Running Board

Climbing Mount Criterion XXXI

2006-01-29T08:44:00.000-06:00

Some time ago, I whacked myself with a wet noodle for writing a review of Le Cercle Rouge before I saw Rififi (#115)--in fact, without knowing about the connection between the two. (But to engage in this sort of self-flagellation is to fall down a sort of rabbit hole of confessions of ignorance: I didn't know about the existence of the Rififi semi-spoof Big Deal on Madonna Street until very recently, and I'm just assuming at this point that there's a long and fascinating history of European noirs with lengthy heist scenes that I'm destined to discover accidentally.) But without discounting Rififi's dark, patient power, would it be too heretical of me to say that I remember Le Cercle Rouge better, and perhaps even like it more? In my mind Alain Delon cuts a more imposing, intriguing figure than Jean Servais, and I know Jean-Pierre Melville's work better than Jules Dassin's.

The Hidden Fortress (#116) struck me as structurally cleaner than usual for Kurosawa--fewer characters, clearer demarcations of class lines, more emphasis on the gruff wisdom of Toshiro Mifune. But it's also more plodding, and more gimmicky in its pursuit of comic relief, giving an enormous emphasis on the two peasants who follow and shape the proceedings. George Lucas, a director who likes to key in on the gimmicks that make a film work instead of the emotional elements that make it endure, found lots to work with here (he gives a brief commentary on the Criterion disc).

Like lots of Bunuel films, Diary of a Chambermaid (#117) is bent on exposing the foibles of the bourgeoisie. But excepting a brief scene where Jeanne Moreau, as the chambermaid, reads some pro-working class writing from Huysmans for her new master (who busily obsesses over her calf), there's not a lot of pointed ironic comedy that sends up wealthy foolishness. Privilege is contemptable as always with Bunuel, but here he mostly just wants to say it generates weirdness--petty fights between neighbors, blinkered and racist nativism, obsessive concern about primness, foot fetishes. Lest you think this is relatively harmless--the pecadillos of sheltered mansion owners--the death of a young girl midway through raises the stakes. And yet the deliberately muddled resolution of that death, which focuses on the groundskeeper, Joseph (Georges Geret, compellingly inscrutible), is meant to make you wonder how much Moreau's chambermaid has indicted her environment and how much she's embraced it.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXX

2006-01-01T18:42:00.000-06:00

Somebody must've heard and believed in Michael Bay's argument that what he was doing with the action film was creating high art--two of his films, after all, are part of the Criterion Collection. But before outsize propagandistic junk like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor rendered that idea ridiculous, it was somewhat tenable in The Rock (#108), a movie that takes Nicolas Cage's screamathons and Sean Connery's crusty-elder declamations and turns them into something operatic. That's not exactly the same thing as good, mind you: Ed Harris isn't believable as a rogue military man, Connery's escape from the prison confound's common sense, and--well, you could waste a lot of time pointing out the plot holes. But Bay's conviction that big-equals-good made reasonable sense in movies when he wasn't trying to explain the history of the world, which makes his flaws as a director (especially his hamfistedness when it comes to romantic subplots) at least tolerable.

The Scarlet Empress (#109) is unavailable. M. Hulot's Holiday (#110) and Mon Oncle (#111) are my first exposures to Jacques Tati, and while I can understand equating him with Keaton and Chaplin as a comic character actor, the comparison falls apart when it comes to pacing. These films are slow, at least slower than the pace I'd prefer to take in comedies, though sometimes the sluggishness is an asset--the buildup to the grand explosion that ends Holiday is masterfully tense, and the running gag in Mon Oncle with the horrid fish-shaped metal fountain finally seems worthwhile once we get to a shot lingering on the male guests at a garden party--once the incessant trickling of the water finally forces the men to cross their legs, it's a riot. But I'll take Modern Times's commentary on the push-putton age over Tati's; Tati takes a few easy whacks at the self-satisfied tools upper middle class, while Chaplin gunned for the people who ran the show.

Playtime (#112), I'm told, is prime Tati, but it's also unavailable. A pair of more pleasurable comedies ensue: Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (#113) is a marvelous send-up of the heist film that manages to have all the tension and drama of a heist film as well, with an excellent performance in particular by Marcello Mastroianni. And Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (#114) is a Marxist romp that's still fun despite its taking obvious whacks at the ruling classes. When the ladies of the wealthy Bullock family wail along with the clan's trained monkey and the camera lets you catch all the noisy stupidity at once, its multilayered slapstick is astounding.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXIX

2005-12-04T19:31:00.000-06:00

There are great gaping holes in my knowledge of Bunuel--Diary of a Chambermaid and That Obscure Object of Desire, most prominently--but not out of disinterest. In fact, he's one of the few examples I can think of who can give surrealism a human, resonant effect--not just the early stuff but comic essays like Simon of the Desert. I saw The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (#102) a few years back at Copia, a museum in Northern California dedicated to foodies, and it struck me as disappointingly flat satire; its comic whacks at elites were full of familiar ironies and character pile-ons that felt like a Marx Brothers film projected at the wrong speed, in a different language. I'm willing to concede that a day's worth of exposure to Copia, a place I found very Northern California-absurd, might've contributed to my impatience. But I'd rather pursue other Bunuels before revisiting this one.

I've seen The Lady Eve (#103) at least three times--usual for me, since I don't tend to do a lot of repeat viewings of movies. I caught it first as a college freshman, and it definitely sparked my love for Preston Sturges and Henry Fonda--and film, to some extent. But it didn't turn me on to Barbara Stanwyck--there's an icy quality to so many female stars of that era that's off-putting, though that's not to say that Fonda's milquetoast snake researcher pratfalling and taking abuse isn't wonderfully entertaining. Hell, Stanwyck's smirking is entertaining too.

Masahiro Shinoda's Double Suicide (#104), a tale of hopeless love between a paper merchant and a courtesan, was based on a puppet play, and if it's fair to equate that with stiffness, then, well, it's easy to understand why I was bored. Claustrophobia's a problem here, too--the film doesn't pick up much energy until the very end, when the title suicides actually happen, climaxing with a beautifully presented shot of the two lovers lying dead next to one another, dovetailed. But you can see that shot on the DVD box.

Did I forget about Spartacus (#105)? I forgot about Spartacus. There are a few hints of Stanley Kubrick's influence here, despite his well-documented disinterest in (and eventual disengagement with) the film: the smash cuts preceding the battle scene, the chilly obviousness of the conversations. But it's also on the good end of the stage-managed warmth that defines the Hollywood epic, and Kirk Douglas is unimpeachably excellent in his stoic performance--thanks in part because the overacting all around him makes his restraint look even more like heroism than the script intended.

Coup de Torchon (#106) will have to wait for another day, since Netflix insists its unavailable. Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (#107) is a reminder that I need to see more of Bob Hoskins. In The Long Good Friday, he turned his shortcomings--pudgy, moody--into assets, and he does much the same thing here, as a dim but brutal fellow so disconnected from his ability to feel and understand that helping a call-girl locate her old lover seems as good an option as any. The plot is lousy crime-drama boilerplate that doesn't have the requisite depth or darkness for noir, though some critics have called it that. Few good movies have endings this bad, but it's power is in the performances--Michael Caine in a small but sharp turn as Hoskins' old mentor, Cathy Tyson as the indomitable call girl, but mostly Hoskins himself--whenever he's presented with an emotional or intellectual concern he looks like he wishes he could just beat the crap out of it. Which is why I'd love to see the made-for-TV movie in which he played Mussolini, even if it's horrible. No other actor turned lack of nuance into depth the way he has. He's a big flinching muscle.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXVIII

2005-11-26T10:21:00.000-06:00

We're crashing a book deadline, but we're still keeping up...

Spike Lee's done his best work in recent years concentrating on actors: he immortalized Ed Norton in 25th Hour, got a stunning amount of mileage out of Damon Wayans in Bamboozled, and organized an excellent ensemble in Summer of Sam. It's been a while since I've seen Do the Right Thing (#97) , but though I recall excellent performances there as well(Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, the forever underrated Giancarlo Esposito), I think of it as dull, Big Idea Spike, where his ambition to strike blows about race and class swallows up the movie. But it's fascinating for being the start of something--the moment where he began his career-long struggle to make message films and be Woody Allen at the same time.

My schooling on Antonioni is still limited--just Blow Up and L'Avventura (#98)--and I'm afraid I still remain unimpressed, or at least unaffected.

I've learned to like other Maysles Brothers films more--Salesman in particular--but Gimme Shelter (#99) was my first, and (thinking on it now) perhaps my first exposure to the idea of a documentary as an art piece--a showcase of a rock star's smugness, and how easily it can get erased. I don't think that the videos assembled for the Beastie Boys Anthology (#100) are any better than what a lot of bands these days can assemble, but you can argue that the Beastie Boys cared the most at the time they began. "Sabotage" and "Shadrach" are unquestionably brilliant conceptually, but watching a bunch of videos in a row by any one group tends to erase your ability to see the videos as art. It becomes a crazy-quilt image of the persona an act wants to present to the public--promotion.

Despite a remarkable Liv Ullmann performance, Cries and Whispers (#101) never really transcends the oppressive black-and-red color scheme that surrounds this story's three sisters, all metaphorically dying and one literally dead. Autumn Sonata at least had the good grace to have a fight at the end; this film collapses in on its own sad tone.

And Now For Something Completely Different...

2005-11-12T10:21:00.000-06:00

(I sent this piece, in slightly different form, to two esteemed publications that politely rejected it.)

A few years ago, when I lived in San Francisco and had a little too much time on hands, I started researching a book about Windham Hill Records. I dropped about a hundred bucks on about a hundred New Age albums; I spent hours interviewing George Winston over the phone and in person (he’s a talker); I photocopied and highlighted dozens of articles. I tracked down relatively obscure Windham Hill artists like Scott Cossu, a pianist who was struck by a car in 1989 and nearly died from a severe head injury. He endured multiple brain operations and a facial reconstruction; he struggled for years to relearn how to do everyday tasks and play piano again. Listening to him tell his story, I wished I liked his music.

That’s the problem, of course. As a business and as a collection of personalities, Windham Hill was, to my mind, a singularly entertaining rags-to-riches-to-rags drama. But I had to contend with the problem that most of the music sucked. For most of the 1980s Windham Hill released a stream of popular albums that mostly ranged in quality from mediocre to godawful. The story was much the same in the 90s, though the records weren’t so popular by then; America’s New Age moment had come and gone. In this decade, with New Age music accounting for about one percent of total record sales in the U.S., the label’s just a subset of a subset of the BMG empire; with the notable exceptions of Winston and Jim Brickman, a jingle writer turned romantic-dinner-music titan, the label is pretty much content to repackage its back catalog as one-disc samplers targeting the Pilates crowd. So A Quiet Revolution, a four-CD retrospective box set commemorating Windham Hill’s 30th anniversary, is a surprisingly frisky move—-a public claim to relevance that it hasn’t had the nerve to make for years.

“[Windham Hill] was as much a lifestyle as music,” says a bit of promo patter for the set, and the reason for the label’s aesthetic failure is in that statement—-by the mid-80s it had begun to coddle the fan base that used its music as the aural equivalent of aromatherapy candles. But the people who ran and recorded for the label in its earliest days would have bristled at the notion they were making, as one wag put it, “a little Nytol music”-—they were running a serious shop dedicated to honoring a respectable tradition in American folk. Had it stuck with its original mission, it probably wouldn’t have become a multimillion-dollar business. But it also wouldn’t have been a laughingstock. Indeed, people would have called it influential; if you can dig out the right records in the bargain bins, you still can.

