach, slightly untouchable. Ads for Paramount’s Merrily We Go to Hell are interesting because of the discrepancy between the story being sold, and the image presented. The tagline for Merrily We Go to Hell promises high stakes drama, even melodrama, in all its messy glory:

What She Wanted – was days and nights of tender love…the fulfillment of her girlhood dreams! What She Gets – In her, an awakening, she is appalled by marriage as it IS! He’s made a wife of her…Now she’s got to hold him – but how? (7/2/32, p. 6)

In stark contrast to the luridness of the tagline, the ad itself depicts stars Sylvia Sidney and Frederic March in classic, “studio portrait” tradition; smiling romantically at each other, faces in perfectly lit profile, glowing among a blanket of (literal) stars. Classical Hollywood mostly avoided the grit and dirt of real life, striving to make sure that its stars always looked glamorous and beautiful – because that glamour and beauty was the mystique the whole Hollywood apparatus was built on.

This “kid gloves” approach carried over to “celebrity gossip” of the time. In July 1932, as now, the private lives of movie stars was always good for sparking reader interest, but it’s remarkable how innocent yesterday’s celebrity news seems compared to today’s tabloid fodder. Most of the stories from that July are about sweet, wholesome subject matter, like movie star births; a July 1st blurb features a heartwarming picture of movie actress Mary Astor, and introduces her daughter Marylyn, “held by her mother for her picture in Honolulu, the infant’s birthplace” (p. 3). Even a Hollywood divorce was discussed in surprisingly tasteful tones; in the split of Alfred C. Reed Jr. and actress Claire Windsor, Reed, ever the gentleman, “took the blame in the case” (7/18/32, p. 5). Only one item feels lurid enough to appear on modern gossip pages – a story about the Hollywood actress Lina Basquette, who attempted to poison herself following a broken romance with the fighter Jack Dempsey, addressing her suicide note to him: “I love you. Only you. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t go on without you.” (7/29/32, p. 1).

That kind of lurid romanticism, it might be argued, has always been the backbone of movie marketing. The movies from 1932 may have presented a glamorous package, but beneath that veneer they more often than not promised spectators all sorts of illicit goings on. Just look at the titles of some of the films from that July: Merrily We Go to Hell, Forgotten Commandments, Scandal for Sale, Sinners in the Sun. To put it generously, these are not understated titles; they’re broad and melodramatic, emphasizing the most sensationalistic elements of the film for potential spectators.

Ads continued that sensationalistic trend. The movie taglines of 1932 were zesty and energetic, and what they lacked in subtlety they more than made up for in vividness. Make Me a Star, for example, framed its tale of Tinsletown treachery with this memorable line: “I’ll Pay Any Price/I’ll Slave/suffer…starve…Only – Make Me a Star.” (7/6/32, p. 6) Even better is the tagline for Lady and Gent, so melodramatic it’s almost dripping:

“My Idea of Night Life Ain’t Singin’ No Kid To Sleep!” To her, a speak-easy was Home, Sweet Home. To him a fight-ring was the family circle. Until a youngster from nowhere took them over – and made them over! (7/30/32, p. 6)

That kind of lurid salesmanship was really Hollywood’s bread and butter – so much so that it got the industry into trouble. As early as Eugene Sandow, the movies had promises audiences something a little scandalous – but lest the prudes cry foul, Hollywood ads more often than not seemed to bend over backwards to disguise their racy content. Cecil B. DeMille’s Forgotten Commandments, for example, comes with a pulp title and an equally pulpy tagline – “How long would your marriage last? If 150 million people laughed at your marriage vows!” (7/2/32, p. 6) – but wraps it in a moralistic veneer, telling us that the film is “Glorified by spectacular episodes from the Cecil B. DeMille epic ‘The Ten Commandments’”; a July 4th ad for the same film even tells us to “Make the Fourth a real Holiday…enjoy this splendid program with the entire family” (7/4/32, p. 6)! Similarly, ads for the Jean Harlow vehicle Red Headed Woman played up the actress’ “sexpot” image: “…Is it true about the red headed girl?...Is she different from other women?...Learn for yourself the secret of this flaming child of nature…whose crimson tresses reflect the fire in her heart…” (7/18/32, p. 7) But a special (and carefully worded) box within the ad reads: “Please note: Red Headed Woman…appeals to the adult mind, and while not offensive to the most refined tastes, it will neither interest nor entertain the children!”

Modern readers may laugh a little at the luridness of these taglines and titles; by our standards, what was offered in 1932 seems pretty tame. Illicit love! Unhappy marriages! Backstage drama! All these subjects were (at least for more conservative sectors of the public) downright scandalous at the time, but are old news today, and it’s easy for us to just shake our heads and laugh – at least, until we open up the paper, and see those tactics alive and well in our own modern movie marketing. A persuasive argument might be made that studios are still primarily selling sensationalism to the movie going public. Horror movie ads always promise the most horrific, gruesome violence, and even the trailers for David Fincher’s recent The Social Network made careful use of that film’s (very limited) sexual content – because, as the saying goes, sex sells. The same “illicitness” that was used to sell movies in July of 1932 is still peddled today; the tools are just subtler, and in an odd way less sincere.

That’s perhaps the most interesting lesson to take away from these old ads and stories. On the surface, movie news from July of 1932 looks and feels completely alien; there’s an "innocence" to these old ads that the big news corporations and tabloid journals have rendered obsolete, and in so many ways the movie going landscape of that bygone era seems like just a nostalgic memory. But look closer – because movie marketers are still, in many ways, using the same familiar tropes and lurid sales pitches to entice us to the theater. Now, instead of stars with set personalities, we’re lured by movie franchises with set storylines; now, instead of the rather tame sensationalism of 1932, we get rampant sex, drugs and violence. Much to the chagrin of moralists everywhere, the movies continue to sell sin, and do it in style.

Les Demoiselles De Rochefort (1967)

2010-11-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

At first glance, Jacques Demy’s Les demoiselles de Rochefort (English translation: The Young Girls of Rochefort) might seem like nothing more than a trifle. It most certainly meets those criteria; Le demoiselles de Rochefort is a joyous confection from beginning to end, and takes great delight in its status as such. But it is also, in its subtle, effortless way, much more than that. Demy’s film can be seen as a loving comment on, tribute to and even parody of the classic Hollywood musical, mythologizing the form at the same time it gently sends it up; and moreover, Demy introduces in both his screenplay and lyrics deeper themes and ideas, just beneath the surface of the sophisticated veneer.

As its title suggests, the film takes place in the city of Rochefort; the story spans the course of one weekend, as a carnival rolls into town. The opening sequence depicts the arrival of the carnies, via trucks. They’re young, vibrant; they’ve obviously been driving for hours, and as they park the trucks on a suspension bridge that will carry them across the river, they stretch in the morning sun. Gradually, their stretching, their movements, become unified, choreographed to the flow and ebb of Michel Legrand’s glorious score. The camera itself becomes choreographed, gliding with the dancers or leaping up for a Busby Berkely-esque aerial shot, looking down at tiny figures from the bridge’s highest peak. (This entire opening sequence is a visual marvel – one can only wonder at how Demy and his crew, including cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, accomplished it.) The metaphor is as obvious as it is apt; as the same time the carnies are traveling to the town of Rochefort, they are also ascending to the lofty plain of the musical, a magical space where emotion can only be expressed through song and dance. For Demy, both those spaces – only real, one conceptual – become intertwined; Rochefort in this film is as much a state of being as a physical place, a marvelous, incandescent stage upon which a glorious cast of characters will play out their fortunes.

We are gradually introduced to all these characters, and to the various webs of interconnection between them. Two of the carnies, Etienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale) are by their own description traveling companions with a girl in every port. (It’s telling that the way the two make their living is by selling motorcycles – another form of transportation, facilitating life on the “open road.”) As the carnival sets up in Rochefort’s town square, the two begin frequenting a local fry stand; it’s run by Yvonne Garnier (Danielle Darrieux), whose beautiful twin daughters, Solange and Delphine (Francoise Dorleac and Catherine Deneuve, sisters in real life), run a dance studio. Solange is an aspiring composer, Delphine a dancer; for musical supplies, the two visit the shop of Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli), who they do not know is their mother’s former lover. Dame believes that Solange is extremely talented, and wants to introduce her to his old friend, the American composer Andrew Miller (Gene Kelly) – who just so happens to run into Solange that very day, igniting “love at first sight”. Delphine has her own romantic complications; desired by the pragmatic art dealer Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles), she realizes that a painting hanging in his gallery, a portrait of the artist’s “ideal”, looks exactly like her. The painter, Maxence (Jacques Perrin), is a young soldier with artistic ambitions – who spends much of his time at Madame Garnier’s fry stand…

If all this is making your head spin, don’t be alarmed. Le demoiselles de Rochefort’s playfulness can be glimpsed from the outset, in the convoluted nature of its story. Demy clearly takes great delight in constructing a tangled web of characters, and then devoting the rest of the film to showing how those characters intersect (or don’t intersect) at various times. There’s a certain cheerful silliness to the way that the film asks us to accept the essential ludicrousness of its premise. Surely, in a town as small as Rochefort, Andrew Miller should suspect that the beautiful young composer he ran into and the beautiful young composer Simon Dame is mentions might be the same person; surely Solange should notice that Dame’s tale of his lover – a beautiful woman who had twin daughters by another suitor – sounds suspiciously like her own mother; surely Yvonne Garnier should realize that Simon Dame runs a music shop in the very same town where she lives and works. Demy’s film understands the ridiculous nature of all these coincidences, and rather than ask us to believe wholeheartedly in them, the film accepts and even celebrates its essential ludicrousness, with an almost childlike glee. Characters’ not being able to connect the dots becomes a running theme throughout the film. It takes Etienne and Bill inordinately long to understand that Solange and Delphine are twins, and their confusion is symptomatic of all the film’s characters. Demy’s film plays like screwball comedy; the characters in the film are constantly (both literally and metaphorically speaking) just missing each other.

The fact that Demy’s film embraces its own ridiculousness – celebrates it, even – is just one of the many ways that Demy pays tribute to Hollywood musicals. For if nothing else, Les demoiselles de Rochefort is a clear and glowing homage to the great musicals of the thirties, forties and fifties. Demy is clearly in love with the genre, and in this film not only tips his hat to it but even mythologizes it. It’s no accident that one of the great musical stars, Gene Kelly, appears here. He may be playing “Andrew Miller”, but from his sly dialogue about “returning to Paris” (an obvious nod to Vincent Minnelli’s An American in Paris), and from the way that he is introduced in mythologizing close-up, it’s clear that he’s really portraying Gene Kelly, the great icon of the musical cinema. Few films have made more obvious – or more apt – use of a movie stars; Demy conjures Gene Kelly not only for his wonderful skills as actor and dancer, but also to recreate some of the glorious, giddy spirit of classic Hollywood.

It’s a spirit that the movie infectiously celebrates. If Les demoiselles de Rochefort is not wall to wall with musical numbers, it certainly feels like it; the result is a film bursting with energy. The construction of the carnival is conveyed through a marvelous and carefully choreographed dance routine, and the carnies celebrate not just their arrival but life, love and the brilliance of musical expression. Everyone in the film’s Rochefort seems to sing and dance; when Delphine walks down the street to visit Guillaume, the passerby dance with and around her, as if responding to her inner energy. Guillaume, in fact, is one of the few characters in the film unable to express himself through song, a telling detail. He’s a cold man, obsessed with money, who wants to own Delphine more than love her. We first see him making art by shooting balloons to splash paint on a canvas; his art is like him, cold and detached, and so we’re not surprised that the closest he can come to musical expression is singing a few short, staccato lines during one song. For these characters, music – and musical expression – is life.