The label had modest origins: it was founded by Will Ackerman and his then-wife, Anne Robinson, to release exactly one record, Ackerman’s In Search of the Turtle’s Navel, a collection of acoustic guitar solos. Windham Hill more or less minded its own business for five years, selling its records out of health food stores and through the mail until 1981, when pianist George Winston’s Autumn became a surprise hit with jazz listeners. Autumn’s success brought an infusion of much-needed cash into the Palo Alto, California, offices of the label, and one of the first things Ackerman and Robinson did with the money was create a spinoff label, Lost Lake Arts.

Turtle’s Navel sounds like John Fahey with the edges sanded off; Autumn is Keith Jarrett without his infamous distemper. (And Ackerman readily cops to using the label Jarrett recorded for, ECM, as inspiration for Windham Hill covers.) But the sound of the Lost Lake albums dovetails surprisingly well with the wooly free-folk sensibility of today’s New Weird Americans. Guitarist Robbie Basho, who recorded for Fahey’s Takoma label in the 60s, came out of semi-retirement to record a Lost Lake disc, Art of the Acoustic Steel String Guitar 6 & 12, and an album for Windham Hill, Visions of the Country, which reflect his obsessions with Middle Eastern, Indian, and classical music; Ballads and Blues 1972, a reissue of George Winston’s first album (which came out on Takoma), is filled with propulsive blues, ragtime, and stride piano playing that he’s avoided ever since. Winston lobbied to reissue Ocean, an album of fuzzy, drifting nylon-string guitar meditations by Brazilian-born guitarist and onetime Dizzy Gillespie sideman Bola Sete. Ackerman’s cousin Alex de Grassi, a huge fan of U.K. jazz-folk groups like the Incredible String Band and Pentangle, agitated for a reissue of Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn’s 1968 solo album Sir John Alot Of Merrye Englandes Musyk Thyng and Ye Grene Knythe, an assortment of ballads and madrigals that’s a direct forefather to the likes of Six Organs of Admittance and Espers.

Those elements are there in a few of the early Windham Hill records too. De Grassi’s technique on his 1978 debut, Turning: Turning Back, is just as elegant and muscular as Renbourn's; obscurities like Daniel Hecht’s Willow and David Qualey’s Soliloquy are fine excursions into mannered but broad-minded acoustic folk that any Harris Newman fan could get behind. And on his best days Ackerman could come up with a speedy, gorgeous fingerpicking showcase like “Seattle.”

So what happened? To perhaps oversimplify, Shadowfax happened. First appearing on Windham Hill as a backup band on one of de Grassi’s albums, Shadowfax played snoozy fuzak that reflected Ackerman’s interest in making Windham Hill less of an acoustic folk label and more of a home for ensemble playing, where musicians guested on one another’s albums and appeared together on the label’s enormously popular samplers. (The sound boomers conjure up in their heads when they think of Windham Hill probably isn’t Winston so much as Michael Manring, a fretless electric bassist who played on many of the label’s mid-80s albums--almost always making them worse. His tone was expansive and goopy filler, the musical equivalent of foam insulation.)

But if the ensemble approach wrecked Windham Hill’s sound, it also made it consistent—-and more packageable. Arrange articles about Windham Hill chronologically and the label’s story shifts from music glossies to the business pages. Jazz magazines took Windham Hill releases seriously in the early 80s, and Rolling Stone crowned Autumn with a four-star review in 1981. (Kurt Loder, an early booster, had nice things to say about its follow up, December.) But by 1985, when there were Windham Hill sections in record stores, Ackerman couldn’t avoid the fact that he’d accidentally invented a genre. Windham Hill signed a distribution and marketing deal with A&M records that year, becoming a $40-million-a-year business. Other major labels took that as a cue to jump into the New Age game as well, building stables out of Windham Hill’s most successful (not best) parts: lotsa mid-tempo keyboards, some Manring-esque caulk, a few nods to “foreign” musical traditions. From there it’s an easy trip to musical hell, which you and I know as Yanni: Live at the Acropolis.

In truth nobody with ears can reasonably connect Winston--a close friend of John Fahey who was obsessed with Professor Longhair, Fats Waller, and Vince Guaraldi--with Yanni, who started his career playing keyboards in a Minneapolis synth-pop band. But making that connection made good financial sense for Windham Hill; when it bought Private Music in 1997 it inherited the rights to Yanni’s back catalog and has since released three compilations of his music. There’s no Yanni on A Quiet Revolution, but the set is more a reflection of its New Age business plan than its acoustic folk roots. Only one song on the set predates 1980; none of the acoustic work by Qualey, Hecht, or de Grassi from that era appears. Box sets are easily compromised by licensing hassles and disagreeable artists, but even with that qualifier, the set’s a mess. Its first three discs are broken out into meaningless themes—-Elements, Peace, Artistry—-that showcase lesser lights such as Nightnoise, Liz Story, and Manring. The fourth disc, Excursions, reveals just how confused the label became in its third decade. With New Age clearly a dying yuppie fad, Windham Hill was flailing for ways to get an audience. What was the Windham Hill brand name worth? Would listeners like aging topical folkies like Janis Ian? A world music artist like Cesaria Evora? Singer-songwriters like Patty Larkin and John Gorka? A scat version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” anyone? Anyone?

That’s a story, I suppose. But it’s not a tale, and the deeper I fell into Windham Hill the more my enthusiasm waned—-the initial excitement of a group of musicians inventing a small but relevant byway in American folk devolved fairly quickly, stripping my interest off along with it. (For the record, I had a stunningly patient and supportive agent who helped generate a few lengthy phone calls with interested editors, resulting in a bite from one publisher. But by that point I couldn't see myself finishing the project; I had neither the time, energy, or resources in pursuing a book that, if done wrong, would be a complete rep-killer.) I tried thinking about Windham Hill from different angles—-a reflection of America’s spiritual individualism, perhaps maybe something about the New Age business in general. But no rhetorical or organizational gambit was going to let me get around the fact that the label simply wasn't interesting by the 90s—-it didn’t represent anything except a label that sacrificed its aesthetic impulses for the sake of building a brand. (Even a fine acoustic guitarist like Michael Hedges, who’d surely be wowing ‘em at Bonnaroo if he hadn’t died in 1997, had fallen off his game in his later years.) Its back catalog isn’t so toxic that it couldn’t make for a solid two-, maybe even three-disc set of the good stuff, if an enterprising label wanted to pursue the idea. But that label isn’t Windham Hill.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXVII

2005-11-06T18:09:00.000-06:00

Two Sirks...

Films:

All That Heaven Allows (#95, 1955)

Written on the Wind (#96, 1956)

Director:

Douglas Sirk

Sirk wasn't perfect--that deer showing up by the picture window at the end of All That Heaven Allows is too much. And that toddler bouncing on the mechanical pony just after Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) discovers he's impotent in Written on the Wind--that's something beyond too much. But the territory that Sirk worked in is so difficult to navigate well that his lack of miscues is astounding, as is his ability to conjure up layers of moral struggle beneath that shiny Technicolor veneer. The scene where trampy Marylee Hadley (a magnificent Dorothy Malone) prances around her room clutching a photo of her beloved Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) works because we know she's tragically oblivious to the chaos she's inflicted on her family--what she's drowning out is Kyle's despair, along with her father's (legitimate) fear that he's failed both of them. Sirk gets knocked around a bit for being an unsubtle director, but I'm not hearing it. In both of these films he's blessed with great actors--Jane Wyman and Lauren Bacall are both older and more confident (which, ironically, allows them to better play wounded souls), and Rock Hudson finds real room to maneuver within his Noble, Earthy Fella persona. Toward the end of Wind he sits across the dinner table from Marylee; the second she says "You know, I was thinking..." he flinches slightly, and you can feel him bracing.

Despite its strengths, time has made All That Heaven Allows feel overdone--troubling the delicate sensibilities of waspy alcoholic suburbanites is such a well-worn theme that Todd Haynes found it easy to tweak in Far From Heaven. But, it's worth noting, he didn't spoof it. If the interactions between Wyman and Hudson in that film are formulaic, the ones between Wyman and her children are decidedly not; Sirk has a strong handle on the churlishness of children who've idealized their parents and resists any change in them. Indeed, he has a strong handle on churlishness in general--stubborn adherence to values cripples communities, Sirk knows, even while it supports them. (As one smirking townsman says halfway through, their ability to be contemptuous is financed.) Wyman and Hudson are forever getting struck by arrows in the midst of all this, but they never come off as falsely valiant. They play it like two young kids trying to figure it all out--which, if you're an honest director, you're going to play as melodrama.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXVI

2005-10-30T11:56:00.000-06:00

A Powell-Pressburger twofer:

Films:

Black Narcissus (#93, 1947)

I Know Where I'm Going! (#94, 1945)

Directors:

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Both are essentially fish-out-of-water tales: in Black Narcissus a young nun, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), is assigned to run a mission on a desolate Indian mountaintop, while in I Know Where I'm Going! a young woman, Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), is determined to make it to the desolate Scottish island where she's to marry her impossibly wealthy fiance. Though the latter film has a happy ending, both films get their energy by being tales of failure: Clodagh cannot in fact properly run the convent, just as her mother superior in Calcutta told her, and Webster can't make the crossing to Kiloran no matter how much money she throws at the problem. And Powell-Pressburger aren't selling these failures as ennobling, either; in both cases their star women are portrayed as being very much in need of a thorough dressing-down.

I'd call that approach sexist if I thought the team didn't play up men as comic relief in both films, or if I thought Powell went any easier on Carl Boehm in Peeping Tom. And besides, these women aren't women-in-crisis who need to be put in their place. They're looking for their place, and they have layers: Clodagh's war with the increasingly mad Sister Ruth (a tremendous Kathleen Byron) is as psychological and emotional as it is physical, and Joan is spending much of the film processing the meaning of her headstrong past. Which is why the party she observes from atop a ladder is so meaningful to her--the small dramas of love and rejection and fear of death that's plagued her practically from birth play out before her eyes. And Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), the sort of man who calmly smokes a pipe in a life-threatening storm, is right there beside her, stubborn enough to remind Joan (and us) of her flaws without rubbing her face in them.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXV

2005-10-16T16:45:00.000-05:00

The (Japanese) horror! The (American) horror! The (British) horror!

Films:

Masaki Kobayashi, Kwaidan (#90, 1964)

Irwin S. Yeaworth, Jr., The Blob (#91, 1958)

Arthur Crabtree, Fiend Without a Face (#92, 1958)

My initial instinct is to write off Kwaidan as too formal--two genuinely creepy ghost stories bookending an uninteresting middle pair--but formalism is part of the point of genre fiction. And in horror, it's a good deal of the fun--because the good stuff is always commenting about our worst fears about ourselves, the pleasure's in how well it nails our anxieties. Kwaidan is more enduring because it cuts to essential notions about identity and love, but it's also draggy, and it can't compete with the great themes of The Blob (Those Damn Teenagers Are Up to Something) and Fiend Without a Face (We'll Be Blowing Ourselves to Smithereens Any Minute Now, Thank You). I've spent zero time googling the argument that the blob is a representation of America's fear of juvenile delinquency in the 50s, but I'm sure it's out there--all those adults punching their hands over those lawless kids, who can understand what they're on about? Making out, mostly--after all, it's what Steve McQueen would've kept on doing if he didn't have an alien invasion to give him a chance to process himself into an adult. And you have to love the presicence of the ending, where the chilled blob is dropped onto the polar ice cap and the end title reads "The End . . . ?" What else could the question mark imply but global warming?