The same might be said for Demy, who makes his film a glittering, sometimes dizzying edifice to the musical genre. When Solange, Delphine, Etienne and Bill meet to discuss the possibility of the sisters performing at the carnival, they finally become united over the course of – guess what – a musical number. Each character sings, dances, plays multiple instruments; they move through any number of musical styles and genres, from classical music to the jazz sound of Louis Armstrong, even sneaking in a cheeky reference to Michel Legrand. Music is the life force of Les demoiselles de Rochefort; even when Demy’s characters aren’t singing, it seems as if they are. In one scene, the characters dine together at Madame Garnier’s fry stand, and their dialogue transforms into rhyming couplets, so effortlessly that we might not notice. Demy’s lyrics are similarly playful; they become like children’s word games, effervescent and fun, and in a way all of the characters in the film are like children, imitating the stars of a great Hollywood musical they have just seen. Little wonder that for their performance, Delphine and Solange do an almost step for step imitation of Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Demy’s film may be in love with musicals, but at the same time, it recognizes some of their limitations, and has the bravery to comment on them, even kid them. The entire plot – the stunning coincidences that lead to inevitable happy endings – might be read as self parody; Demy knows that we know how the story has to turn out, and so takes great delight in making the journey as convoluted as possible, toying with our expectations at key moments. Les demoiselles de Rochefort builds to a climax where the audience knows that all of the characters must finally understand the webs of chance that have link them – and then frustrates us, having characters enter and exit just a few seconds too late. You can sense audience members grow apprehensive toward the end of the film, as Maxence and Delphine seem to come closer and closer together without meeting – will they, or won’t they? You can sense Demy smiling behind the camera, delighting in being able to mess around with storytelling conventions and stretch them to the breaking point.

He also stretches the stylistic conventions of musicals to the breaking point – perhaps even beyond. The classic Hollywood musicals were shot largely on back lots and soundstages, and took place in a heightened, artificial world, more about showmanship than reality. In keeping with the tenants of the French New Wave, Demy stages most of the scenes in Les demoiselles de Rochefort in the real city (which, by the way, still holds an annual celebration in honor of the film), but transforms it, through his use of color and set design, into a gloriously artificial set. The colors of both the locations and the costumes are vibrant, even flamboyant; there’s one astonishing shot where we see Delphine, in a bright yellow gown, posed against an equally bright yellow wall. Throughout the film, Demy pushes aesthetics, to the point of tongue in cheek. Simon Dame’s music shop, for example, is a wholly artificial looking space, with blinding white floor, ceiling and counters, and musical instruments literally hanging off the walls. Likewise, the costumes are bright and vivid; they look like an explosion in a candy store. Demy is taking the visual flamboyance of those old Hollywood musicals – their willingness to stylistically go one step further – and pushing it almost into the realm of camp – but in a loving, affectionate way, that honors as much as it parodies.

So Les demoiselles de Rochefort perfectly qualifies as a merry romp. In fact, Demy described it as a change of pace after his previous, much darker Les parapluies de Cherbourg. But Demy goes one step further – his musical is willing to explore subject matter that the average Hollywood musical wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. Sexuality, for one, gets a positively radical redefinition. Delphine and Solange, our twin heroines, are completely open about their sexual appetites; it’s clear that the two are hardly virgins, and during their first number, they teasingly mention the fact that they both share a birthmark – which can be seen when they’re undressed. They’re two single women living together, who seem to have no desire to “settle” for just any man, and accept the comforts of a stable home; they are independent, free spirited, determined to leave for Paris and become artists. This depiction of female characters was still shocking in 1967. The film even kids it – when being shown the gowns they’ll wear for the carnival show, Delphine asks, wryly, “Won’t we look like whores?”

The film’s sexual politics become even more complicated and, for the time, even revolutionary. The two carnies, Bill and Etienne, are open about the fact that what they're really interested in doing is sleeping with Solange and Delphine. A roll in the hay, and then it’s on to the next town, and the next girl; as they say themselves in one musical number, their real affection is for each other. (The bisexual/homosexual subtext here is pretty obvious.) Madame Garnier is an interesting figure of female liberation; she is perfectly open about the fact that she’s had three children by two different fathers, neither of whom she’s married to, and she ran out on Dame specifically because of his last name. Being identified as “Madame Dame” was just too narrow a definition of femininity for this liberated woman. Dame, meanwhile, tells Andrew Miller he may be in love with Solange, who he does not realize is his own daughter. All works itself out conventionally in the end – Dame ends up with Madame Garnier, not Solange (to paraphrase the last line of the screenplay of Some Like It Hot, that’s a story the public might not be ready for) – but the element of potential incest remains. Les demoiselles deals with the matter lightly, even jokingly, just as it does with any number of social and sexual issues; but the fact remains that through that joking tone, the film approaches subject matter no Hollywood film of the time would dare to touch.

There’s also a dark underbelly to Demy’s light fantasy, lurking just beneath the surface. There’s an elderly, rather meek looking man named Dutrouz who frequents the fry stand, and who seems quite pleasant and amiable; at dinner, he begs off cutting a cake, insisting that he doesn’t know what to do with knives. That dialogue turns out to be darkly ironic, for we learn that Dutrouz has murdered a famous French actress, one Lola; he pursued her for years, and when his spurned affections could take it no longer, he chopped her into pieces. The film deals with this subject matter with the same light touch – there’s even a musical number (!) detailing the discovery of the body – but it’s a surprisingly dark plot development. Love in the classic musicals was always a triumphant force, a saving grace for the characters, and it is that in this film as well; but as Demy hints, life does not always work out like it does in the movies, and sometimes the passion and vibrancy that the musical represents can pollute and transform itself into bitterness, even hate.

That might be said to be the major subtext of the film – the fact that there is, around this magical space of Rochefort, a world which is going insane. When Maxence’s regiment of soldiers marches through, they represent the antithesis of everything the musical stands for. Demy loves the fantasy of the musical, and believes in what it represents, but he’s too mature to ignore the fact that sometimes the promise fails; sometimes real life has a way of bringing us back to Earth. When, at the end of Les demoiselles de Rochefort, he finally provides us with an almost deliriously happy ending, you can almost hear him whispering, “You know it doesn’t always work out this way. I know it doesn’t always work out this way. But wouldn’t the world be lovelier if it were so?” The last shot of the film, so beautiful, so delicate, contains within it all those tensions. Maxence and Delphine, each other’s "ideals", finally meet, but we do not see the result. Demy has conjured them – and their love, for that matter – as a fantasy; to show us more – to bring cold reality into the equation – would destroy the magic.

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

2010-10-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, a movie need not do anything more than create characters that we like, and I really liked all the characters in The Kids Are All Right. This is a wonderful little film that deals with some potentially hot button issues – marital infidelity, same sex relationships – but does so in such a sweet and unassuming way that we find ourselves concentrating on human beings rather than politics. The film is about a gay couple, yes, but in terms of the issues it deals with it could be about any couple.

The film stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as Jules and Nic, a lesbian couple with two kids, Joni and Laser (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson). We sense right from the start that their relationship, while healthy, has its tensions; Jules is a free spirit can’t seem to decide on a career, while Nic, a doctor, is a perfectionist and even a bit of a neurotic. The two like to pride themselves on their openness with their kids – but all the same, they’re shocked when, without consulting them, Joni and Laser seek out their sperm donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Paul is a nice enough guy, but not necessarily the world’s greatest role model; we can see that Nic squirms a little when, at a “family dinner”, Paul admits that he quit college after a year, that he’s unmarried, that he doesn’t really have any prescribed goals. Tensions long stagnant within the family unit begin to simmer when Paul enters the picture. Joni, always the “perfect kid”, begins to demonstrate a rebellious streak as she heads to college; at one point, she even rides on the back of Paul's motorcycle, an activity expressly forbid by “the moms”. And Jules, who’s currently working as a “landscape designer” (not a gardener, she emphatically insists), is hired by Paul to redo his backyard – and finds herself being sexually attracted toward Paul…

First and foremost, The Kids Are All Right is absolutely wonderfully acted. If its three leads don’t all get Oscar nominations, it will be a crime. Julianne Moore is so effervescent as Jules that it’s not hard for us to understand why both Nic and Paul would be attracted to Jules, in spite of her shortcomings. Ruffalo is likewise splendid at inhabiting all of Paul’s contradictions. He’s a thoroughly irresponsible person who seems to be having casual sex with three different women simultaneously and who has a terrible habit of putting his foot in his mouth (see the scene where he gently tells Nic that she’s maybe a bit overprotective; it’s not necessarily bad advice, but it’s certainly a bad time to be delivering it, and he’s the wrong person to do so); but all the same, we sense that he’s really a good guy, and we’re almost as surprised as he is by how deeply he cares about his two “kids” after he meets them. The best performance in the movie, however, may well be by Annette Bening, who takes a stock character – the neurotic mother – and gives it such depth and humanity that we believe her implicitly.

The Kids Are All Right takes these characters – and the titular “kids”, wonderfully played by Wasikowska and Hutcherson – and allows them to play off one another. The movie is, above all, astutely observed; there’s really very little plot to speak of, and most of the film’s running time is devoted to simple dialogue exchanges, to watching the way these characters interact. Because the writing and acting are of such a high caliber, we don’t mind at all. The Kids Are All Right is proof positive that a movie does not need explosions and pyrotechnics to create suspense; that it doesn’t need pratfalls or puns to get laughs. Instead, co-writer/director Lisa Cholodenko is content to let us observe her characters, get to know and like them.

That last verb – “like” – is important here, because we ultimately like all the characters in The Kids Are All Right. It’s easy to imagine what a “Hollywood” version of this film would’ve looked and felt like; it would’ve had to have been an “important movie” on an “important subject”, with all sorts of references to politics and Proposition 8 and weepy speeches by its leads. In The Kids Are All Right, however, we’re presented with a much messier picture. Nobody in this movie is a villain, but nobody’s a saint either; Paul is a nice enough guy who really needs to grow up, and Nic and Jules, while loving and happy, don’t have a perfect relationship by any stretch of the imagination. There’s an extremely moving scene late in the film where Jules more or less sums up the moral of the movie – “Marriage is really f_cking hard” - and it’s a moral that holds just as true for gay or straight couples. The Kids Are All Right isn’t about politics; it’s about people – people whom we come to know, like and even love over the course of two hours.
Roger Ebert's Review of The Kids Are All Right - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100707/REVIEWS/100709988/1023
Jim Emerson's Scanners "The Kids Are All Right: Taut editing, stunning effects - http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2010/08/kids_are_all_right.html#more

Blackmail (1929)

2010-10-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

When he was shooting Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock had not yet become “Alfred Hitchcock”. It would be another decade or so until he left for America and began directing the string of pictures for which he’s best known: Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, and so forth. Back in late 1920s, Hitchcock was just a young director stuck (as he saw it) in the English film industry. He had few resources to work with, and was essentially inventing his filmmaking techniques as he went along. Blackmail was originally planned as a silent film, but by the time shooting began, sound had come to motion pictures, and so Blackmail became the first sound film of both Hitchcock and Great Britain.

The plot is simple: Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating a policeman (John Longden) but simulatenously carrying on a flirtation with Mr. Crewe (Cyril Ritchard), an artist. One night, the artist manages to lure Alice up to his studio, where he tries to rape her; in a panic, she reaches for the first object her hand finds – a knife – and kills the rapist. She’s wracked by guilt over what she’s done, but there is another complication – a local thief, Tracey (Donald Calthrop), has witnessed the murder, and wants some compensation in exchange for keeping quiet…

Blackmail’s plot is excessively basic, even for a film that runs just over 80 minutes; the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” television series used to do this kind of story in about a fourth of the running time. The film’s characters don’t even strive toward two dimensions, much less three; they’re all excessively basic and uninteresting characterizations, from the stalwart policeman to the slimy thief to the terrified heroine. In many ways, Blackmail feels a lot more like a silent film; it’s a movie that emphasizes mood over plot, image over character.

Indeed, Blackmail exists in two forms – a silent version, and a sound version which was cobbled together from bits of the silent film and other material shot especially by Hitchcock for the new format. I’ve read that the silent version is supposed to be superior, and indeed, the sound Blackmail often feels like a Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together rather haphazardly. Lead actress Anny Ondra had a thick Czech accent, and because post dubbing technology was in its infancy, the film had to be shot with another actress, Joan Barry, sitting just off camera and reciting the dialogue, while Ondra mouthed the words. It adversely affects Ondra’s performance; she seems rather slow and stiff in the film. Indeed, a lot of the acting in Blackmail is slow and stiff; we’re in an era when actors were still told to speak slowly and enunciate clearly, lest the microphone not pick them up, and many of the dialogue scenes in Blackmail almost play like sub-par Sergio Leone in terms of their leisurely cadence.

Hitchcock was clearly struggling with the new technology, and it’s sort of perversely fun to see the future master of cinema darting about like a schoolboy, using fancy footwork to cover up technical limitations. Shots from the silent version are spliced in that look and feel totally different from the sound footage; it’s odd to see Ondra mugging in an expressionistic close-up, and then cut to her acting naturalistically in the medium shot. A number of scenes are filmed by putting the camera on character’s backs, so that dialogue can be dubbed in later; likewise, sound effects often seem to be laid thick over silent footage, in an attempt to fool us.

In spite of the film’s technical limitations clumsiness, it’s hard not to admire it just the same. When he made Blackmail, Hitchcock was rapidly becoming Britain’s most celebrated director, and one of his great skills was making the best of the industries’ severe technical limitations. (One of the main reasons he bailed for Hollywood was that America had an infinitely more advanced film industry.) At a time when most directors were still trying to deal with the where of sound on film, Hitchcock was experimenting with it, transforming it to become another element of his storytelling. There’s a famous sequence in Blackmail where, the night after the murder, a rather intrusive woman comes to the store where Alice lives with her parents, and babbles on and on about the knife killing. After awhile, her speech becomes distorted and inaudible – except for the word “knife”, which rings out clearly to the terrified Alice. Today, the effect seems a little obvious, but in 1929 nobody was experimenting with sound the way Hitchcock was; there’s another scene where he cuts on sound, going from a shot of Alice screaming to a shot of a maid screaming as she discovers a dead body. (Hitchcock would essentially repeat this same gag in The 39 Steps, when he overlapped an image of a woman screaming with the sound of a train whistle.)

Hitchcock also shows in Blackmail that he was already quickly becoming a visual stylist. Hitchcock apparently watched F.W. Murnau shoot when he visited Germany, and in its visuals, Blackmail shows the influence of German expressionism. The most effective passages in the film are arguably the most visual, with no dialogue or sound effects whatsoever: the opening prologue depicting a policeman’s daily routine, for example, is masterful in its economy, and the later scene of Alice catatonically leaving the scene of the murder is equally brilliantly staged. These purely visual – purely cinematic – sequences have a power and energy that much of the rest of the film, encumbered by the technical limitations of sound technology circa 1929, lacks.

Blackmail, then, is arguably most interesting as a historical curiosity. In this film, we get a glimpse of the early Alfred Hitchcock. Many of his thematic and even stylistic tenants are already in place: we get perhaps the earliest of Hitchcock’s many blondes-in-peril, we have the murder mystery backdrop, we have the visual flourishes, and we even get an early Hitchcock cameo. (It’s one of his more amusing, as he’s tortured by an irritating little boy on a train.) But it’s not carried off with all of the typical brilliance. In 1929, Hitchcock was still near the beginning of his career, still making things up as he went along, still honing his craft. Here, he was still a schoolboy; it would be a few more years, until pictures like The 39 Steps and Sabotage, before he would come into his own as the master.

Alfred Hitchcock and Anny Ondra: Sound Test for Blackmail - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6SMOSXa7A

Breaking the Sound Barrier: Hitchcock's Blackmail(s) - http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/breaking-the-sound-barrier-hitchcocks-blackmails/

Yojimbo (1960)

2010-10-14T07:50:00.000-07:00

Yojimbo opens with an astonishing vista: a distant mountain range, beautiful and austere. A human figure – a samurai – steps into frame, his profile symbolically linked with the mountains; he seems enormous, even mythic in stature. The music is grand, booming low tones – and then something funny happens: the samurai rolls his shoulders, a little irritably, and a hand emerges from the back of his cloak to scratch at his neck. As the music swings to a jazzier sound, we realize with a wry smile that our first impressions have been undercut; unlike the heroic, larger than life figures in so many samurai films, this samurai seems very human, very ruffled and insouciant, even a little goofy.

It is, the opening titles inform us, a time of transition; the old social system has fallen apart, and many samurai have found themselves master less, out of work. That’s where we initially find our main character (Toshiro Mifune); he’s wandering aimlessly, and when he needs to decide which direction to go at a fork in the road, he throws a stick in the air and, when it lands, walks in the direction it points. That leads him to a town which, we quickly learn, is rife with corruption and violence. Almost the first thing the samurai sees is a small dog trotting along with a severed hand in its mouth; the town has two rival gang bosses, Seibei and Ushitora, and they have turned it into a hellhole. The local inn owner tells the samurai to take some sake and get the hell out of town, but the samurai, with a wry smile, tells him, “I like it here. I think I’ll stay.”

His motivation at first seems to be mere profit; the samurai will hire himself out as a bodyguard (the literal translation of the film’s title) to the highest bidder. A gang war seems to him as good an opportunity as any to get paid to do what he does, which is kill people; when a character chastises him for worrying about money more than a samurai should, he says pragmatically, “It’s dangerous work, and only worth it for a good price.” As the film goes along, however, we begin to sense that that simple pragmatism is concealing something else; it becomes more and more obvious that what the samurai is really doing is not so much working for either side as playing them off against each other, stirring up the town to a boiling point. “This town is full of men who would be better off dead,” he tells the innkeeper.

Director Akira Kurosawa apparently said that one of his primary inspirations for Yojimbo was Dashiell Hammett’s novel "The Glass Key" (one sequence, where the samurai is tortured, is straight out of Hammett’s book), but it’s another Hammett novel, "Red Harvest", that is typically cited by scholars; in that book, a slightly unscrupulous, nameless detective for the continental detective agency (he’s literally only known as “the continental Op”) clears up the corrupt, gangster ridden town of Personville (pronounced “Poisonville” by the residents) by systematically pitting the gangsters against each other. Regardless of which novel Kurosawa was stealing from, Yojimbo does indeed feel, in some ways, a lot more like an American crime film than like a more classical Japanese samurai picture. That, in fact, is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Kurosawa was always sort of looked down on by Japanese critics for making movies that were too “Western”, and Yojimbo is maybe his riskiest venture in that direction; the values (and one might say clichés) of the samurai genre have been turned on their ear, and mixed in with the crime genre.

Consider: the samurai, as presented by Kurosawa and played by Mifune, has a lot more in common with the antiheroes of film noir than the regal, heroic figure of the samurai. Mifune was an actor of great energy – he often seems to leap off the screen – but in Yojimbo he seems to be channeling some of the world weary spirit of Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum. (There’s one shot, where the samurai’s shadow precedes him to menace two adversaries, which looks straight out of The Third Man.) His typical expression is one of faintly interested bemusement; he’s a character who has the ability to be of the action, and yet at the same time standing a few steps back from it, commenting on it. He’s an insanely talented swordsman, but doesn’t boast about it; he spends most of the movie slouched at the innkeeper’s place, drinking sake, calculating his next move. He bears a much stronger resemblance to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon than he does to, say, the samurai general Mifune played in Kurosawa’s earlier The Hidden Fortress.

The crime movie comparisons continue through the story. The idea of a “dirty town” is of course central to both noir and gangster films, and we have all the ingredients in this film; nasty gang bosses, cowering police men, officials who can be easily bribed. Kurosawa’s gangsters are basically all presented as comic book types; they’re scumbags without any moral compass whatsoever – when the samurai goes to work for Seibei, the gang boss and his Lady Macbeth-esque wife immediately plot to kill him, so that they don’t have to pay him. The various bosses and enemies even get overly descriptive names that tell us who they are; Ushitora, for example, is so named because his mother went into labor during the year of the cow (Ushi), but gave birth during the year of the tiger (Tora). The real wild card is Unosuke, a beatific young man with a sadistic streak – he carries a gun, and likes to shoot it off occasionally, just to prove to everybody that he’s the toughest guy in town.

Kurosawa was one of the great visual masters of cinema, and certainly one of the great masters of the widescreen format, and Yojimbo may very well be his best photographed film. It’s a very meticulous, precise film; Kurosawa likes to have frames where characters are spread out to the very opposite sides of the screen, in such a manner that if someone was only a few inches out of position, they wouldn’t be seen. Unusually for such a big, widescreen epic, Yojimbo mostly limits itself to interiors and claustrophobic sites; the village that the samurai tears apart, for example, is so small it’s almost comic. Kurosawa turns that cramped, claustrophobic village into a vista; he’s a master of using foreground and background, as when he contrasts background warriors scurrying around fearfully, with Mifune’s expressionless demeanor in the foreground, passive and uncaring.

Kurosawa is also arguably ever when it comes to the choreography of mass groups. There’s a wonderful moment early in the film when the two gangs face off against each other – fearfully and clumsily, gradually moving inch by inch toward a confrontation. Kurosawa somehow makes each gang move as one; mass crowds become a specific character, their moves almost dancelike. The sword fights in the film are also dancelike; Kurosawa prefers impression over realism when it comes to violence, and what swordplay there is in Yojimbo is depicted as blindingly fast and stunningly graceful – it almost seems that the samurai can kill five men in the time it takes the rest to get their swords out of their sheaths.

I’ve been referring to the character as “the samurai” throughout, because he essentially has no identity. When he’s asked for his name, he looks out the window to where a Mulberry Field sits, and says that he’s named Kuwabatake Sanjuro – which translates as 30 year old Mulberry Field. (“Going on 40,” he adds dryly.) That kind of stoic figure – a “man with no name” – has become a cliché in action films; perhaps most notably in Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars, with Clint Eastwood playing the first of his spaghetti Western heroes. (Fistful of Dollars was basically a remake of Yojimbo, stealing – er, homaging the plot of the Japanese picture almost scene for scene.) What separates Sanjuro from many of the action heroes he inspired is the humorous touch Kurosawa and Mifune give the character; he’s gruff, he’s a little lazy, he seems utterly uninterested in the scramble of events. He always seems to be two or three steps ahead of the story – as does Kurosawa. Yojimbo may not be his greatest or his deepest film, but it’s arguably his most entertaining.

Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" Review of Yojimbo - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050410/REVIEWS08/504100301/1023

Jim Emerson's "Scanners": Opening Shots, Yojimbo - http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2006/07/opening_shots_yojimbo.html#more

East Side Story (1997)

2010-10-13T07:09:00.000-07:00

When one thinks of the countries of the Eastern bloc, what images jump to mind? More than likely, one see scenes of gray, huddled masses toiling miserably in endless fields under gray skies, all observed by a red flag waving the hammer and sickle. These are the kinds of images that Western propaganda has provided for us of life behind the Iron Curtain, and to be fair, a lot of it was true; life in the countries of the Eastern bloc was, generally speaking, hardly carefree, emphasizing hard work and quotas over fun and frivolity. The films produced by these countries generally followed suit; most of the cinema produced under socialist banners was cold and functional, party polemics in search of stories. But the fascinating documentary East Side Story demonstrates that there was another side to socialist filmmaking, one that constitutes almost a lost genre – the socialist musical. By the looks of what bits of film have been compiled by director Dana Ranga, many of these films were easily the technical equal of their Hollywood counterparts – and more importantly, they shed light on a rarely explored side of socialist culture.

The key phrase here is “bits of film”. As East Side Story makes clear, the socialist musical is an almost invisible genre. Watching the documentary is almost akin to peering into an alternate dimension. The clips that we see are from films that have rarely – if ever – been seen outside their home countries, and that in many cases may not even exist anymore, at least not in viewable prints. What exists is but a shadow of its former glory; the excerpts we see are generally in pretty ragged condition, the film scratched and the soundtrack hissy. Looking at clips from a picture like Revue um Mitternacht (Midnight Review) makes one want to cry; you can glimpse the once vibrant colors and sense the infectious energy, buried under years of cell dirt and lack of care. If East Side Story incites one’s curiosity about seeing some of the films, then good luck; a few might be found on out of print V.H.S. copies outside the U.S., but most have never had any life beyond their theatrical runs, and remain forgotten.

That's a shame, because at least from a historical perspective, a number of them look quite interesting. East Side Story informs us that the “socialist musical” was rather an intermittent genre; the film estimates only about 40 musicals were produced by Eastern bloc countries (G.D.R., Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, ect.) in a 60 year period. The reason certainly wasn’t popularity; the musicals were generally popular successes, and especially welcomed by a movie going public hard pressed for some joie de vivre on the screen. The problem, as East Side Story posits, seems to have been mostly with the government functionaries who regulated film production. Like everything else in socialist societies, the film industries of Eastern bloc countries ran on quotas; there was only so much money for so many films to be made. Musicals have always been an expensive, complicated product – the major reason Hollywood has stopped making musicals, arguably, is because it no longer has the apparatus to do so – and so it often came down to a simple logistical question: should we devote a large amount of money and resources to a boring, bloated, “socially important” film about the revolution, or to a silly little musical? The winner was always obvious.

Beyond that, the musical posed certainly ideological concerns for socialist censors. Musicals, the most joyous of all film genres, were also seen in many ways as the most decadent of genres. They were bourgeoisie, frivolous; they were not “important films” about “important subjects”. East Side Story makes this point very clearly by interviewing a number of the actors and technicians who worked on the musicals of the period, they were sniffed at by the establishment, and their films were treated mostly with derision. School children were transported en masse to see the “Ernst Thallman” films, so that government pollsters could show how their citizens were attending “important” pictures; but interviewed audience members admit that these pictures were dull, and wonder out loud why more musicals weren’t made. It seems baffling, from a modern perspective, that these socialist nations didn’t see the potential of musicals as a propaganda tool; didn’t understand that by slipping socialist ideology in the guise of fun, it would perhaps be easier to win audiences over. Joseph Stalin himself was apparently a proponent of musicals, believing they expressed the joy and fulfillment of the country. (“On the other hand,” the film’s narration wryly notes, “happiness was only to be enjoyed by those who remained alive.”) But censors continued to disapprove; even when they commissioned musicals, they didn’t seem to understand them, as illustrated by the story of Meine Frau macht Musik director Hans Heinrich, who was chastised by G.D.R. officials for making a frivolous, funny musical – which was exactly he had been asked to do.

The films themselves look fascinating. To be fair, a number of the clips that we see are exactly what one might expect when one hears the phrase “socialist musicals”. Could a satirist possibly concoct anything better than a chorus line of workers bailing hay and singing lyrics like “Harvest! Harvest! Keep loading! Keep loading!/The quota has been attained”? A number of the clips look so hilariously naïve that satirizing them seems almost impossible. Yes, Virginia, there really was a musical entitled Tractor Drivers (Traktoristy), and it really did feature big, burly Russians straight out of a revolutionary painting singing about the time when “Comrade Stalin” would send them off to war; yes, there really was a musical where a pigtailed blonde sang love songs to her swine collective. In a number of cases, the clips point up the obvious supposition that “socialism” and “musicals” just don’t mix; watching a voice teacher instruct school children how to “sing the song of the coal press” may be politically correct, in the socialist sense, but it sure as hell doesn’t seem like much fun.

But those initial impressions can be deceiving. At the very least, the socialist musicals look like they were the technical equal of their Hollywood counterparts – and with lower budgets and less resources, no less. Vincent Minnelli and Stanley Donen were given all the craft and resources Hollywood could spare; socialist filmmakers, on the other hand, describe how every eight minutes they had to stop shooting, lest they deplete the electricity from a nearby hospital. In spite of these technical limitations – or, as some of the interview subjects suggest, perhaps because of them – filmmakers were able to come up with truly ingenious visuals. That above mentioned musical number with singing tractor drivers may be ridiculously goofy, but the imagery that we see is downright astonishing; it’s an almost impressionistic sequence; a high midday sun illuminating thick cumulous clouds of dirt, an image that seems to call to mind all the hopes and dreams of the socialist ideals. Many of the 1930s Russian musicals feature truly luminous looking black and white photography that is easily up to par – and, in some cases, arguably surpasses – what was being done in Hollywood; the images seem to glow with an unearthly light. By the 1950s, directors were using color photography and cinemascope processes just as effectively as any Hollywood extravaganza, making one desperately wish for a restored copy of Carnival in Moscow or Revue um Mitternacht to surface.

Beyond all this, a number of the films themselves look interesting – not just as historical documents, but as stories, as narratives. It might be argued that a musical that glorifies socialist ideals is really no more ridiculous than a musical which glorifies democratic ideals, or which glorifies show business, or Hollywood; and a lot of the musicals we see look just as clever and sprightly as any Hollywood offering. Meine Frau macht Musik and Beloved White Mouse, for example, look guaranteed to entertain; based on the evidence we see in East Side Story, we’re hardly surprised that both were enormous popular successes. Carnival in Moscow, a similarly charming little film, apparently became for many years a new year’s tradition behind the Iron Curtain, in much the way that It’s a Wonderful Life has become a Thanksgiving and Christmas tradition in the states. Moscow Laughs and Volga-Volga, both directed by Griorgi Aleksandrov, look very silly but also very exuberant; it’s hard not to watch the boating sequences of Volga-Volga, with their numerous extras and swooping camera movements, and be amazed. (Volga-Volga was apparently Stalin’s favorite film, and he gave President Roosevelt a personal copy to watch.) The real buried treasure here, though, appears to be Revue um Mitternacht, a meta-musical about a group of filmmakers who are pressed to make a musical, but don’t want to because they think that they’ll be looked down upon for doing so. (“Zur heisse”, indeed.) In the way that it comments on musical cinema, the G.D.R film industry, and socialist snobbishness toward popular art, Revue um Mitternacht really looks like it might be a hidden gem, a meta-musical on the level of Singin’ in the Rain.

Not that we’re likely to ever get a chance to find out, because the films featured in East Side Story were the victims of dual censorship – both from their own countries, and from the nations of the West, who had little interest in importing and showing them. Although there are other possible justifications – foreign cinema has never played all that comfortably in the U.S. market, and there are clear cultural differences between the films of the Eastern bloc and Hollywood product – it’s obvious that politics were the real reason these films never made it past the Iron Curtain. At the height of the cold war, American distributors were hardly eager to show films that glorified, through song and dance, such un-American notions as farm collectives and Marxist manifestos. (The fact that these films also celebrated such classically American concepts as hard work, teamwork and agrarian culture seemed to go unmentioned.) The irony here is thick; musicals may have been seen as frivolous and weightless by socialist countries, but to the countries of the West, they came laden with subversive potential.

It’s quite possible, however, that Western distributors simply worried too much. The fact of the matter is that the “socialist message” in most of these musicals seems pretty light, and in fact, that’s probably what made them so successful. One of the interview subjects in East Side Story was a young woman in the G.D.R. in the 1960s, and asks point blank why these films were looked down upon, not considered “artistic”. “Anything that makes people happy,” she muses, “is art.” Government censors just couldn’t understand that the musical’s inconsequential nature was what made it popular among audiences; people went to see Meine Frau macht Musik and Beloved White Mouse because they soft pedaled party politics. At the end of a long work week, socialist moviegoers didn’t want rhetoric shoved in their faces; they wanted to dream. (Ironically enough, Lenin himself said that the socialist artist was “allowed to dream…he is required to dream.”) Toward the end of East Side Story, Ranga wryly notes that socialism might have been more successful had it just been a little more fun. In the lost cinema she shows us, we see that fun, spirit and energy peeking through, before being squelched out by beauracracy and rhetoric.

Michael Brooke's "The Digital Fix" Review of East Side Story - http://homecinema.thedigitalfix.co.uk/content.php?contentid=3498

Janet Maslin: "With Rubles From Heaven" - http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505E6DC1731F936A15755C0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Scott Tobias' A.V. Club Review of East Side Story - http://www.avclub.com/articles/east-side-story,18750/

Walk on Water (2004)

2010-10-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

Socially and politically, collective Jewish identity in the 20th century has arguably not been informed more by any issues or events than by two: the Holocaust of World War 2 and Israel’s ongoing war with the Palestinian nation. These are both highly controversial – and highly complex – issues; to take on just one, and to try to deal with it fully, might seem risky business for any artist – to take on both simultaneously seems downright foolhardy. But that is just what director Eytan Fox and screenwriter Gal Uchovsky do in Walk on Water. Fox and Uchovsky boldly confront a number of issues relating to their collective Jewish heritage, issues pertaining both to a past of Nazi atrocities and a present and future mired in religious warfare – and what’s more, they do so engagingly, with a great deal of warmth and humor and humanity.

Walk on Water grabs us with an opening sequence where an Israeli Mossad agent poisons an Arab terrorist in Turkey. The agent’s name is Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi), and he is presented as the essence of the movie spy; he’s like a Hebrew James Bond, cool, functional, professional. Later in the film, he informs a character that it is literally physically impossible for him to cry, “even if I want to”. Indeed, his prowess as an assassin seems directly linked to his stoic nature; he’s a perfect shot, and it’s obvious that, in his mind at least, that is only possible because he is so emotionally cold.

That functionality may be a boon for his professional life, but it wreaks havoc in his private. Eyal returns from his successful mission in Turkey to congratulations from his government superiors, but he also returns to tragedy; his wife, Iris, has taken her own life, and in her suicide note tells Eyal that “everything you touch dies.” The words haunt Eyal, in spite of the impervious front he puts up; his dreams are haunted by the face of his dead wife, a face which dissolves into the tearstained features of the young son on the terrorist in Turkey, watching as his father’s killer strolls implacably away. Already, Walk on Water is playing with our expectations; from the opening, we may be expecting a standard spy thriller, but Fox and Uchovsky are pulling back the curtain on our genre expectations, and showing us the humanity that lies behind.