Fiend Without a Face is a funny little essay on the dangers of nuclear power and what happens when our brains begin running free from our bodies--unattached to our own mortality and hubris, we cause all sorts of chaos. Nuclear paranoia is an overworked theme in horror and sci-fi (and even noir, if you want to count Kiss Me Deadly), but Fiend gets over by having more than the usual amount of well-drawn personalities and tensions--farmers versus soldiers versus Canadians versus Americans versus men versus women versus nuclear reactor workers who keen about pushing the plant into the danger zone but who chirp "It's your funeral" when ordered to comply. (Dude! It's a nuclear power plant! It's your funeral too!) Plus there's some nice stop-motion animation and sound editing as well--that horde of brains and spinal cords makes the best creepy-squishy noises when it finally attacks our American soldiers and Canadian love interests. The Canadians try to think things through, while the Americans do what they do whenever they're confronted with something that's foreign to them--keep shooting.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXIV

2005-10-08T10:10:00.000-05:00

Packaged as a box set (#86) called Sergei Eisenstein: The Sound Years, Alexander Nevsky (#87) and Ivan the Terrible parts I and II (#88) are late Eisenstein--products of a man so committed to his theory that it tended to swallow his art. (The second Ivan was released posthumously; a third Ivan film was planned but never made.) Not that there aren't surprises and pleasures in both films--the battle scenes in Nevsky are broad, brash, and exciting, and the sudden shift to color midway through Ivan II is striking even if it's not clear where he's going with it. But Eisenstein's fascination with geometric patterns in both films feels fussy and almost oppressive. I'm thinking of the very end of the first Ivan, where people are reduced to an small, stringy line in the background, overwhelmed by Nikolai Cherkasov's pointy beard. I've read complaints about how heavily formal Potemkin is--that the montage of the concrete lion rising from sleep and roaring thanks to three edits is terribly heavy-handed. Of course it was--the film was unabashed propaganda. But if Eisenstein was gunning for subtlety and layers with Ivan--and why plot out a trilogy if you're not?--such mathematical strictures are just tiring. Worse, for all their engaging ornamentation, the Ivan films are muddled and confused--Eisenstein never seems quite sure whether to use Cherkasov as an allegory, a character unto himself, or as an empty vessel for generalized grumpiness about Russian rule under the czars. Cherkasov splits the difference--he hams it up.

Let's go to #89:

Film:

Sisters (1973)

Director:

Brian De Palma

Despite the Bernard Herrmann score and the tracking shots through binoculars, Sisters isn't all Hitchcockian. Hitchcock wouldn't go for the gross-out the way De Palma does, for one thing; no chance he'd spend lots of time lingering on a fellow (Lisle Wilson) who's had his face slashed with a knife, bits of lip flapping free. He also wouldn't be so thoroughgoinging dim about journalists, cops, and the way they interact. What reporter lines the walls of her apartment with framed copies of her columns? Jennifer Salt's Grace Collier, that's who. What detective would threaten a reporter with "attempted libel?" Dolph Sweet's Detective Kelly, that's who. And why send homicide detectives to the apartment when the whole problem here is that the cops don't believe there's a murder?

It's best not to get too caught up in plot details here, but De Palma is also off his game as a mood-maker: if we're willing to hang with the notion of siamese twins being lashed together emotionally as well as physically, he doesn't succeed in making the story feel terribly creepy. The blame for that goes in a number of directions: Margot Kidder's crummy French-Canadian accent; Emil Breton (William Finley), the husband-svengali-brainwasher being so one-note; a drama featuring a private dick played by Charles Durning being essentially drama-free. But the problem is mostly De Palma, who wasn't yet skilled at working with those Hitchcockian conventions. When Phillip Woode, the Kidder character's would-be lover, finally eats it, De Palma uses Herrmann to create some comic plinking while his body gets shoved into the couch-bed. Defenders would argue he's lightening the mood and that Hitch had a sense of humor too; I'd say De Palma was never sure how much we were supposed to be invested in the plot.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXIII

2005-09-17T10:59:00.000-05:00

Busy summer, but we're still paying attention. Let's do a quick roundup before taking a deep breath and diving into a bunch of Eisenstein.

Variety Lights (#81), Federico Fellini's first director credit (he codirected with Alberto Lattuada), shows a handful of the tics that made Fellini so entertaining (or foolish, depending)--mostly sexual obsession, and a way of simultaneously embracing unusual people and playing them for laughs. But its plot--about an ambitious young vaudeville dancer, nicely played by Carla Del Poggio--is hackneyed, and movie lacks the appealingly surreal touches that defined Fellini's later work.

I'm working off very old memories when it comes to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (#82)--I caught it in high school with a classroom of AP students who felt the Melacholy Dane was a bit too touchy-feely with Ma in the early scenes. I don't trust my remembrance of the film enough to add anything more insightful than that; my classmates may have been right.

Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (#83) is a thrill for the first half of its run time--a colorful, gritty vision of a young man, Ivan (Jimmy Cliff), stunned by the Big City but crafty enough to game it to his advantage; the studio-performance scenes are wonderful portraits not just of reggae but of music-making in general. But as it drifts into a crime story and there's less to like about Ivan, the film becomes more rote--and the attempts to edit Ivan into a spaghetti-western oppressed hero feel forced and limp.

Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning (#84) was the first Ozu I've ever seen, and one of the first films I saw on that old Magnavox. Ozu's wonderful with children, and though I gather he's told the story here many other ways, I haven't had a chance to research the point.

I'll take My Fair Lady over Pygmalion (#85), though not because I find too many flaws in Asquith & Howard's version--Leslie Howard's Henry and Wendy Hiller's Eliza are both beautifully performed. (Is Eliza's first bath overly dramatic? Probably, but I'm also convinced that it'd kind of go that way.) But there's an inherent preposterousness in Shaw's story that the filmmakers seem unwilling to acknowlege (David Lean worked as an editor on the movie), and if you've seen My Fair Lady first, you're probably can't be convinced that the story doesn't need Audrey Hepburn and her missing aitches.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXII

2005-08-07T18:47:00.000-05:00

On to #80...

Film:

The Element of Crime (1984)

Director:

Lars von Trier

Feeling disengaged from Dogville (too many heavy-handed metaphors) and angry at Dancer in the Dark (if you don't like human beings, why make movies about them?), I hoped there'd be a little less contempt in The Element of Crime; I figured that von Trier needed a few years to whip himself into his patented froth. True enough, there's a sort of puppyish concession to noir cliches--The Third Man most obviously--and there's an appropriate, appealing stylishness to the way he tweaks noir aesthetics. Instead of bleak shadows, he goes for a sepia, almost jaundiced color scheme, with lots of rain misting the proceedings and pitter-patting through the story. Which is pretty mundane, unfortunately--the hard-boiled dick (Michael Elphick) who goes native in the midst of his investigation is hackneyed stuff, and turning the femme fatale (Me Me Lai) into an Asian whore instead of a seductress is less creative than von Trier and his cohorts probably thought it was. But the surface pleasure of noir are still there in those shadowy, rainy, double-exposed scenes--the notion that getting at the truth requires navigating a whole lot of muck.

Climbing Mount Criterion XXI

2005-07-17T16:34:00.000-05:00

Catching up...

Sandrine Bonnaire is both a feral and sympathetic character in Agnes Varda's Vagabond (#74), a sort of precursor to Varda's excellent documentary on homelessness, The Gleaners & I. The trick is to make homelessness a subject you want to care about without devolving into easy plays for sympathy; Varda, impressively, has pulled it off twice. I've written at length about the film here.

I caught Chasing Amy (#75) in the theater when it was released in 1997 and have no interest in seeing it again; I've never been much of a Kevin Smith fan, and this film is the main reason. Ben Affleck falls for a lesbian; hamfistedness ensues.

Brief Encounter (#76) is David Lean working on a small scale--a man and a woman, married to others, who improbably fall for one another. But you have to buy the premise that she falls hard for Trevor Howard because she's attracted to his boyish qualities. Tough sledding: Howard doesn't have much boy in him. It's a British version of the whirlwind romance fantasy--which is to say it's a bit stiff--but it doesn't pile on the guilt the way Lean's Summertime later would.

And God Created Woman (#77): A perversely overwrought expression of the notion that a pretty lady in a curve-hugging dress has the power to make the world stop cold. But Brigitte Bardot is remarkably game to argue that ridiculous point.

Unlike most of his contemporaries--even the Marx Brothers--W.C. Fields's humor came not from what he did but from what he said. Not that The Bank Dick (#78) or the shorts in W.C. Fields: Six Short Films don't have their share of physical comedy; the constant whacks and club-snaps and pratfalls in The Golf Specialist are proof enough of that. But I still think of Fields as the first insult comic--he's forever condescending to his wife or whacking his daughter upside the head or giving some petulant child what-for. That makes his humor dated enough, now. But his vaudevillean humor asks for a different sort of suspension of disbelief than comedy today does; The Barber Shop closes with a dopey gag arguing that two cellos, placed next to one another, will eventually spawn a pile of tiny violins.

Climbing Mount Criterion XX

2005-07-03T14:36:00.000-05:00

Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (#70) isn't necessarily a better film about Jesus than, say, King of Kings or even The Passion of the Christ, but I do think it asks smarter questions -- more a credit to the original Nikos Kazantzakis novel than to anything that Scorsese or Willem Defoe accomplish. I wrote about the film in a bit more detail here.

I don't have the skill set about either Bergman or opera to say much about The Magic Flute (#71), except to say that I hope opera fans find themselves just as exasperated with the tittering horndog Papageno as we members of the great unwashed do--despite the constant cuts to the young smiling lady throughout the film. (Look! Opera's fun!)

Rene Clair's Le Million (#72) is screwball boilerplate that gets credit for helping to design the boilerplate. But, with the exception of the sweet doubled love scene toward the end, it's something more appreciated than enjoyed.

Which brings us to #73, and one of the first films I've seen since starting this project that I've just flat-out fallen in love with:

Film:

Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962)

Director:

Agnes Varda

Varda began her career as a photojournalist, which may have made her better attuned than many of her compatriots to the ideas that defined the French New Wave: a keen eye for the simplest and clearest way to get an idea across, an affinity for life as it is lived, and a certain sentimentality -- not melodrama so much as an ability to make emotions come off the screen without bludgeoning you with them. If Cleo seems breezier and less intellectual than Godard or Truffaut, it's not that she was thinking less than her compatriots, only that she clearly put more energy into clearing away the cinematic clutter and showing people the way they essentially are. Which is to say, troubled.

The story is roughly two hours in the life of Cleo (Corrine Marchand) a young and somewhat successful pop singer who's dreading the results of an examination -- she may have cancer. Melodrama does get wrapped up in some of this -- composer Michel Legrand, who makes a lovely cameo, contributes some familiarly pregnat swells on a couple of occasions, and the plot does devolve into a somewhat untenable love story toward the end. But Varda's point is more that when we're under pressure we tend to generate movie-style melodrama all by ourselves. Cleo weeps publicly in a cafe, plays her own song off a jukebox at a club and bemoans her fate when nobody pays much attention, flays herself in front her composers, her valet, the gentleman she meets at the park -- pretty much everybody, really. And yet the interior glimpses Varda provides of Cleo's thinking are so sensible and understandable that Cleo never becomes an object of our contempt.

And the clarity that Varda brings to the film -- both as a filmmaker and a student of human beings -- is remarkable. This is a knowingly brief glimpse of somebody's life, but Varda isn't compelled to pack in information about Cleo; though there are chapter breaks noting the time, they're not weighted with any tick-tock anxiety, just markers for small revelations that Cleo has in the course of her living. An hour or two is enough, we learn, to understand the whole of our world, meaning we get a solid sense of all the things we can't figure out. Which is why the film's most perfect moment is the ridiculous inscrutable short film that Cleo and her dancer friend -- and we -- watch from the projector's booth. It's silly and small and dumb and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and I'm sure that's precisely why Varda put it in a movie that gets remarkably close to plumbing the depths of our own daily confusions.

Climbing Mount Criterion XIX

2005-06-22T08:35:00.000-05:00

Oh dear -- a trinity of poetic abstraction that isn't quite abstract. Well, let's try:

Films:

Le sang d'un poete (1930)

Orphee (1949)

Testament of Orpheus (1959)

Director:

Jean Cocteau

“It really is time that mankind admitted that it is living on an incomprehensible planet," Cocteau said in a lecture he gave at a screening of the final film in this trilogy, four hours or so of camera tricks, intellectual discussions that work like Moebius strips, and even a bit of humor -- Cocteau fervently believes that poetry ought to be the stuff of fistfights in the cafes, but he's willing to concede that the very idea looks a tad comic onscreen. My understanding of the Orpheus myth is limited and grade-school, but I also sense that the films wouldn't really sustain the weight of them anyway; Cocteau wanted to celebrate the qualities of artists that weren't earthbound, and the Orpheus-Euridyce tale is simply the oldest romantic-artistic archetype we have. "The poet, in composing poems, makes use of a language, neither living nor dead, which few people speak and few understand," Cocteau himself says in Testament. The idea was to articulate the ineffable -- feeling, not coherence, was the point.

And yet it's coherent, in part because Cocteau realized how infinitely capable film is to create dreamlands. (Indeed, he's arguably the first to do so.) So the things that stick with me aren't plot points but details -- the tight latex gloves sliding on and off when the film gets reversed in Orphee, the magnificent moment when the mirror turns into a pool in Le sang, the mouth in the hand in the same film, Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso's cameos in Testament, Orpheus (Jean Marais) and Eurydice (Marie Dea) avoiding each other in Orphee like they suddenly fell into a Preston Sturges film. And all this -- creating the appeal of small moments, not narrative -- is probably the way Cocteau wanted it. “This film is the opposite of an intellectual, or 'art' film," he said in the same lecture quoted above. Which would be what? An entertainment? No: a film that was made while almost reflexively avoiding anything that smacked of convention.

Climbing Mount Criterion XVIII

2005-06-11T09:52:00.000-05:00

Catching up with a few brief takes before we go on at length about Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy:

Though I suppose I grew up with enough geek genes to become a Monty Python fan -- WTTW certainly broadcast enough episodes at the time I was most prone to become one -- my interest in Python (and most britcoms, actually) has always been distant. I could appreciate it, but I couldn't get engaged with it. I remember that my brother and I gave it a heroic try when we were both preteens and couldn't get past the accents -- and gags about William Shakespeare's Gay Boys in Bondage pretty much flew right past us. I came to know Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python's Life of Brian (#61) quite well, but I still can't help but see them as somewhat junky movies -- a handful of tremendous gags that fought and scraped to be heard.

There is more to The Passion of Joan of Arc (#62) than Maria Falconetti's stricken face, but it's the first thing I recall -- I blurbed the film a while back.

Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (#63) is a cult film that transcended its cult, though its art-film qualities are overstated. My piece on the film, written for filmcritic.com, is here.

What I've written about The Third Man (#64) will do, I suppose, though in truth I was a bit more disengaged from it than I usually am with noirs. It'd require another viewing to figure out why.

Because I saw Rushmore (#65) when it came out in 1998 and haven't seen it since then, it's hard for me to trust any recollection that I have of it now. But I do still recall it seven years down the line -- splashes of warmth and color emerge from everybody making an effort to push the story outside of its prep-school confines, Bill Murray heroically resurrecting himself.

Climbing Mount Criterion XVII

2005-05-22T19:43:00.000-05:00

Film:
Autumn Sonata (1978)

Director:
Ingmar Bergman

In The Idea of North, Peter Davidson's fine study of how a sort of chill northerliness emerges in various aspects of culture, there's a reproduction of a painting by a Danish artist named Vilhelm Hammershoi titled Interior With a Lady. In it, a woman is at the left of the picture, sitting quietly and a little sadly at a bare table; autumnal light streams lightly through the window behind her an seems to haunt the door at the right. It's a painting that's disarming and calming all at once, and, as Davidson explains, quintessentially Scandinavian: he writes about it in the context of a Finnish notion that "it is good to sit in silence as the light goes, to observe nightfall as a time of contemplation -- 'pitaa hamaraa,' 'keeping the twilight.'"

Hammershoi's painting snapped immediately to mind while I watched the opening frames of Autumn Sonata, as Eva (Liv Ullmann) quietly works at her desk -- light is streaming in through the windows, everything is placed just so, and yet her husband Viktor (Halvar Bjork) is explaining just how broken things are. And this is, for all its manners, a story about corrosion, and how deep words can cut. The worst of the fight between Eva and her mother Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman, in her next-to-last role), is not when the screaming reaches its highest, weepiest pitch. It's when Eva softly plants a rhetorical dagger in her mother's heart: "You should be hidden away and kept from doing others harm." It is a savage late-night conversation, with a constant jagged undercurrent of wreckage -- characterized by Helena (Lena Nyman), Charlotte's sick and neglected other daughter.

Breakdowns like this, on film, are usually "and that's when everything changed" moments. That's not the case here; Charlotte is a concert pianist with work to do, and Eva is a thoroughly sad woman who lives for the responsibility of running a home. But it gets the flash point of realization about a loved one's flaws right -- and it does right to not become a hollow tale of reconciliation.

N.B.: My review of this film for Filmcritic.com is here.

Climbing Mount Criterion XVI

2005-05-22T09:07:00.000-05:00

Film:

The Night Porter (1974)

Director:

Liliana Cavani

"A sadist's wet dream," David Thomson writes of Charlotte Rampling's performance here, and it's hard to tell if he's making a statement or passing a judgment -- a tactic that's common in his Biographical Dictionary. Is he simply explaining that the plot revolves around the lust she creates in Dirk Bogarde, her former oppressor back when he was an SS brute? Or does he mean you have to be a sadist to enjoy the film? Considering how far this movie goes -- eroticized Nazi gear, cuts and blood as lust objects, humiliation as joy -- it's still hard for me to argue that the film goes too far. Cavani creates a mood of perversion without being perverse herself, and Rampling is beyond brave; she seems infinitely capable of presenting herself as wounded, self-aware, blinkered, broken, and strong, and she accesses these tools at just the right moments, in ways that throw any comfort you can get from the film completely off. Starving towards the end, she makes herself into a monster, a child, and a sex object. Cavani can be a very mannered director -- as in the sadly under-seen Ripley's Game -- so the most disturbing aspect of The Night Porter is the air of intention that surrounds the moral and sexual breakdowns she depicts -- she meant every frame.

Climbing Mount Criterion XV

2005-05-15T18:09:00.000-05:00

I caught Stanley Donen's Charade (#57) a few years back while staying at my parents' house, needing to escape San Francisco for a while. I spent a long day tuned to AMC (Gilda was also on the schedule that day, I think), and as much as I admired the colorfulness of the film and its shameless Hitchcock knock-offs, I remember it solely as a love letter to Cary Grant's handsomeness. If that line about there being absolutely nothing wrong with him seems cornball here, imagine trying to apply it to any actor working today. Hitchcock gets a more oblique and impressive homage in #58:

Film:
Peeping Tom (1960)

Director:
Michael Powell

I know Powell's work only from The Red Shoes, but nothing I know of Powell & Pressburger's output suggests that he was capable of this -- a genteel but probing suspense film about being mentally conditioned into madness. It's not perfect -- the closing voiceover after the fade to black is cheap b-movie horror stuff that makes the film end with a thud -- but Carl Boehm is careful to play his madman as a person who's worthy of an attempt at sympathy. And Anna Massey, as the earnest, romantic, somewhat mousy Helen, the neighbor downstairs who's eager to know him better, doesn't become a melodramatic weeper. Powell seemed to intuitively understand that tough characters are better at generating horror than weak-willed, pliable ones, and that toughness plays out perfectly when Mark (Boehm) is confronted by Helen's mother (Maxine Audley) -- a blind alcoholic, she still has a stubborn ferocity and presence in every scene she's in.

I'm certain that a thousand essays have been written about the act of gazing in the film, and how it might related to how we, as moviegoers, treat our viewing as something we do secretly, shamefully. People are forever looking furtively at things in Peeping Tom -- sneaking peeks at porny postcards, catching a film shoot unnoticed from a catwalk, turning on somebody else's projector to watch something she wasn't (and we weren't) meant to see. I imagine that watching it in a theater, you felt part of the conspiracy. On a screen at home, it can take on an eerie feeling too.

N.B.: My review of this film for Filmcritic.com is here.

Climbing Mount Criterion XIV

2005-05-08T20:29:00.000-05:00

Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (#55) is out of print. Off to early Hitchcock, then, with #56:

Film:
The 39 Steps (1935)

Director:
Alfred Hitchcock

I vaguely remember watching this as a boy, nine or ten maybe, catching it on the small black and white TV set I was allowed to keep in my room. It must have been a late-night movie broadcast on WYCC, and it would've been a crummy print -- or at least would've looked crummy on my set. I'm certain I caught at least the tail end of it -- I remember Hannay asking Mr. Memory what the 39 Steps are, Mr. Memory being shot, and my feeling that I'd missed something interesting. Which I did, of course. What I'm always struck by, watching Hitchcock, is that his meticulous plotting always leaves room for human tics. It's an obvious tool in filmmaking, but it's surprising how little it's exploited -- or how consistently brilliant Hitchcock was at doing it himself. Here, it's the heroic effort by the waiter on the train to keep his tea service tray from falling, or Hannay constantly minding his handcuffed hand, the poor farmer who's all to eager to ask Mr. Memory what causes pip in poultry, the bobbie at the climax who brightens when he gets to look at the orchestra pit in action. Slyly, Hitchcock thrust small bits of the rhythms of others' lives to underscore the particular stress the movie was under at the moment -- which is different than other screenwriters and directors, who do this stuff as sight gags or forced bits of color. And Hitchcock is quick about it -- his examples slip in only slightly before they drift away. Think of Hannay and Pamela tussling over her skirt in front of the innkeeper to express flirting, rage, secrecy, play-acting, and fear, or the dance of stockings, sandwiches, and hands a few scenes later. And he'd mastered this stuff with four more decades of a career to work in.

Climbing Mount Criterion XIII

2005-05-07T16:26:00.000-05:00

Terry Gilliam's Brazil (#51) is a film that any sci-fi-identified adolescent of my generation took to easily, many times. It's a nice bit of film-snob training because it was big and brash and had lots of eye-grabbing special effects, and yet it was pompous enough that you could pretend you actually knew what the damn thing was about. It's been years since I've seen it, and another viewing would only reduce my estimation of it and give it less weight; best to slide that particular drawer closed and keep it as a memory of hyperactive smart-kid pretentiousness. Yojimbo (#52) and Sanjuro (#53) blur together -- twin essays on Toshiro Mifune's comic ability to expose the foolishness in others by doing nothing himself. (One of the best moments in Sanjuro is when one of Mifune's would-be acolytes stops his partners to remind them that only when the actually act do they wind up failing.) But earth-bound concerns are dispensed with in #54:

Film:
For All Mankind (1989)

Director:
Al Reinert

We've been trained to be somewhat cynical about space exploration, but the remarkable thing is that our cynicism doesn't come from obvious concerns such as NASA's budgets or two Space Shuttle tragedies. It stems from a more philosophical assessment that the men who explored space really didn't do all that much -- sat in a spaceship, picked up a few rocks, came back. Susan Faludi's Stiffed discusses this "man in a can" syndrome, and the peculiar anxiety that befell many of the men who took part in Apollo -- what if you went all the way to the moon but really couldn't say you've done anything?