Eyal stubbornly insists (some might say over-insists) that his wife’s suicide has had no effect on him, that he’s ready to get back into the field – but his superiors want to ease him back in, and so he is assigned to pose as a tour guide and shepherd a young German tourist around Israel. The young man’s name is Axel Himmelman (Knut Berger); he and his sister Pia are the grandchildren of Alfred Himmelman, a notorious Nazi. The elder Himmelman is believed to be hiding in South America; the fact that he's close to death doesn’t faze Eyal’s boss Menachem (Gideon Shemer), who says coldly, “I want to get him before God does.” Eyal, therefore, is assigned to snoop around Axel and Pia and try to learn what he can.

It’s not an assignment Eyal relishes. He almost immediately dislikes Axel, finding him a “pseudo liberal who talks about suicide bombers motives. I almost punched him.” When Axel wonders out loud that the suicide bombers have families and children, Eyal coldly spits back, “Why do they come and kill innocent mothers and children here?” Eyal, for obvious reasons, has little sympathy for suicide bombers, and thus little use for Axel; he has lived his entire life according to the “never forgive, never forget” policies of the Mossad, and seems incapable of even viewing the Palestinians as human.

But a change is gradually beginning to occur in Eyal – a change that he himself might not even recognize. It’s telling that the film’s soundtrack makes prominent use of the Buffalo Springsteen song “For What It’s Worth”, considering that the song’s opening lyrics are “There’s somethin’ happenin’ here/But what it is ain’t exactly clear”. Eyal is slowly being led into an emotional no man’s land, an arena where he’s not comfortable; while in the beginning he only views Axel and Pia as an objective, he slowly begins, not unlike the hero of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, to identify with and even sympathize with them as he listens to their private conversations via a concealed microphone. Pia left home as a young woman and has not spoken to her parents since, after learning of her family’s Nazi past. (It’s telling that she has decided to move to Israel, submerging herself in the culture her ancestors tried so hard to destroy.) Nazism carried a high price for the Jewish collective heritage, but as demonstrated by the Himmelman family, it has also carried a high price for Germans; it has torn families apart, created wounds that cannot easily be healed. Later in the film, Eyal actually asks Axel about the Nazi past, and Axel admits that he doesn’t feel comfortable talking about it; doesn’t really know what to say. Walk on Water postulates, rather boldly, that culturally the Holocaust had a heavy price for Germans as well as Jews; and that healing needs to begin on both sides before the wounds can be closed.

The film also postulates, arguably even more boldly, that the same is true of relations between Israel and Palestine. As stated before, Eyal at the opening of Walk on Water does not even see the Palestinians as human beings; there’s a particularly unpleasant scene where he more or less steals a coat from a Palestinian street vendor, giving him virtually nothing for the purchase. In his travels, Axel wants to see both the Palestinian areas of the city as well as the Israeli – wants to look at both sides of the equation, so to speak – and by proxy, he forces Eyal to as well. Axel asks hard questions about the Palestinian cause; he makes Eyal consider things in a new and often harsh light. Early in the film, Eyal quietly lambasts Menachem for his obsession with taking revenge on the Nazi Himmelman, but he is forced to see that the same prejudices, the same sense of vengeance runs through his veins. At one point, Axel, who is gay, picks up a young Palestinian who is degraded by Eyal; the youth tells Eyal that “You Jews are so obsessed with what was done to you in the past”, rebuking him (and, in a sense, rebuking Israel) for forsaking a potential present and future.

It’s clear that all of these emotional and/or social confrontations, while necessary for Eyal’s growth as a human being, are not doing him a great deal of good as a spy. His aim, previously unerring, seems to waver more as he opens up to Axel and Pia more and more. In the beginning, Eyal is careful to stay cold, aloof; he watches from a studied distance as Axel and Pia lead a group of Pia’s coworkers in a Jewish folk dance, but refuses to dance himself. Later in the film, he watches as Axel and Pia take the stage at a party and lip synch, and we begin to see what might be jealousy in his eyes, a yearning for the kind of bond that they share. In spite of his initial coldness, he gradually starts to warm toward Axel, begins to tell him a little bit about his life, and even a little bit about his wife; this is not exactly an outpouring of information, but it’s a virtual flood coming from Eyal. The picture is really about the burgeoning relationship between these two men, the Israeli and the German, and how their friendship ultimately surmounts cultural and political differences.

It surmounts sexual differences as well, for Eyal is startled and even horrified when he finds out that Axel is gay, a fact that should have become obvious to him a lot sooner than it does. One of the more amusing aspects of Walk on Water is the way that Eyal, the quintessence of the cool, professional secret agent, misses hilariously obvious hints about Axel’s sexuality, down to the fact that he only likes to listen to women singers. (“When a man sings, I always feel like there’s something missing.”) He seems genuinely offended when Pia tells him that Axel is normally extremely open about his sexuality, snapping back, “Well, he didn’t tell me.” He almost seems to feel betrayed; emotionally, he’s begun taking Axel into his confidence, and he’s uncomfortable when he finds out that he’s actually gay. There’s a fascinating section of the movie where Axel and Eyal travel through the countryside, at one point showering together; when they sit next to a campfire, Eyal insists that Axel stay close, telling him that, “The only way to keep warm is to sit close to each other. Every Israeli soldier knows this.” The homoerotic undertones are not exactly understated, and they become even more overt when, on the drive back to town, Eyal translates an Israeli love song playing on the radio; there’s discomfort in Eyal’s voice, because in translating the expression of love contained in the song, he is in some way expressing himself emotionally to Axel.

Certainly this sexual subtext must have been an important theme for Fox and Uchovsky – themselves a gay couple, both living together in their private lives and working together as artistic collaborators. Fox’s homosexuality has apparently gotten him in trouble in Israel; it’s no wonder that Walk on Water got into trouble with conservatives in that country, considering that in addition to its discourse on Nazism and Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it discourses on open homosexuality. Axel is gay, but unlike gay characters in so many films, he is not marginalized; he is the life force of the film, the force that will transform the main character, Eyal, into a more whole and healthier being. There’s no small amount of symbolism in the fact that when we first see Axel he is wearing a shirt that says “The Miracle Worker”; later he kiddingly approximates Christ’s famous “walking on water” (hence the title), and tells Eyal that he believes that the secret to walking on water is that “You need to completely purify yourself. Your heart needs to be like it’s clean from the inside. No negativity, no bad thoughts…and then you can walk on water. I’m sure of it.” His words are an explicit rebuke to Eyal’s emotional state. Axel, a gay character, is not “deviant”, but emotionally healthy in a way that Eyal has never been. Equating a gay character with a Christ figure is certainly a daring move on the part of Uchovsky and Fox (Axel’s last name literally translates as “man from heaven”), but they earn the comparison. Axel, in his seemingly infinite goodness, truly is a force of redemption.

Axel leaves Israel and returns to Germany, and Eyal follows him there – partially because of his assignment, but even more than that because he is beginning to grow emotionally attached to Axel. He is slowly, stumblingly beginning to acknowledge his own prejudices, and there’s a wonderful comic beat in a German bar where he asks Axel , with a schoolboy’s curiosity, “how does it work out” between two men, and Axel replies “You straight men, you are all the same…the only thing you want to know is who does the schnuckie schnuckie.” Later, Eyal defends several of Axel’s cross dresser friends from a group of neo-Nazis, using his spy skills to defeat the attackers of a group he had previously marginalized and even despised. In that moment, Israeli and homosexual have become united in their mutual derision for Nazism, and they share the same sense of vengeance as well; Eyal is more than a little shocked when the typically saintly Axel tells him, “It’s too bad you didn’t kill that shit. Those people pollute the world.” It’s just the kind of attitude Eyal has expressed toward the Palestinians, or that Menachem has expressed toward the Nazi; it’s corrosive, and ultimately destructive.

The film builds to its climax in the house of Axel’s parents, at his father’s birthday party; Eyal comes as Axel’s guest, and it becomes increasingly obvious as events take shape that his newfound emotional vulnerability is beginning to affect his efficiency as an assassin. In stark contrast to the earlier scene, he now joins in the Jewish folk dance when Axel introduces it at the party (look at the face of Axel’s father, an un-redemptive Nazi sympathizer, as his homosexual son leads him in a Jewish ritual). Axel’s grandfather appears at the party, but Eyal, who would previously have just killed him on the spot, insists to Menachem that he should be captured and brought to trial. Menachem however, is not after justice – he’s after vengeance. “Nobody knows,” he tells Eyal; “you have to finish this yourself.”

But Eyal can’t; he has grown too far over the course of the film, experienced too much, to revert to hatred. He’s provided with a poisoned syringe by Menachem, but backs away from the opportunity to kill Himmelman. The duty falls to Axel, who shuts off the old man’s oxygen supply, and watches him curiously as his last breaths rattle out. The message is clear: for Fox and Uchovsky, only the German people themselves can finally extinguish the horrible flame of Nazism, and to be healthy, the Jewish people must put that hatred – all hatred, even hatred of the Palestinians – behind them, must move on, like Eyal does. “I don’t want to kill anymore,” Eyal tells Axel, before finally breaking down into tears.

The film ends with Eyal having quit the Mossad, living a new life with his new wife – none other than Pia. The two have had a child – the progeny of a new association between Israel and Germany) – and Eyal seems happy and content, free of the prejudices and hatred that used to weigh him down. He writes to Axel that he dreams of the two of them, walking on water, hand and hand. Axel, the “miracle worker”, has brought Eyal peace – and in a way, for Fox and Uchovsky, a peace between Jews and Palestinians would be a wondrous miracle, too.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's...Ah, Screw It, the Joke Really Isn't that Funny. Zack Snyder's Directing Superman.

2010-10-08T07:52:00.001-07:00

Way, way back in February, I had blogged about the rather exciting news that writer/director Christopher Nolan had been tapped by Warner Brothers to help produce/”godfather” the next installment in the Superman franchise. The announcement couldn’t have possibly come at a better time for the Superman series, which has been flagging for a long, long time now; the last time Superman had been in a really successful movie was back in 1980, and Brian Singer’s attempt to resurrect the franchise, Superman Returns, had gotten something of a mixed reception from both critics and general audiences. If nothing else, bringing in Nolan, who had shepherded the Batman franchise back to prominence, was an extremely smart business decision on WB’s part; it seemed the first step to getting Superman back up on his feet.

Following that announcement, however, things stayed pretty darn quiet. Nolan was busy working on a little movie called Inception (hmmm; wonder how that one turned out?), and Batman Begins/Dark Knight co-scenarist David Goyer was apparently hard at work on a script that Nolan was “excited” about. But that was about it, as far as news went; Nolan and WB clearly wanted to keep things close to the chest, and so the “Untitled Superman Project” remained the most closely guarded superhero project in Hollywood next to…well, next to Chris Nolan’s next Batman film. Then, just a few days ago, the first bit of major news on the project hit the entertainment press: Warner Brothers and Christopher Nolan had chosen a director to help reintroduce Superman to a modern audience. The director?

Zack Snyder.

Now, before things start getting unpleasant: here at “The Picture Show”, I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I have little use for Zack Snyder as a filmmaker. I hated his film version of 300, and I really hated his film version of Watchmen; at the end of my rather long blog entry about the latter film, I crankily wrote that “you can officially add Zack Snyder and his oeuvre to my list of ‘life is too short.’” My opinion is not necessarily the majority. Snyder’s got plenty of fans; 300 was a surprise success, and while Watchmen didn’t necessarily set the box office on fire, it did respectably well for a revisionist superhero satire about a group of socially and emotionally malformed misfits, and has garnered something of a cult following. (Of which I am not a member – but I digress.)