For All Mankind reclaims the moon shots as magical, mainly by just letting the footage appear before our eyes -- remarkably clear, pristine, unreconstructed imagery of places that are indeed clear, pristine, and unreconstructed. And getting there was an accomplishment -- there's a certain posture, intelligence, wisdom that all of the astronaut narrators seem to share, as if they've successfully taken on the task of having wider eyes and more open souls than the rest of us. From a critical distance, their accomplishments still seem slight. But the images are breathtaking -- rovers bouncing happily across the Moon, the earth appearing far, far in the distance, men having a grand old time in a world that they claimed as wholly their own, in trust, for a little while.

Climbing Mount Criterion XII

2005-05-06T11:58:00.000-05:00

For myself -- and a lot of critics, I imagine -- my instinct to read, listen, and watch was often sparked by jealousy of others' knowledge. Published critics will do that for any guy with the collector-geek gene -- like a lot of music journalists, I started my career obsessed with trying to hear everything that folks like Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus were listening to, had listened to, and wanted to know better. But sometimes friends prompt the obsession. Sometime in 1988, Fellini's Nights of Cabiria (#49) was rereleased, and I recall going out with a couple of friends who spoke about nothing but their recent viewing of film. I didn't know the movie; indeed, I didn't even know Fellini, but there was that jealous pang -- a combination of the sinking feeling of ignorance, combined with an eagerness to catch up and learn.

I eventually caught up with Cabiria on my Magnavox, though I don't recall much about it now -- just flickering memories of sad-eyed Giulietta Massina in a striped shirt and the streetlights of Rome. I've caught up with Fellini a bit more since then, though he's always been a disappointment to me -- the voluptuousness in Amarcord (#4) feels hollow and insubstantial to me -- jokey. And though I admire the far-flung audaciousness of 8 1/2 (#140) I caught a whiff of contempt running through the film -- it's hard for me to detect what side Fellini's on, or if he ever felt like picking a side. Which means I had problems with (#50):

Film:
And the Ship Sails On (1983)

Director:
Federico Fellini

Though it proposes to be an allegory about fractured European identities just before World War I -- class stratification, overfed royalty, idle rich, and brutalized refugees -- Fellini doesn't really care much for politics. The reason he likes folks from all classes and backgrounds is because it's so amusing to make them look like clowns next to one another -- the unctuous journalist next to the gorgeous blonde waif, the portly archduke next to the portly tenor, the Serbian refugee next to the anxious ship's captain, everyone next to a dying rhinocerous What to make of all this? Nothing that resembles plot and message, certainly -- like a lot of Fellini, the scenes are meant as vignettes about image, amusing juxtapositions if not much else.

Still, one scene, set in the bowels of the ship, is tremendously affecting. Visiting the boiler room, opera singers and various attending nabobs are asked to sing by the men shoveling coal into the burners. Slowly, begrudgingly, they comply, and thei singing soon becomes a competition to see who can fill the cavernous space of the boiler room. The wide shot of the singers on the upper walkway and the workers down below isn't drawn as a message of stratification: they both look small. Mainly, it comes off as a humane glimpse of how far apart these two sides are from one another, and how much they need one another. It's a sweet grace note in a film that otherwise sorely lacking in sweetness and humor.

Climbing Mount Criterion XI

2005-04-24T17:23:00.000-05:00

I've written about The Red Shoes (#44) elsewhere on this blog, though not very well -- the point was that I was struck by a British musical that wasn't wholly indebted to Hollywood approaches toward sound and color. Taste of Cherry (#45) was the first Kiarostami film I'd seen, and I recall feeling impatient watching it; his pace was unfamiliar to me, though it made more sense by the time I got to The Wind Will Carry Us. The Most Dangerous Game (#46) has all the taut brilliance of a child's adventure story -- and all of its limitations. Erik Skjoldbjaerg's Insomnia (#47) prompted an American version with Al Pacino and Robin Williams that was fairly thin and lifeless -- a rare case where Hollywood decided to mirror the original text exactly and turned out to pick to the wrong movie to mirror. Which brings us to #48:

Film:
Black Orpheus (1959)

Director:
Marcel Camus

A pulse runs through the film, start to finish, practically -- regardless of what's happening with the plot, there's a rhythm puttering and sproinging and beating along. For a while it seems to steady the film, roots it in something, which is a nice trick because the plot -- based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice -- is so far-flung. So this tragic love story set in Rio during Carnival has the benefit of its propulsive sound as well as its color -- blues and reds and yellows are doing some sproinging too.

But there's a formality to the film -- a very American Technicolor formality -- that makes the movie seem a little misbegotten. Its plot, its diction, its romanticization of grinding poverty on a mountain with a nifty view, feels so 40s MGM (or, more properly, a French re-interpretation of it) that Black Orpheus feels neither like a film set in Brazil, nor a myth. Breno Mello (Orfeo) and Marpessa Dawn (Eurydice) are themselves blameless for the film's fake-ness -- their sheer beauty galvanizes the film as much as the music does. But beauty, as the movie tells us, has only so much power. And beyond the lovely music -- composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim -- the film feels more invested in reinterpreting than provoking emotional response.

Climbing Mount Criterion X

2005-04-10T19:33:00.000-05:00

Film:

Lord of the Flies (#43) (1963)

Director:

Peter Brook

Lord of the Flies came out a year after La Jetee, which leads me to at least wonder if Chris Marker's short-in-stills masterpiece had some sort of influence on the opening credits. Both deal with postapocalyptic societies, in a way -- Brook, a bright man, might have seen a connection, not to mention a clever way to dispense with a potentially expensive opening. The film is full of lots of gorgeous cinematography of its Puerto Rican setting, and the long shots are masterful -- they show us whenever the boys become small either as a result of their dumbness or their willingness to embrace a herd mentality. But that artistry is a cover for weak storytelling. I haven't read the original novel, but it's difficult to get enthused about a film that's patently about how humans react in conflict with one another -- every movie worth the while is about this, so why foreground it so heavy-handedly? Right, right -- they're just kids, which makes them somehow more innocent playthings of nature, which somehow makes for a movie more full of pathos. And, supposedly, a more potent allegory about....us. And yet an allegory needs a tether to a reality we know, and Brook doesn't do a wholly convincing job of explaining how these boys descend into savagery so easily and so quickly. The pathos we feel isn't for the characters but the setting -- the sadness of such a beautiful place sullied by madly screaming boys, and photographed by grown men who think they're telling us something important by showing them.

Climbing Mount Criterion IX

2005-04-10T15:38:00.000-05:00

Film:

Fishing With John (#42) (1991)

Director:

John Lurie

They're good for a giggle, but with one exception, the six episodes of Lurie's irony-sick nature show are little more than late-night-cable trifles. And there's a very early-90s sort of pomo going on here that's very dated now, which you can see in reruns of hep comedies of the time like The Ben Stiller Show -- lots of deliberate attempts to undercut the structure of TV shows by drawing attention to the parts of the show itself. The announcer speaks booming non-sequiturs like "It's a real Husker Du kind of hotel" or a dry, useless statement like "Ahhhh...fishing," to code this all as Not Your Usual Fishing Show. But what is it, then? Not a celebrity get-together -- Jim Jarmusch, Matt Dillon, and Dennis Hopper are too low-profile (in Q rating and in personality) to count as celebrities. And it's not much fun in a John-Lurie-Hangs-With-His-Pals kinda way; more than anything, Jarmusch and Dillon look as if they got roped in because somebody called in a favor.

But the episode featuring Willem Defoe -- ice fishing in Maine -- is some sort of masterpiece. Unlike the other episodes, it actually teaches you a little bit about fishing, and the ramshackle wooden shed that the two live in, set against the white frigid landscape, is at least something to look at visually. Better still, the plot's humor works because it actually presents a story that has something at stake. And, when the terrifying conclusion comes, the plot twist gets to have it both ways -- it's hilarious because it's so patently contrived and false, but it still has the feel of tragedy. Scholars of postmodernism can have a field day with it, but fans of sharply subversive narrative can get a kick out of it too.

Climbing Mount Criterion VIII

2005-03-28T06:43:00.000-06:00

The TV set I owned when I first started to take movies seriously was a Magnavox TV-VCR combo box with a 13-inch screen. It was given to me by a friend back in San Francisco during my leaner days there, when buying a television set -- let alone add-ons like a VCR -- would have involved some creative checkbook work and more anxiety than the things would have been worth. But with a free TV and VCR I was now free to begin renting sparingly at Gramophone -- a silly name for a video store, but I never thought to ask the manager about it -- which broke out most of its collection of foreign films by director. I realize now that plenty of video stores do this, and thinking back on it Gramophone's assortment was actually pretty paltry, but at the time the stacks of flattened videotape boxes for L'Avventura and Jules & Jim and so on seemed pretty damn impressive to me; browsing through the shelves flipped on the collector-geek switch in my brain.

All of which is a long way of saying that I believe that Wages of Fear (#36) might be the first French film I watched that wasn't Breathless, and was definitely the first French film I watched with any sort of purpose -- an eagerness to understand something that was previously unfamiliar to me. (In this way it wasn't dissimilar to my college-age experience of learning about stacks of music I'd heard of but never heard. New Wave films were like Can albums or New Zealand rock bands.) And all of that is a long way of saying that Wages of Fear is one of my favorite suspense films. That left me eager to see Diabolique (#37) and disappointed now that I finally have. The problem may be as simple as the hackneyed plot being overdone in the years since its release in 1955, but a few decades haven't diminished my appetite for Hitchcockian suspense; except for the tiny giggle of pleasure you get watching Michel (Paul Meurisse) float back upward out of the tub after his drowning -- eyes rolled, wet, and hollowed out -- it's a decidedly unlively glimpse into murder and paranoia.

That, alas, launches a small run of mediocrity on the list. I was fairly tolerant of Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera (2001) when I caught it on video a year ago, but the pleasure there was the surprise of seeing Suzuki's work for the first time, and the audacious use of color in that film: you can see the roots of it in Tokyo Drifter (1966) (#39) -- oh, that yellow nightclub! that powder-blue suit! -- but the confusingly criss-crossed loyalties and persistent gunplay makes it close to unwatchable. Even the fight in the burlesque house is too strangely off-beat to qualify as comedy -- and it goes on too long to qualify as an amusing aside. Branded to Kill (1967) (#38) has it worse -- it's in black and white.

The best review of Michael Bay's weary, overstuffed apology for the existence of Bruce Willis, Armageddon (1998) (#40), was the comment made by a viewer coming out of a San Francisco theater, where for some reason a 10 o'clock news crew planted itself: "That was nothing more than a two-hour advertisement for the military-industrial complex." The same might be said for Olivier's 1944 version of Henry V (#41), which I remember catching in a film class in college, doing a dutiful compare-and-contrast with the Branaugh version. I recall it only dimly know, except to recall formalism, pageantry, broad splashes of Technicolor -- a celebration of the virtues of war without all the bloodlust. A neat trick that doesn't happen in Branaugh -- or much else these days.

Climbing Mount Criterion VII

2005-03-23T09:46:00.000-06:00

I caught up with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (#33) about a year or so ago on a lazy winter afternoon where Chicago was frozen in and my TV was in a too-large apartment living room that never got warm enough. If Nanook radiated much heat, I'm not recalling it -- I was too bothered by the fact that Flaherty staged so much of the film. I don't think I would have enjoyed much more even if I did do advance research, anyhow; like a lot of pioneering films, the brilliance isn't so much on the screen as in the pioneering itself. If Flaherty deserves credit for inventing the documentary, fair enough; but that chilly afternoon, I mainly came away feeling like a nap. There's a bit more fire -- and I don't just mean that burning cow -- in # 34.