From a sheer business standpoint, then, hiring Snyder is a very canny and smart move. One of the constant criticisms of Superman is that he’s outdated; while Batman, Iron Man, ect. have a darkness and complexity that speaks to modern audiences, Superman is just too damn square. He’s basically never changed since the fifties: he’s still the big blue Boy Scout. Any “reinvention” of the franchise therefore has to start by updating the character, proving to a modern audience why they should care about Superman – and on that level, Snyder is certainly a smart choice. He’s a “darker”, “edgier” filmmaker than the Man of Steel has had in the past; clearly, WB is hoping that the guy who managed to turn the rampant gore and bloodlust of 300 into box office success can similarly update Superman for a modern audience. They’re also clearly hoping that the announcement of a pairing between Nolan and Snyder, two geek gods of the moment, will get all of fanboydom up on their hind legs in anticipation.

You’re going to have to count me out. When I read the announcement of Snyder's hiring, my anticipation for the new Superman film, which had at least been steady, took a sharp nose dive. The announcement seems especially bizarre because Snyder and Nolan seem like such polar opposites as filmmakers. Nolan favors realism, preferring to shoot on real sets, even real locations, and doing as little CGI as possible; both of Snyder’s previous comic book pictures have been CGI heavy, creating completely artificial worlds for the characters to inhabit. Nolan prefers not to let his effects overwhelm the story; he’s not a director who goes in for cinematic fireworks like slow motion or fast cutting or excessive visual flamboyance. Snyder is all about visual flamboyance, much of it headache inducing; his “speed ramping” style constantly seems to be screaming at the audience, “Hey, look at me! Isn’t this cool?!” The idea of putting these two guys together in bed and having them screw seems very, very strange.

Why Snyder, then? Probably because, for WB, he’s the “safe choice” – which seems, to me at least, a bit disingenuous. I recall that prior to the announcement, there was a rumored “shortlist” of directors that WB and Nolan were looking at; some of the names included Duncan Jones (Moon), Matt Reeves (Cloverfield), Darren Arnofsky (The Wrestler) and…well, Snyder himself. I recall not being all that excited about any of those names, but thinking to myself, “Well, as long as they don’t go with Snyder, I think I could live with it.” Picking Snyder just feels like WB is taking the safe route: “Hey, this guy made a successful, stupid comic book movie before – let’s hire him!” Say what you will about Chris Nolan as a filmmaker, but when WB picked him to reinvent Batman, they were rolling the dice. Before Batman Begins, all Nolan had made was a little black and white independent film, a modest thriller starring Al Pacino, and “that backwards movie.” The gamble paid off handsomely, and WB now has (almost inarguably) the hottest superhero franchise in Hollywood. I was sort of hoping that, for Superman, they would pick someone equally idiosyncratic; for example, I’m not necessarily a fanatical lover of the films of Darren Arnofsky, but he’s an interesting director with a unique vision, and I would’ve been curious to see what he did with Superman. Instead we got…Zack Snyder.

I hate to be “that guy”, and I know that my opinion means bupkiss – but let’s enumerate why Snyder is wrong for Superman, huh? Aside from having little use for his work, I really, really worry that Snyder’s vision is just way too pessimistic for Superman. As I said in my previous blog post on Chris Nolan and Superman, one of the stumbling blocks for the character is the fact that he’s not dark, he’s not tortured. Superman really is the big blue Boy Scout; that’s the whole character. You can make the world around Superman a little bit darker, make the story a little more complex, but you can’t really make Superman himself dark, because that’s not who he is. Superman is easily the most optimistic and humanist of all the superheroes; he’s a character who’s got to have heart – something that I think has been singularly lacking from both of Snyder’s films that I’ve seen.

In addition, there’s the little matter of verisimilitude. One of the major challenges to a Superman film is making us believe, really believe that a man can fly; we have to buy into Superman, and into his world, or the whole film doesn’t work. You’ve got to work hard to ground Superman in a world that the audience can recognize and accept. Snyder, on the other hand, showed a great talent in Watchmen for taking a gritty and reasonably believable (if exaggerated) comic book universe, and turning it into a windows desktop. Everything in 300 and Watchmen looks artificial; there’s not one moment where you honestly believe that what you’re looking at could really be happening.

And finally – Snyder just isn’t any damn good with actors. I’d argue that one of the great strengths of Nolan’s Batman films – hell, of all Nolan’s films – is the casting; with only an occasional misstep (*cough* Katie Holmes *cough*), he picks damn good actors, and allows them to play everything as realistically as possible. Snyder got lucky in 300, a movie which really didn’t require its actors to DO anything except stand around and look grizzled, but Watchmen proved conclusively that he doesn’t know what to do with his thespians. Virtually the entire cast of WATCHMEN ends up flailing around foolishly, with a desperate look on their faces, as if wondering, “Is this really going to work?” This, I think, does not bode well for getting me to invest in the characters of Clark Kent and Lois Lane.

Okay, my fan boy vitriol is (more or less) spent. Is there a potential upside to this situation? Sure. Let’s keep in mind that when Richard Donner was hired to direct the original Superman: The Movie (which I love) back in 1978, he was basically a TV director, whose most successful film up to that point was…The Omen. Can you imagine what message boards would be doing if that kind of announcement were made today? Or again, look at the Chris Nolan analogy; Nolan is hardly the kind of filmmaker you would stereotypically expect to do a big budget action movie, but the gamble paid off quite well for Warner Brothers. It could very well be that Snyder is actually a perfect choice for Superman; to be fair, his over the top style – constant speed ramping, ridiculous exaggeration of action, unsparing use of slow motion – makes a lot more sense for a character of the mythic size and weight of Supes than it does for the antiheroes of Watchmen. If he’s working from a solid script by Goyer and Nolan, if he’s got a really good cast that’s impossible to trip up (think of an actor like Liam Neeson, who can show up in basically anything and elevate the material just by being there), and if he can tone down his visual excess, maybe his Superman film can turn into something really special.

I’m not holding my breath, however. A lot of the net is a buzzin’ with excitement over Snyder’s entry to Superman, and certainly it signals that WB is serious about the property, and wants it to be a successful franchise again. Superman was the first of the “superheroes”; hell, he’s the one that they’re named for. I’m just not sure how certain I am that Zack Snyder is the right man to bring him back to the screen. I honestly hope that I’m wrong.

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

2010-10-07T06:55:00.000-07:00

“What a glorious feeling!” the ads for Singin’ in the Rain declared. That pretty well sums it up. Singin’ in the Rain is one of the most joyous of all movies, an exuberant confection. But it is also much more than that. In its sly, affectless way, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s wonderful film pokes fun at the Hollywood dream factory that produced it, revealing Hollywood as a place where image and reality do not necessarily correspond. It also calls attention to its own artifice; Singin’ in the Rain is one of the first musicals to tell the audience the fact that it is just an illusion, smoke and mirrors – and even more remarkably, it does so seemingly effortlessly, with a smile and a wink.

This is certainly a novel approach for the musical genre, and atypical. Movie musicals are, above all, fantasies. They lead us into a world where characters break out into song and dance whenever their emotions dictate it, where people seem to be constantly performing for unseen cameras and technicians, where the narrative often hangs suspended for the duration of another musical number. There is always a tenuous suspension of disbelief required by the musical, and that’s one of the reasons that, perhaps more than any other genre, musicals often implicitly turn people off; they just find it too hard to buy into the essential ludicrousness of the world, and of the premise. Most musicals try to overcome that problem by making a kind of implicit contract with the audience: as long as the audience ignores the fact that the whole film is, essentially, rather silly, the film itself will not point to its own artificiality. Hollywood musicals (and, hell, even most revisionist musicals) are always careful to posit themselves in a kind of heightened fantasy world, with bright colors and extravagant sets, in the hopes that they can transport the audience to a state of mind where the sudden flights of fancy and bursts of musical expression pass without comment.

The most astonishing thing Singin’ in the Rain does, then, is comment on them. The playful tone of the film – its willingness to kid its own ludicrousness – is apparent right from the opening scene. The story opens, interestingly enough, at a film premiere; a more or less risible silent epic, “The Royal Rascal”, is being opened by the humbly Monumental Pictures, starring box office sensations Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lena Lamont (Jean Hagen). As hundreds of screaming fans wait outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, we see their hysterical reactions to the arrival of stars like Zelda Zanders and Olga Mara, who are only slightly exaggerated caricatures of well known stars of the period. The crowds scream and ooh and faint over the appearance of their favorites, going into frenzy as Lockwood and Lamont arrive, with Lockwood’s boyhood pal Cosmo Brown in tow.

At the insistence of the crowd, Don spools out his life story – a life whose motto, in Don’s own words, was “dignity – always dignity”. As Don is unspooling his cheesy, Hollywood biopic life story, the film itself “pulls back the curtain”, showing us a montage of Don’s life as it actually happened – and it bears little resemblance to the pretty fiction Don is inventing. As he tells of he and Cosmo dancing for their parent’s society friends, we see them dancing for pennies in a smoke filled pool hall; when Don says that they, as kids, were reared on the classics of Shaw, we see them sneaking into a third rate movie house to watch a lurid B-picture; as Don describes their upbringing in the finest music conservatories, we see Cosmo and Don performing a musical comedy number, “Fit as a Fiddle”, to the boos and catcalls of drunken vaudeville audiences.

Already the film is introducing what will become one of its central themes – the difference between image and reality in Hollywood, a city not exactly known for its ability to clearly delineate the two. Don’s narrative sounds like a bad movie, but the images we see make it clear that that story is almost entirely invented – because, of course, the public doesn’t want the reality of Don’s life story. Hollywood in Singin’ in the Rain is presented as a great, glowing tower of artifice, a place where dreams are made with a little magic and a lot of commercial salesmanship. In one scene early in the film, Cosmo and Don wander through a studio soundstage past jungle scenes, French costume dramas and western epics, all housed under the same roof. Hollywood is a town where you can never be quite sure what’s real and what’s fake.

The question is certainly one that begins to haunt Don, who (it’s made very, hilariously clear) may be a star, but is really not much of an actor, at least not in the roles he’s been asked to play. When he first meets the love of his life, Kathy Seldon (Debbie Reynolds, whose picture is probably in the dictionary next to “adorable”), Don is told by her that he’s “nothing but a shadow on film, a shadow. You’re not flesh and blood.” The moment is played for humor, but it’s clearly a question that nags Don, and that nags the film. To what extent are the images created by Hollywood informed by some kind of reality, and to what extent are they complete fantasy?

This theme finds its fullest expression in the character of Lina Lamont. Lina has become a star in a series of more or less interchangeable costume pictures with Don because she’s gorgeous and looks good in frilly French gowns; but when she opens her mouth and speaks, the voice that comes out is harsh, and far from her demure image, Lina is herself harsh, a vindictive woman willing to other's careers to advance her own. Yet while she is, in some ways, an embodiment of the worst aspects of the Hollywood system, she’s also in many ways a victim of that same system. The movie gets a lot of comic mileage out of the fact that Lina really doesn’t understand that her Hollywood stardom is a fantasy. While Don and Cosmo treat movies like a great game, Lina really believes that she’s the queen of a French court, and she truly doesn’t understand that Don is only acting when he tells her he loves her. (“Now Lina, you’ve been reading those fan magazines again…”) Don understands that his screen image is a masquerade, a fake; Lina really is nothing more than a “shadow on film”, and so when her masquerade is unveiled, when the curtain is (literally) pulled back on her career, she is destroyed.

The film takes as its subject matter the transition of Hollywood from silent films to talking pictures, and uses that period to take some of its widest broadsides at the film industry. Far from the well oiled machine presented in news reels and fan magazines, the Hollywood of Singin’ in the Rain comes across as a community of talented bumblers who don’t quite know what they’re doing. Monumental studio head, R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) is a well meaning dolt who probably wouldn’t know a good idea if one hit him in the head. (“I can’t quite visualize it,” he says, after the astonishing “Broadway Melody” number; “I’ll have to see it on film first.”) Likewise, master director Roscoe Dexter screams impotently at Lina to “Talk – into – THE BUSH!”, and predicts that talking pictures will never amount to anything. (“That’s what they said about the horseless carriage,” Cosmo mumbles under his breath.) The opening montage juxtaposed reality and fantasy, showing us that these “classically trained artists” actually learned their craft on the vaudeville circuit; likewise, Hollywood in Singin’ in the Rain, far from being an efficient dream factory, is presented as a motley crew of clowns who somehow skate by.

It’s important to note that, in another filmmaker’s hands, these images could add up to a bitter indictment of the Hollywood establishment and its denizens, charlatans passing themselves off as artists. Singin’ in the Rain, however, is anything but bitter, and in fact celebrates its cast of hoodlums. Talent is the key dividing factor here, because while the characters in the picture may be phonies, the movie makes it clear that they’re talented phonies. Don and Cosmo do indeed play scummy dives and pool halls, but they’re legitimately funny, energetic song and dance men who take a certain childlike glee in being able to put one over on the gullible movie going public. (Just look at the bemused, mock innocent expression on Cosmo’s face when Don starts rambling about “dignity” and their golden years growing up together.) The movies – and the people who make them – may be fakes, but they’re wonderful, glorious fakes, and the film celebrates them more than it mocks them. Even Kathy, who had so vehemently talked down film as inferior to the stage, eventually confesses that she’s seen all of Don’s pictures, and that she reads Hollywood fan magazines.

Singin’ in the Rain would be thematically remarkable if it only commented on the glittering falseness of Hollywood as an industry, but the film goes further. It is willing to point to itself as an example of that artifice. There’s a magical scene around a third of the way into the film where Don and Kathy are just beginning to fall in love, strolling down the studio back lot; Don wants to confess his love, but tells Kathy that he’s “just a ham”, and that he needs the proper setting. He takes Kathy into “an empty stage”, and then, in front of both Kathy and the audience, using the tools of Hollywood trickery, he creates a magical scene: “a beautiful sunset, mist from the distant mountains, colored lights in a garden…we add 500,000 kilowatts of stardust, a soft summer breeze, and – you sure look lovely in the moonlight, Kathy.” The film literally calls attention to the fact that it is a film – that it’s a figment of imagination, created in an artificial studio setting – it creates an artificial atmosphere for us, and it still draws us in. The smile on Gene Kelly’s face is almost the smile of a magician who tells you to watch closely, that you shouldn’t be fooled – and still manages, somehow, to trick and delight you.

The film is, in that way, playful throughout – this is a movie musical that knows it’s a movie musical, and that wants you to know that it knows. When Gene Kelly performs his immortal, beautiful “Singin’ in the Rain” number, he strides down a street full of passerby who look at him as though he’s crazy. The film acknowledges the sheer ludicrousness of a man singing and dancing in a downpour – while at the same time exulting in the sheer wonder and beauty of Don’s emotional outpouring, celebrating his joy. When Lockwood and Lamont’s latest picture, “The Dueling Cavalier”, bombs hilariously at a preview screening, the solution comes in a flash of inspiration from Cosmo – just make the movie into a musical. Over and over again, Singin’ in the Rain cheekily – and daringly – does not try to avert our attention from the fact that it’s a movie, but instead calls attention to it, and asks us to delight in it. When Don is pitching ideas for the new musical (re-titled “The Dancing Cavalier”), he simply points to a blank movie screen (“First we set the stage with a song; it goes like this…”), and suddenly a whole musical number that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot, “Broadway Melody”, is conjured out of thin air, like magic.

“Magic” is the key word, because what separates Singin’ in the Rain from so many other films concerned with Hollywood artifice is the fact that it carries off its gambit with such grace and ease. That ease is, of course, another form of artifice, another ruse. Far from spontaneous, musicals were probably the most planned of genres, the most rehearsed, and Gene Kelly in particular was famous as a perfectionist, a man who wasn’t satisfied with a dancer unless their feet bled. Making something appear so effortless can’t have been easy and yet while watching Singin’ in the Rain it never looks like anybody’s breaking a sweat. When Gene Kelly performs the title number, when Donald O’Connor defies gravity and human stamina in “Make ‘Em Laugh”, when Kelly, O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds burst into “Good Mornin’”, there isn’t a moment when we don’t believe that these characters could, in fact, spontaneously perform such wonderful feats. Fittingly, the ending of the film is another sleight of hand. In a corny-as-hell but unbelievably satisfying climax, Lina is revealed as a fraud, and Kathy is unveiled as a new talent. (“Stop that girl…That’s the girl whose voice you heard and loved tonight! She’s the real star of the picture! Kathy Seldon!”) Kathy and Don declare their love for each other in song – “You Are My Lucky Star” – and on a stage, no less, in front of a movie audience. The scene dissolves to the two standing in front of a billboard, trumpeting their new starring vehicle, no doubt a magical, wonderful musical, a film of beautiful artifice. The title? Singin’ in the Rain, of course.

Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" Review of Singin' in the Rain - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F19990214%2FREVIEWS08%2F401010359%2F1023

Carne Tremula (1997)

2010-10-06T07:08:00.001-07:00

Pedro Almodovar’s Carne Tremula (English translation: Trembling Flesh) uses its story of illicit passion and sexual dysfunction to offer a scathing critique of the Spanish government during the years of the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. If the film were only its political subtext, it probably would not be particularly interesting; a slow, rather preachy political treatise. Almodovar’s picture, however, is not just a simple diagram of class struggles; he offers both positives and negatives in all his characters, refusing to paint his story in black and white terms and (perhaps more importantly) refusing to pass judgments. All this, and he’s a pretty good storyteller, too; stripped of its political context, Carne Tremula plays just as well as a melodrama of illicit loves, and the lives they tear apart.

The film’s political stance is apparent from the opening scene. The young prostitute Isabel Plaza Caballero (the luminous Penelope Cruz) goes into labor on one cold, dark night, eventually giving birth aboard a city bus. The city streets that we see outside the bus windows are empty and barren, and the city walls are plastered with propaganda posters trumpeting the new regime. The meaning is clear: Isabel’s baby, a son named Victor, will be born into a lonely, gray world that crushes and destroys any dissent, a world of fear, a world of oppression – the world of the Franco regime. In Isabel’s hands, the baby – who is spotlighted on television, due to his noteworthy birth aboard a piece of public transportation – looks tiny and tremulous. As he grows into a young man, he will seem no more in control of his fate; the next time we see Victor, he's a pizza delivery man played by Liberto Rabal, and as he cruises through the streets of Spain on his motorbike, he seems a tiny, insignificant figure, dwarfed by the city around him. The news report informs us that because of the circumstances of his birth, Victor is to be permitted a lifetime pass to use public transportation, and in a way this is true; for the rest of his life, the state will be, to use a popular expression, “taking him for a ride.”

Victor goes to visit Elena (Francesca Neri), a young woman with whom he had experienced a sexual encounter and with whom he has apparently set a date. She was so high the other night that she doesn’t remember; she tells Victor that they didn’t even really have sex (“You missed – you didn’t get your thing in the hole”), and from the look on Victor’s face, it’s obvious – even before he verbally confesses it – that it was an embarrassing first attempt at a sexual encounter for him. He’s still a little boy, in so many ways; when Elena and he scuffle and fight, and he strikes her, it’s more in a silly, childish way than in a brutish manner. The police who arrive on a neighbor’s tip don’t see it that way.

The policemen are Sancho (Jose Sancho) and David (Javier Bardem), and in a way the two characters represent the other puzzle pieces of Almodovar’s political allegory. From his very first moments, we see that Sancho, although a police officer and supposed enforcer of the law, is a drunk and a lout, who abuses both his wife Clara (Angela Molina) and his power. He seems to see that abuse as part of his job; in his first minutes, he looks out of his police car at the teeming streets of Spain, and derides the “flock”, the (in his mind) disgusting masses he’s paid to shepherd. There is a sadistic sense about him – it is as though he sees it as his job to punish his citizens, as well as his wife – and it’s not hard to see the parallels Almodovar is making to the Franco government, and to all dictators, who rule by fear and ignorance and genocide and tell the people that it’s “for their own good.”

David, in contrast, is presented as an almost saintly presence; he’s the “good cop”, the partner who is there to keep Sancho in line, keep him from hurting anyone, and nod noncommittally while Sancho rambles drunkenly about the affairs his wife is having. When Sancho and David take the call at Elena’s apartment, a scuffle ensues between Victor and Sancho over a gun; as a result of the scuffle, David is shot. Here we begin to see the contradictions of class Almodovar presents for us. David is presented as a middle class character, not ridiculously wealthy but certainly not poor; while this means that he does not have the “burden of responsibility” of a man like Sancho, it also means that he does not have the burden of poverty. Because of his station in society, he can rise above tragedy, surmount it; his spinal injury does not destroy his life, as he becomes a successful wheelchair athlete and even marries Elena, who apparently sees only the good in him. The middle class, Almodovar seems to be suggesting, have the luxury of being able to ignore tragedy, pretend it’s not there. But the poorer classes do not; Victor, on the lower rungs of society, is sent to prison for seven years as a result of the shooting, and his life is torn apart.

That’s just the first act of Carne Tremula; the plot picks up as Victor is released from prison after seven years, and is at this point that the movie starts to do something interesting – it works to invert the moral world it has set up. One of the most interesting things about the structure of Carne Tremula is that it spends its first third carefully setting up for us clear, almost stereotypical images of its characters; Sancho is the bad cop, David the good, Elena is the good for nothing drug addict, Victor is the young hoodlum, and Clara is Sancho’s unfaithful wife. Having established all these characters very clearly, the movie then spends its remaining hour or so inverting all those images.

Return, for example, to the character of Victor, and to his confession that he has never slept with a woman before, that his first attempt with Elena was a childish bungle. With his fierce eyes and his leather jacket, Victor looks like he could be a street hoodlum; but we soon realize that he’s really the one truly innocent in the story, still more or less a child. When he gets out of prison, he plots to get revenge on David by cuckolding Elena, but eventually reneges on the plan because he’s just not mean enough; he confesses to Elena herself that he doesn’t have the stuff to be truly nasty, to truly cross that line. Elena, in a marked reversal of how we first see her, has grown in seven years into a completely different woman; she is smart, she is successful, and she helps runs a sort of halfway house for wayward children who need guidance and help, perhaps not unlike herself at that age. Perhaps that’s part of what attracts her to Victor when they make love late in the story; she wants to revert to her old, “bad” self, yes, but she’s also interested in the wayward child in Victor, the little boy who lost his way.