Film:

Andrei Rublev (1966)

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

I e-mailed my film rabbi back in San Francisco that Andrei Rublev was next on my list; he responded with a bit of a shrug, saying that he wasn't a big Tarkovsky fan. Flipping to the Tarkovsky entry in my Thompson, there's a simliar distance -- Rublev is a masterpiece, he says, but only for its time and place. Ms. Kael? "Depressive." So I suppose this is where my personal experience comes in handy; growing up Orthodox, you get used to the idea that being an artist is equated with suffering. (Actually, everything is equated with suffering, but that's a different discussion.) And there's no denying the sadness in the eyes of Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn), his would-be mentor Theophanes the Greek (Nikolai Sergeyeve), or his prodigal friend Kirill (Ivan Lapikov), a weeping mess in the tail end of the film, grateful for the opportunity to spend the rest of his life copying out scripture.

Joy is for murderers and fools: the only people who smile are the marauding Tatars, the dumb girl (Irma Raush) Rublev tries to protect, and Foma (Mikhail Kononov), the ambitious apprentice. Foma's death scene says a lot about Tarkovsky's take on art and suffering -- he slows Foma's spearing down, so we can better see his eventual collapse into the river, beads of water splashing into the camera. He's fixing our head straight to make us look as innocence destroyed -- yet another thing Rublev is going to have to carry on his back for the rest of his life.

If I have a problem with the film it's not so much with its depressive qualities as its joyful ones -- we get to see the herculean effort that leads to the the ringing of the bell at the end, but Tarkovsky translates this into an epiphany for Rublev a bit clumsily. Surely his re-engagement with the world, and with painting, involved more than this. But maybe Soviet politics forced Tarkovsky to be careful at the expense of the film. Tarkovsky wants to celebrate collective effort but also make something of the individual suffering that defines the Orthodox Church; those two notions are not irreconcilable in theory, but in Russia they were in practice. It may be Tarkovsky's greatest achievement that he addressed both issues sagely despite whatever pressures were bearing down above him.

Climbing Mount Criterion VI

2005-03-14T07:15:00.000-06:00

Before it takes on the shape of a horror film in its final frames, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (#29) is an almost sugary lament for the decline of innocence at the tail end of the Victorian era -- watch it, bub, that's not a teenager's ankle you're olging, it's the start of the 20th century!

It's been years since I've watched M (#30) -- the last time must've been a revival screening at the Music Box sometime in the late 90s -- but it was the first movie with Peter Lorre that I saw, which means I'm forever doomed to think of him as a bug-eyed horror, though I can see his charms elsewhere.

Speaking of melodrama and horror and Victoriana, we move to #31 and #32, two Dickens adaptations:

Films:

Great Expectations (1946)
Oliver Twist (1948)

Director:

David Lean

Charles Dickens was never one of my favorite authors, and I think that part of the reason is that he seemed to want to have it both ways when he wrote about children: he wanted to expose the injustice of their ill treatment, but theres a pitiless, almost savage tone to the way he wrote about them. Lean fluffs matters up a bit in both movies, but not by much -- Pip is a discredit to his family until his salvation, and Twist is a wretch. But Lean wants these to be stories about redemption, not social verisimilitude, and each film goes about it in different ways. Lean throws lots of light on Pip, putting him next to wide windows and London sunlight in advance of his grand re-entrance to Miss Havisham's weary old home. And Twist gets smothered in kisses and hugs and claspings from well-wishers. Setting aside the creepy, vaguely anti-Semitic tones of the role, there's gentility and warmth to Alec Guinness's Fagin -- before things get violently criminal, he's a bittersweet counterbalance to the wealthy benefactor who eventually saves Twist from the streets.

Because I only know Lean from his late work, the emotion in both these movies -- and Lean's disinterest in smoothing over it -- came as a surprise. His willingness to let a sort of ragged humanism play out in both these movies is wholly different from anything I've seen from Summertime onward, and I'm told that Brief Encounter, which preceded both these films, is much the same. Spine #76, though, so it'll be a while.

Climbing Mount Criterion V

2005-02-26T12:07:00.000-06:00

Films:

Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)
Blood for Dracula (1974)

Director:

Paul Morrissey

No avoiding the campiness and downright absurdity in both these movies -- I and probably you chuckled at the idea of chopping off a head with pruning shears in the first movie, and all the talk of "wirgins" in the second -- but Morrissey's instincts were valid. Horror is erotic, and maybe it required the nerve (or laissez-faire attitude) of a mentor like Andy Warhol to let a director go over the top with the idea. Dracula is the better of the two because its cheapness doesn't emerge so often. The core of that film is Udo Kier's performance of Dracula, which despite his ridiculously insistant diction at least conveys a sense of lust and need. In Frankenstein he's just dumbly mad, which make the hilariously drawn-out ending all the worse: Dude, you've got a spear running through your torso and your innards are hanging from its end. Stop talking and die, will you?

What Morrissey drew from both the Dracula and Frankenstein tales is that horror is something that happens when the urge to propegate the species gets stymied. It's a tenable but reductionist idea, which makes these movies simplistic, not just campy, viewing. The representative of us, the viewers, in both movies is Joe Dallesandro: the servant whose virtue comes from the fact that he's politically aware and sexually well-adjusted. But by the time we see he's painted a hammer and sickle in his room in Dracula and he deflowers a 14-year-old in the film's final act, the movie ceases to become a metaphor for our own collective neuroses and slides into needless grand guignol. Small wonder poor Vittorio de Sica, as the master of this ugly house, bolts from the proceedings three-fourths of the way through.

Climbing Mount Criterion IV

2005-01-26T08:17:00.000-06:00

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (#25) is a brave attempt to transfer the mood and rhythms of New Wave filmmaking into sci-fi, but it comes off clunky -- a misbegotten merger of noir and slacker-cool and bright lights and talking doors. Best to set it aside and leap ahead a decade and a half to #26:

Film:
The Long Good Friday

Director:
John Mackenzie

Towards the end of the film, Harold (Bob Hoskins) goes on an extended rant about how his would-be American partners don't understand the English. "Culture, sophistication, genius," he brays, his pudgy chest puffed up but framed to look as small as he truly is -- clearly, he's in possession of none of the three things he brags about. Culturally, I imagine The Long Good Friday meant more to British audiences than American ones and less to either today -- it comes off as a well-turned take on The Godfather -- but that doesn't mean some elements aren't enduring. I particularly love how Harold accrues meanness over the course of the film. Hoskins appears too insubstantial to carry his own character, let alone a movie, but what seems at first to be a milquetoast mobster slowly becomes a man who's obviously more at home gutting people with whiskey bottles than entertaining on his yacht.

There's a lecture about English hubris as it entered the 1980s buried within the script; screenwriter Barrie Keeffe, normally a playwright, conceived late-70s London as decadent (coded as homosexuality), corrupt, and willfully ignorant about IRA terrorism. The film's brave enough to suggest that (unlike The Godfather) the conflict, not the family, is what endures. It's not unimportant that Harold and his wife, Victoria (Helen Mirren, acting to type despite her best efforts), have no children; mayhem's their legacy.

Climbing Mount Criterion III

2005-01-23T17:49:00.000-06:00

I saw RoboCop (#23) when it first came out in 1987. I was 14 at the time, and a sheltered suburban boy, so I remember being mainly struck by some of the movie's dystopian postures -- an ad for the game Nukem poking holes at Reagan-era paranoia, coke-sniffing sluts held up as exemplars of decadence, "I'll buy that for a dollar!" suggesting that America was, all things being equal, a cheap and porny place. Not that my thinking was terribly sophisticated back then; at the time, it came out as something like "You can say this stuff?" Which is to say that RoboCop felt a little rude. I wish there was more rude science fiction out there. I've also written about the film here. That said, we move on to #24....

Film:
High and Low (1963)

Director:
Akira Kurosawa

I've never been much for police procedurals -- the ongoing success of Law & Order in all its iterations baffles me. Police work in many ways is intellectual work, which is difficult to capture on film without much real action going on. (With its bombs and stark imagery, The Battle of Algiers springs to mind as a rare exception.) So the middle portion of High and Low comes off as overstuffed and overdone, and it comes off even worse because the film's opening and closing sequences reflect such virtuosity on Kurosawa's part. I'm sure that if, on a second viewing, I spent time looking at where Toshiro Mifune was placed in the frame, I'd learn something about how Kurosawa arranged his actors to stress particular plot points; as it is, the feeling that Mifune's wealthy entrepreneur is alternately big and small, generous and greedy, comes across strongly. But the scenes of dope-sick gutter dwellers in the tail end of the film are truly disarming -- they reflect an emotional sensitivity and intelligence about shadow that Kurosawa never got much credit for. But then, he usually worked in broader strokes than this; which is unfortunate, given how powerfully the closing shot crashes down on you. It's the sort of emotional pitch that the ends of Law & Order episodes shoot for but can't reach, even with all its tough words and moody music.

Climbing Mount Criterion II

2005-01-23T10:12:00.000-06:00

Pasolini's Salo (#17) and Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (#21) are out of print. I think I've paid fair respect to Sam Fuller's domestic noirThe Naked Kiss (#18) elsewhere on this blog, and Fuller's Shock Corridor (#19) is one of my favorite movies about journalism -- a suggestion that an ambition to understand the world around you, when it collides with the zeitgeist, is bound to drive you a bit batty. It's been years since I've seen Sid & Nancy (#20) , which at least prepared me for the moment after my junior year in college when, working a despairing job as a Blockbuster clerk, a woman hoisted the Sid & Nancy box up to my face and asked:

"Is this OK for a 12-year-old to watch?"

"Well, uh, it's kind of dark, and there's drug use, and..."

"Well, does it have naked people in it?"

"Not that I can think of."

"Well, why didn't you say so." And she walked off in a huff to gather her boy and rent the movie. Northern Virginia was a fucked up place. Regardless, that brings us to #22...

Film:
Summertime (1955)

Director:
David Lean

Because the only other Lean films I know are the epics that came directly after, my initial instinct was to see Summertime as somewhat misbegotten -- a tiny love story stuffed, with lots of padding, into a package full of sweeping cinematography. For the first half of the film, Lean seems to care more about how sunlight hits his Venetian setting than with how he gives us Hepburn. Lots of lovely shots of birds ducking and rising through plazas, towering steeples, glistening waters, lush Technicolor making even the dowdiest houses look stately. Hepburn? Early on, lotsa clunky lines pointing fervently at the character points we're supposed to keep tabs on: An aging lady from the Midwest (from Akron -- a gal from tire city in Venice!), but no Ugly American -- she wants to get her Italian right and wouldn't deign to hook up with some package tour. But the clues get familiar -- she's always walking against the tide of humanity, her sole companion is the camera she totes along. We get it -- she's lonely.

And we also get that Hepburn's brassy -- it was her calling card for years. But I'm a sucker for well-played romantic tension, even in crummy TV shows, so when she says "Oh" when Rossano Brazzi says he wants her, I'm sold. Because she says "oh" twice. The first time, she gives it a note of oh-this-again fatalism -- clearly this isn't the first time a man's made a play for her, even if as a "fancy secretary" she's had to endure a lot of awful Akronites. The second time, she telegraphs surprise, possibility, interest. And her shift in those two seconds is so sincere, so perfect, that it all but saves the rest of the film for me. The plot becomes a bit obvious towards the end, and in the tail end of the film, trying to pull away, she's too demonstrative. But we also get a lustiness between the two that, on film, must've been rare in '55. That gardenia Brazzi hoists high at the end isn't just a memento from a romantic fella -- it's intended to remind her of her interest in fleshly pleasures, a romantic fella's way of telling her that it's a shame Americans, ugly and otherwise, always feel like they have to wave goodbye to them.

Climbing Mount Criterion I

2005-01-20T20:57:00.000-06:00

Not long ago, I thought it might be fun to watch every film in the Criterion Collection that I haven't seen, by spine number. This says something about my idea of fun, no doubt. But I was discussing this idea with a friend of mine, and he thought it a worthwhile venture. And since this friend is also a charter member of the Running Board Fan Club, I thought that writing about the Criterion films as I caught them would be a nice way to revive this joint. So, here we are, starting with spines 14-16.

Films:
Samurai I: Mushashi Miyamoto (1954)
Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955)
Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956)

Director:
Hiroshi Inagaki

A few years ago I was working on a story about romance novelists, so as part of my research I attended a meeting of members of the San Francisco chapter of the Romance Writers of America. It was a Saturday morning breakfast, with a short break after coffee for a speech by a successful local novelist. (Successful meant you sometimes gave thought to the idea of quitting your day job.) Her name escapes me, but I recall that the title of her talk was "Fixing Our Sagging Middles," and it was a discussion about how to improve the middle chapters of novels, which tend to be the dullest, and liven them up.

I don't remember any of her advice about the matter -- the talk came during the middle of that day's gathering. But I thought about that day while I was halfway through Duel at Ichijoji Temple, because it seemed to sadly sacrifice the elements that made Musashi Miyamoto so enthralling, solely to keep the the plot moving. When Inagaki's focus turns to a love story, his trilogy becomes deadly. My initial instinct was to blame this on the two conflicting female characters, Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa) and Akemi (Mariko Okada), who are chin deep in melodramatic quicksand. But formalism isn't a flaw, and there's an engaging fight in the third film between the two, complete with fire and hatchets. It's not Inagaki -- there's a painterly feel to some of his shots between male and female characters that's elegantly and touching. (I'm thinking of the meeting at a waterfall at the beginning of the third film, and the departure at the bridge at the end of the first.) And when he takes long shots of the surrounding environments, he magnificent -- the first movie is the best of the three, in part because it has the most of these kinds of shots.

So I'm left with no choice: the flaws in the trilogy fall pretty squarely at the firmly planted feet of Toshiro Mifune. Was there ever a great male actor who was so weak as a romantic lead? And it only gets worse as we go along because the arc is to make Mifune's Musashi a whole man with the capacity to love. It's a lovely instinct, but is there any question that Mifune's best performance is in the first film, where he's a feral, heartless creature? Stomping bow-legged down dusty trails, screaming at foes, cursing any moment in which he's entrapped, Mifune is at his best when he's cranky. And there's heart in his crankiness, but he's no softie; we want to watch him resolve a moral or personal dilemma, but not fall in love, or even deal with the notion of love. He can't telegraph that feeling; he's too interested in being in charge, either defiantly or imperiously, with that wise, upright bearing he has in the whole of the third film.

And though the weak points in the trilogy aren't Inagaki's fault, I'll still bemoan his inconsistency from film to film. Wide pallettes of outdoor shots in the first film give way to dreary night battles in the second and a strangely Ford-ian rhythm in the third. I don't know if Inagaki knew Ford's films, but it's hard to believe he didn't. He seems to be the source for his approach to the bandits in the heart of the film: lots of episodic scenes (with more fades than the other two, I think), familiar battle themes, even the insertion of a tetched-in-the-head fellow traveler. Expounding at length about why Musashi Miyamoto was given the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1955 would require some research into Inagaki's and the Oscars' history. But my best guess is that Inagaki flattered American viewers with a plot that (for better or for worse) flattered its stereotypes about Japan, and hinted at some very American approaches to putting the country's feudal history on film. Seems like a condescending approach now, but perhaps there was some sincerity behind it back then.

We're Moving

2004-10-06T07:51:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of this blog -- I'm counting two -- may know that we're a little slow around here lately. Slow to update and, now, we realize, a little slow at realizing what our mission is in the blogosphere. Thinking that it might be more worthwhile for everybody if we were less about the David Thomson impressions and a bit more, er, on the news, we're shifting tacks and moving to a new site: straightouttaberwyn. See you there.

Brian DePalma, Femme Fatale (2002)

2004-10-01T06:51:00.000-05:00

A little dumb, a little insulting, more than a little preposterous, and yet...the damn thing works. A sexed-up and noired-up collision of "Rear Window" and "Charade," Brian De Palma spends two hours continuously tweaking his characters' motivations and how we'll react to them. The result is his best film since "Blow Out." Here, you're laughing at how absurd the set-up is, but also at how much you're falling for it, how much you're thinking about it. The standard complaints about De Palma apply: He still likes kicking women around, robs Hitchcock blind on occasion, and still has no interest in makng a film with larger ambitions ("Scarface" doesn't count -- a three-hour movie about a thug is still just a movie about a thug). But "Femme Fatale" masters the action thriller and the psychological thriller simultaneously. Antonio Banderas and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos don't act particularly well here, but they don't really need to; the fun is watching how they navigate the film's clever puzzle-piece structure. The overrated opening sequence -- "Double Indemnity" meets Cannes meets lesbians meets faux "Bolero" -- is just DePalma grinding his ax against a Hollywood establishment that rejected him, and I wish he'd get over it. When he's making movies this fun and clever, he doesn't need to impress anybody.

Claude Miller, Alias Betty (2002)

2004-09-30T06:42:00.000-05:00

A diverting, off-kilter psychological thriller that eventually collapses under its own weight. The set-up is both preposterous and engaging: Bestselling celebrated author Betty (Sadrine Kiberlain) has lost her son, who her cracked mother Margot (Nicole Garcia) has seen fit to replace with a boy she kidnaps. Smugglers, thieves, ex-husbands, prostitutes and other shady folks show up, giving the film a brisk "Pulp Fiction"-style feel. It's all as wonderfully strange as good Hitchcock, and for the first hour "Alias Betty" is potent stuff. The main mother-daughter story is a compelling one, touching on issues of love, motherhood, and what breaks the boundaries surrounding them; the excellent performances by Kiberlain and Garcia drive the points home. By the end, however, we've met a variety of different people who feel more like caricatures than characters, and the film becomes disengaged and conventional fill-in-the-plot-holes stuff. It's neither pure thriller nor pure drama. Alas, it doesn't quite benefit from being a mix of the two.

Alex Cox, Repo Man (1984)

2004-09-29T08:04:00.000-05:00

For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

"Following the Films"

2004-09-05T19:22:00.001-05:00

Something different.

Recently, I came across a bound copy of the 1935-36 volume of Scholastic. I never knew of Scholastic as a current-affairs magazine for high-schoolers (and had no idea that there were so many inheritors to its legacy). But I was struck by the level of writers who contributed then -- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Seldes, and other heavy hitters -- not to mention the ample space given to poetry and fairly sophisticated primers on public policy. Despite the best efforts of the editors to be objective and unoffensive, a certain political philosophy emerged from the Scholastic brain trust -- in the main, Scholastic was anti-interventionist, squishy on Mussolini and Hitler but hard on Stalin, and tended to take allegedly humorous whacks at New Deal bureaucracy. Also, most issues featured ads promoting Fleischmann's Yeast as an acne cure. ("The first girl I ever liked -- and these pimples had to come!")

Scholastic also had a film critic: Sarah McLean Mullen. A quick google offers little background information; a woman with that name taught high school English in 1927, which sounds about right. Otherwise, nothing. Her unlovely prose is prim and foursquare and often pedantic, which I suppose is a combination of Scholastic's own stiff approach and the fact that film criticism was a fairly new form. But the history intrigues me, and in each edition of "Following the Films," Mullen does tackle some films and people that film buffs still care about. So I thought it'd be worthwhile to type one up.

This is from the Jan. 25, 1936 edition of Scholastic.

The work of the film editor is very important and very difficult. It is worth noting in well-made pictures. Because of the fact that the scenes are not photographed in the order of the story sequence, the work of putting the various pieces of film together to make a story requires much consideration and care. It is not sufficient to have the film sections merely ordered so as to make sense. They must be arranged first so as to provide for easy or natural transition from one episode to another. Probably the best current example of skillful work of this nature is to be found in A Tale of Two Cities. They must be so arranged as to provide for continuing much the same intensity of illumination of film, for keeping all the threads of the plot up to the same point, and for effective accentuation provided by such means as repetition, close-ups, contrasts, and change of tempo or of bac ground to insure needed relief or variety. At the same time, the scenes must be definitely inter-related and so ordered as to mount in interest to a well-motivated climax and a sincere ending. Try to note with some appreciation of the difficulties involved in the way the editing is done in the films reviewed in this issue.

Last of the Pagans. (M-G-M. Dir. Richard Thorpe. Cast: Mala, Lotus) This is a story of the South Sea Islands -- the story of the simple direct love of a raiding native warrior for the girl whom he captures. The adventures of the two Polynesian lovers is painted against the beauty of the islands, lush with tropical growth and gleaming with water. Its drama is that of a friendly, honest, pagan people who lived in idyllic simplicity, menaced only by occasional native raids of rival tribes, until the white man came. Sub-titles in English provide the almost superfluous explanations. The dialogue is, for the most part, that of the Polynesians who compose the supporting cast. Native dances, courting cermonials, and other customs of native life are provided with careful consideration of accuracy and beauty. The charming simplicty of native living is heightened by the cruelty inflicted upon the innocent captive natives by the white traders and superintendents of the phosphorus mines. The two featured players, Mala and Lotus, who established themselves as film favorites in Eskimo, prove again their versatility and charming naturalness. Humor and pathos, beauty and repulsive ugliness, mark the highlights of the story. The natural loveliness of the South Sea Islands has been happily caputred by the camera, and is supplemented by the musical score played by a large symphonic orchestra directed by Herbert Stothart.

Captain Blood. (Warner Bros. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, Lionel Atwill, Basil Rathbone, Adapted from the novel by Rafael Sabatini) Port Royal and the Caribbean Sea provide the background for a thrilling tale of slavery and buccaneering in the days of King James of England. The story deals chiefly with a young doctor sent as a slave to the sugar plantations of Jamaica in punishment for his having aided an enemy of the English king. The picture mounts with well-sustained suspense through one stirring scene after another to a strong climax. The spirit of high adventure and reckless bravado that we associate with pirate stories is recorded with dramatic realism. Music is used most effectively to build up emotional background and to take the place of speech in mob scenes. Prententious in mounting, the picture is full of details that portray the habits and customs of the time and place. It is photographed with telling success. The most pictorial scenes are the attack by the Spanish pirates upon Port Royal, the duel between the buccaneer leaders, and the final battle between Captain Blood's ship and the French vessels in Port Royal harbor. Errol Flynn, a newcomer to the screen is Captain Blood to the life, a dashing, daring, fighting Irishman with a spirit equalliy intrepid in love or war. Olivia de Havilland, too, does excellent work as the niece of the slave-holder.

Chatterbox. (RKO. Dir. George Nichols, Jr. Cast: Anne Shirley, Phillips Holmes.) This is a naive romantic comedy concerning a stage-struck country girl whose mother had been an actress. The girl obtains a part in New York in the same play that her mother had played in. She takes it seriously, but everyone else realizes that it is a burlesque. Awakened rudely to her foolishness, she is glad to be reunited to her forgiving grandfather. Anne Shirley successfully carries the story, which offers little opportunity for the other players. The most amusing bit is unfortunately motivated through a drinking scene. Yet one has to admit the humor of the two older men matching stories of ancestral glory.