In a way, the most shocking reversals of characters may involve Sancho and David, because they are presented as pure “types” when we first see them. David, as stated before, is the “good cop”, Sancho the “bad”. But there is more shading here than we might immediately recognize. David is a good man, yes, but as the narrative unspools we begin to see more of his very human flaws; he is clearly extremely jealous and protective of Elena (not unlike Sancho), to the extent that when Victor begins reappearing in her orbit, he takes to watching him, stalking him, even photographing him. It is eventually revealed that it was he who was having an affair with Sancho’s wife Clara at the opening of the film; he eventually allows his jealous impulses to take over his natural upright nature toward the end of the film, by revealing to Sancho a key piece of information that leads to several unnecessary deaths. There is great shading in the character of Sancho, as well; he is a drunk and a lout, yes, but he’s a surprisingly pitiable lout, and there is real despair in his desperate, ultimately destructive attempts to connect with his estranged wife (“I’ve always been crawling after you”).

I think these reversals of character point up the fact that Almodovar does not settle for black and white in his story schematics; Sancho may represent a Franco like dictator, but he’s not just a monster – he’s a human being, and while we certainly don’t approve of his actions, we can on some level understand why he undertakes them. Unlike a lot of politically motivated directors, Almodovar doesn’t want to preach to his audience; he tells them the truth, the whole truth, and that truth often contains a lot of unpleasant gray areas and terrain that is difficult to navigate. Carne Tremula is a deeper, more interesting film in the way that it refuses to offer easy answers; virtually all of the characters are both a wise man and a fool, a killer and an innocent.

All of which is a great deal to write about a film without describing its aesthetics. Taken outside of all of its political subtext, Carne Tremula holds up quite well as a lurid, slightly old fashioned melodrama. Almodovar is telling, in some ways, a rather over dramatic story, and he knows it; the images and colors are vibrant, bold, and Almodovar approaches both his visual design and his narrative in terms of broad strokes. The movie switches from tone to tone from scene to scene, and sometimes even within scenes; a dramatic confrontation between David and Victor leads to a sudden, completely unexpected comic interlude over a televised soccer game, and the movie’s rather whimsical opening scene of Victor’s birth does not prepare us emotionally in any way for the heart wrenching tragedy of the finale.

Those mood swings may represent what the movie is really about. Almodovar has been described as a “cinematic hoodlum”, and his films have sometimes been decried and even banned on the grounds of tastelessness and vulgarity. For Almodovar, that vulgarity and tastelessness is not a drawback; it is something to be celebrated. Among their many sins, the film’s figures of the bourgeoisie – David, Sancho and Clara – have little freedom, or sense of humor; they are trapped in acting in certain ways, responding to certain situations, and their emotional limitations ultimately destroy them. The heroes of Almodovar’s film are ultimately the “hoodlums”, Victor and Elena; they may be wayward children, and often mistaken and a little foolish, but at least they know how to live, to experience life in all its dirty, clumsy glory. The key scene of the film, in some ways, is the one where they finally make love; it’s a finally tuned set piece, a carefully structured celebration of sensuality, and it is the event that triggers the climax of the movie. By making love, Victor and Elena are more or less defying the forces of social order; and as such, their rebellion – their vulgarity, their offense – is what finally destroys those figures of order.

The film ends circularly, with a denouement analogous to the opening. Victor and Elena, now a couple, rush by taxicab to the hospital as Elena enters childbirth. In stark contrast to the beginning of the film, the streets we see outside the taxi windows are bustling with life; the city of Spain is celebrating, to the extent that the taxicab has to creep through the streets at a sluggish pace. Victor leans close to Elena’s pregnant belly, and whispers to his child to wait, that there is no hurry, no worry; he will be born into a city, into a country, devoid of the hate and fear that Victor faced, because the abuses of power are gone.

What a Glorious (Possibly Homoerotic) Feeling!

2010-10-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

If recent debates about homosexuality in the United States show nothing else, they perhaps suggest that America, the country so mythically founded by such iron clad male figures as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, is still trying to reconcile reality with its own image of traditional masculinity. That image has been shaped over time, by all manner of popular media – myth, folklore, popular fiction – and movies are certainly not the least of these. In such quintessentially “American” genres as the Western or the gangster picture, classical Hollywood presents us with a clear image of what it means to be male; but fascinatingly, there is another classic genre that presents us with very different images of masculinity. The Hollywood musical challenges our standards for male screen heroes – from a physical, emotional and sexual standpoint – and forces us to reconcile our preconceived notions with the images we see on the screen.

What are those preconceived notions? For the most part, classical Hollywood cinema provides a surprisingly cohesive image of the male figure. He is rough, rugged, a loner, emotionally undemonstrative; a man of action, not talk, more comfortable engaging in a fist fight than an emotional discussion. It’s an image that had popped up as early as the 1910s, with such stoic and (in this case, literally) silent cowboy figures as Tom Mix, and it’s an image that crosses genre lines; we can see it in the great Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks, and in the classic gangster movies starring James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, among others. When classical Hollywood tweaks those notions, it must still on some level pay tribute – the heroes of film noir may be more emotionally vulnerable, but they must hide that vulnerability behind a mask of cynicism. It's almost become an archetype; when the first generation of “sensitive leading men” of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Brando and Clift and Dean, appeared on the scene, everyone instinctively knew what image they were playing against.

But long before the method generation was redefining masculinity on the silver screen, a whole genre had already been doing it – and from within the Hollywood machine, no less. It’s easy to imagine actors like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly becoming trapped in a sea of lackluster parts in other genres, playing foppish “second leads” who can’t measure up to the real star of the movie, be it Humphrey Bogart or Clark Gables or Spencer Tracy. In the musical, by stark contrast, Astaire and Kelly were not stuck playing shallow supporting characters; they themselves were the stars, and as such, became the embodiments of all sorts of interesting contradictions in classic Hollywood’s conception of masculinity.

The male heroes of the musical differ from traditional leading men in a number of ways, perhaps most immediately noticeably in their physical appearance. The Western hero typically looks rough and rugged; when John Wayne enters a bar, he seems to tower over the patrons, a mountain of machismo. Likewise, the heroes of the ‘30s gangster pictures were “tough guys”, men of the streets who the audience well believed lived first and foremost by their fists and their gats.

In stark contrast, the actors most associated with musicals were the kinds of men often derisively typed as “pretty boys”; men who were openly attractive to women, who were polished and elegant, whose skin was perfectly maintained and whose hair was flawlessly combed. Even more radically, the musical genre celebrated the perfection of its male stars appearances. Robert Mitchum might have been a pretty boy, but his roles in noirs like Out of the Past tempered his Adonis looks with world weariness, a dark edge. Kelly and Astaire were not required to play against their images, were not required to temper their good looks with human flaws and frailties; the musical allows its male figures to be suave, sophisticated and beautiful, and at the same time masculine and heroic.

Musicals are also a radical departure from most Hollywood genres in the way they present the male figure as emotionally vulnerable. In virtually all classic genres, emotional expression is limited to the female characters; males are not allowed to express vulnerability, certainly not openly. Emotion in the gangster film is directly linked with weakness (in The Public Enemy, Leslie Fenton tells James Cagney that an adversary has “got the Indian sign on you…he thinks you’re soft”), and there are numerous Westerns where it is implied that the male figure who marries and finds a stable family life is deprived of his masculinity, “neutered”. Moreover, when emotion is shown by men in classical Hollywood cinema, it’s usually seen as destructive. John Wayne, the rock hard Western hero, is destroyed by his unconsummated love for Vera Miles in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, like many of Hitchcock’s males, is destroyed by his emotional fragility; and countless of the gangsters of the ‘30s and ‘40s flame out in what can best be described as volcanic temper tantrums – Jimmy Cagney in White Heat cannot control his raging emotions, and so they consume him.

What a stark contrast, then, are the heroes of musicals! Where other male figures are stoic and impassive, the heroes of musicals are childlike, jubilant; to them, the world is a wonderful toy to be played with and delighted in. Male figures in musicals can’t help but express themselves emotionally – and through song and dance, no less! (It’s hard to imagine a less stereotypically “masculine” form of expression – crocheting, maybe?) These characters burst with emotion, to the point that everyday reality cannot contain them – they must ascend to the lofty plateau of the musical number, where their feelings can find true expression. Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain is so delighted Debbie Reynolds loves him that he dances during a downpour, skipping through puddles like an exuberant child; likewise, in Royal Wedding, Fred Astaire is so enraptured by love that he defies gravity, dancing up the walls and onto the ceiling of his hotel room.

The musical also breaks tradition by having this emotionality be a positive quality; far from destroying them, emotional expression is how many of the male figures in musicals succeed in the end. At the climax of Singin’ in the Rain, Gene Kelly sings “You Are My Lucky Star” to Debbie Reynolds is front of a packed theater audience, confessing wholeheartedly his emotional dependency; as the tears slide down Reynolds’ face, they wash away all the impediments standing between the couple. Emotional expression in the Hollywood musical is the force that allows the male hero to succeed, to come to his “happy ending”, to surmount sorrow and convey joy. By contrast, it is often the emotional emptiness of other characters (think of heartless Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain, or icy Nina Foch in An American in Paris) that leads to their downfall.

Finally, and perhaps most radically, classical Hollywood musicals redefine the boundaries for male sexuality. For the most part, classical Hollywood solely eroticized female figures; Garbo, Dietrich, and Crawford were all viewed by the camera in an almost fetishistic manner. By stark contrast, Hollywood typically didn’t openly eroticize its leading men. John Wayne set the prototype for the Western hero, who was rugged and manly but certainly never openly sexual. When the gangster picture approached sexuality, it was only in its most tawdry forms; gangsters didn’t have girlfriends, they had molls and whores, and their sexual appetites only showed how animalistic they were. That focus on the cheap and tawdry side of sexuality carried over to film noir; the male heroes of noir are often hapless goons whose sexual desires cause them to become ensnared and obliterated by the femme fatale.

In light of all this, the image of male sexuality presented in the Hollywood musical is downright shocking. First and foremost, the male figures in musicals are openly erotic beings; the male leads of Hollywood musicals wore tight fitting clothes that accentuated their physicality, and in musical numbers, these men were just as much the subject of the camera’s erotic gaze as their leading ladies. When Gene Kelly dons a body hugging white jumpsuit to imitate a character from a Toulouse-Lautrec painting in An American in Paris, the camera doesn’t shy away from it; Kelly’s choreography celebrates his own, very distinctly male sexuality, his physical robustness, and the camera celebrates it as well.

Celebration is perhaps the key term here, because while most Hollywood genres approached sexuality sheepishly, even ashamedly, the musical exults in it, gloriously, even flamboyantly. No wonder gay audiences were so drawn to the Hollywood musical, for it is the only genre that offers a positive expression of the idea of men as carnal physical beings. The male hero of the musical wears tightly fitted clothes, often in bright (techni)colors guaranteed to grab our attention; it is as if they are shouting out, in a liberating manner, “Look at me!” This is not to suggest that all Hollywood musicals were openly gay, or that all leading men in musicals were homosexual; far from it. But the Hollywood musical is arguably the only classic genre to celebrate male sexuality as something other than a tool for dominating women; it joyously highlights the notion of sexuality and physicality as an aspect of personal expression.

Today, our cinematic images of masculinity continue to undergo fascinating shifts. To be certain, the traditional images are still with us – action films in particular butter their bread off of old fashioned, stereotypically heterosexual male figures; but films like 2005’s Brokeback Mountain have introduced overt homosexual themes and imagery into traditional genres like the Western, and many of today’s top male stars are expected to be both tough and sensitive. But long before these images were being created, the heroes of the Hollywood musical had already cleared the turf, offering up a still novel portrait of the male figure as attractive, sensitive and erotic.