Skull and Crown. (Reliable. Dir. Elmer Clifton. Cast: Rin Tin Tin, Jr., Regis Twomey, Jack Mulholland.) This James Oliver Curwood story ranks high in its own class as a vehicle for fine animal acting. As it is an oudoor story, there is plenty of action. The events follow in order of increasing interest and excitement. The fights between the men are interesting, of course, but those between the dog and the outlaws are thrilling. The story deals with a member of the mounted police and his devoted dog. In the pursuit of the bandit, the dog proves his courage and devotion. Regis Twomey as the dog's master is sincerely realistic. The performance of the dog, however, in response to silent directions of an unseen master is truly remarkable. This dog promises to become as great a performer as his famous forebear.

Seven Keys to Baldpate. (RKO. Dir. Wm. Hamilton. Cast: Gene Raymond, Margaret Callahan, Eric Blore, Grant Mitchell. Adapted from Earl Derr Bigger's mystery story ) Seven persons, each with the "only key," come to a deserted summer in in the depths of winter for various individual reasons. Among these is a young author attempting to write a novel in twenty-four hours on a bet. He finds plenty of material for a thrilling detective novel, but he does not get it written. Settings and lighting effects are especially worhty of mention. Rapid tempo and well built-up suspense carry the story swiftly forward, but depend upon elimination of some of the story features whose presence would have make the plot easier to understand. The result is a good, but not outstanding, mystery story.

Professional Soldier. (Twentieth Century Fox. Dir. Tay Garnett. Cast: Freddie Bartholomew, Victor McLaglen, Gloria Stuart.) Many interesting features, no matter how cleverly carried out, do not make a good photoplay unless more closely knit than this play is. Freddie Bartholomew, as the young king who is kidnapped, is more than satisfactory. He has the manner, the bearing and the speech of royalty. In strong constrast, Victor McLaglen, as the boastful ex-marine, is equally good. The plot concerning the kidnapping, too, is well outlined, but there is too much unnecessary introduction that does not bear directly on the story, and later too many unrelated episodes. The result is similar to a story written on a typewriter where the keys alternately stick or skip. It lacks unity.

Three Easy Pieces

2004-09-03T08:12:00.000-05:00

Recent reviews for filmcritic.com:

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Thanks for reading, whoever you are.

Jose Padilha, Bus 174 (2002)

2004-08-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

It's hard to tell what's going on for too long here: the Rio de Janiero hostage standoff that occurred in 2000, or this film, which documents it. Certainly, the main points are pretty straightforward -- a crazed and damaged street kid hijacks a bus, an action that illuminates much about street kids in general. That notion can be dispensed with in less time than the two hours we're given, and there's not enough tension in the story proper to make Padilha's documentary work as a drama. And yet, my instinct is to forgive him his indulgences: We don't get too many visuals of hijackings that get us this close to the action, and we get a portrait of the savagery of street-kid life that's powerful without slipping too often into self-righteous wailing (Only a brief scene of an overstuffed prison, needlessly and archly shot in negative, seems forced. If protecting identities was the concern, face-blurring would've done the job better.).

There's a strange irony in the fact that the reason we have such excellent footage of Sandro the hijacker is the laxity of Rio's police force. Under-trained, uncoordinated, and lacking in the necessary tools to manage a hostage situation, there's a social collapse in the police culture just as bad as the one that creates the hordes of street kids. Maybe I wanted a film that indicted the cops as much as it humanized Sandro. Or maybe what I really wanted was City of God, which covers similar territory with a deeper intensity and passion. It's hard to recommend fictional narrative over documentaries most of the time -- why bother with Will Smith's dull Ali when there's the glorious When We Were Kings? But in movies, where feeling means more than fact, and one of the best movies in the past ten years gets a special dispensation: the insane interior world of lower-class Brazilians in God has detail and stunning power that Bus 174. And I have a sense that even Padhilia would agree.

Terence Malick, The Thin Red Line (1998)

2004-07-29T22:05:00.000-05:00

(Note: Summer's supposed to be all about the movies, but it's been hard to make space for them of late. So, to keep the board, er, running, I'll occasionally be transferring some of the old scribblings I did on movies for Netflix's "member reviews" pages here.)

The war movie recasted as a blood-soaked poem. True, this is not how we tend to appreciate war movies (or poems, for that matter). But Terrence Malick was very much onto something here; he asks only that you throw out nearly every preconception you have about what the proper structure of a war movie ought to be. Remarkably, it's not hard to do.

There are no heroes, no bad guys, and no star turns: Nick Nolte's a brassy and irksome yeller as a commander, but he's right as often as he's unlikeable. The Japanese "enemy" is as scared as he is dangerous. Every man's an Everyman, though the movie does mostly turn on Jim Caviezel's moral struggle to be a good soldier, even as he wonders whether that's a worthy goal. That's not knee-jerk liberalism, just an honesty we only sometimes get in Red Badge of Courage or Saving Private Ryan, and never get in Patton. Even the film's detractors appreciate the gorgeous cinematography here, and there's nothing wrong in watching The Thin Red Line with that as the centerpiece, instead of looking for a conventional plot -- its rhythm, not its story, is what counts. What Bonnie & Clyde did for the gangster flick, this does for the war movie: Deliberately confuses the idea of "heroism," uses shots instead of dialogue to convey meaning, slows the story down so we can see the details of human beings. It's not for everybody. But the only thing that is for everybody is propaganda.

Stephen Frears, Dirty Pretty Things (2003)

2004-07-28T09:03:00.000-05:00

It might be thankless work but might also be bloody fun: A study of how black market undergrounds are portrayed in European films versus American ones. Here in the U.S., such films tend to involve gangsters, thuggery, and strict lectures about good versus evil, all of it done up with super-sized absurdity -- think of Al Pacino diving headfirst into a pile of cocaine before he's aerated by an army of his enemies in Scarface. European countries, which never had to suffer through the neurotic contortions of the Hays Code and HUAC, are at least free to consider the subtleties and play up the notions of fair play and justice that movies about the black market ought to inspire. It's a tough call between a didactic American film like, say, GoodFellas, and a more nuanced Scottish one like, say, Sweet Sixteen -- I like thinking in movies, but I'm a sucker for a bullet in the head.

To a certain extent, Dirty Pretty Things is a win-win -- director Stephen Frears gets to creep us out with an organ farming plot but swaddle the affair in a smart essay about social justice. If the metaphors are heavy-handed -- yes, yes, there's a human heart in the toilet, I got it -- the performances have the benefit of subtlety. Nigerian immigrant Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a hero who isn't particularly heroic, and Steven Knight's script makes sure we don't get the sob story of his personal life until towards the end; Audrey Tatou, smartly realizing that she needed to be the opposite of Amelie or be forever cursed as a tres precieux annoyance for the next few decades, does a nicely understated job as the Turkish refugee Senay. A set design that emphasizes the lurid -- lots of neon reds and blues, along with some sickly greens -- helps the mood along as well. But movies about black markets on both coasts are only as good as their most evil characters, and there's a charming, sinuously obnoxious one here in Juan (Sergi Lopez), who leads the organ-farming racket , sees all and knows all, and has a nose for fine truffles. His nickname is Sneaky, which signals a sort of dastardliness, but also a wicked intelligence. So everybody calls him Sneaky -- but not to his face.

Alfred Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train (1951)

2004-07-27T21:29:00.000-05:00

For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Sam Peckinpah, Straw Dogs (1971)

2004-07-19T18:07:00.000-05:00

For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Note: I'm still watching movies, but I haven't had much time to write about them of late, thanks to a heavy load of summer social commitments and a welcome increase in real (or, rather, paying) writing work. Given that there aren't too many people reading, I'm feeling less motivating pressure to keep this running at its old clip. Still, there seems to be a trickle of folks who stumble across this site despite the lack of recent updates. Personally, I'd love to hear how you've found this place, and if you have any thoughts about it (Call me selfish: all the other blogs seem to get lots of "YOU SUCK" hate mail, and I wanna play too). So drop me a line, will ya?

Peter Bogdanovich, Paper Moon (1973)

2004-06-23T09:18:00.000-05:00

The apotheosis of deep-focus black and white cinematography. That's not being cute, or reductionist, or taking a thing away from Alvin Sargent's wonderful script, Bogdanovich's restrained direction, or the cast. But there's an intensity to the look of Paper Moon, a relentless clarity that's rewarded with dozens of small details: Madeline Kahn jiggling across the landscape twice as high as the poor black girl behind her; the curious townspeople watching the two O'Neals have it out together; the sputter of the broken down car that Ryan O'Neal drives in the beginning and end of the film given to us so precisely that we know just how far he is from his maybe-daughter. This, in the wrong hands, could easily have been a mundane coming-of-age story, Bonnie and Clyde with a happy ending. But Tatum O'Neal's Addie is already of age from the moment we first see her; what's left is the disarming but fascinating pleasure of watching a nine-year-old cigarette-smoking grifter discover that her deviousness and sense of moral relativism is equal to her maybe-Dad's. Bogdanovich didn't let it drift into daddy-daughter cute either, so we'll have to call it a love story: A story about two people whose souls interlock so well that separation is unthinkable. And that deep-focus black and white cinematography is so effective you forget just how morally questionable this particular love story is.

Mick Jackson, Live From Baghdad (2002)

2004-06-21T17:32:00.000-05:00

It would take some serious time spent with Michael Keaton's oeuvre to prove this, and my guess is that it'd prove to be a horrific task, but I have a sense that Keaton's main talent is schizophrenia. Or, rather, bridging opposites in his roles. Or, rather, doing something that has something to do with taking two polarized beings and attempting to combine them. The man is exasperating and unreadable, which I suppose is what you get when you look like a walking oxymoron -- a cute Jack Nicholson. He's been a knight but a dark one (Batman), a father but a mother (Mr. Mom), an American industrialist but a lap-dog for globalization (Gung Ho), the nice guy but an alcoholic (Clean and Sober), scary as hell but funny as hell (Beetlejuice). All of those were leading roles for Keaton in the '80s, and, with the exception of Beetlejuice, shit films, low-interest high-concept films that weren't worse because Keaton was in them, but not markedly improved for his presence. Such is the career of a man who isn't anything, except a man who's willing to be two things at once.

If Live From Baghdad is to be read as Keaton's return to respectability, that's fine, because finally he gets a role where being polarized is part of the fun: A TV journalist is supposed to be a noble creature and an asshole at the same time. So MIck Jackson's made-for-HBO film about CNN's coverage of the first Gulf War is one of the few examples where Keaton looks like the guy you choose instead of the guy you settle for. It's brisk and efficient and spends no time getting excited about what news is like behind the scenes; just Keaton's Robert Weiner angling questionably for access with Iraq's minister of information. When he shows himself being just moral enough to wonder if he put a hostage's life in danger by interviewing him, we buy it; when he shows himself being just immoral enough to ponder sleeping with his co-producer (Helena Bonham Carter, one-note), we buy that two. But everything gives way to some spectacular special effects capturing the launch of the war outside of CNN's Baghdad hotel room -- the damnedest Fourth of July show ever. And there's a coy smirk on Keaton's face in that moment, a glee in knowing that maybe he didn't invent the war but he sure as heck made sure we knew about it. His finest hour.

Samuel Fuller, The Naked Kiss (1964)

2004-06-21T09:12:00.000-05:00

An offbeat melodramatic noir that makes the most of its limitations. Judging from the plots of his films, Sam Fuller seems like the least-likely purveyor of intelligent female roles, dealing as he does with cops and shakedowns and two-fisted turf wars, if not war itself. But Fuller also knew that the best way to transcend a small budget was to make a great script with strong characters, and Constance Towers' Kelly is one of his most fully-realized creations. Humiliated from her career as a prostitute, the arc of a plot is a simple struggle for respect from her new townspeople, and part of the strength of The Naked Kiss is in showing that it's a difficult, perilous, often soul-killing climb. And Fuller suffuses the thing with creepiness -- all of those disabled children singing off-key, and the hospital's wealthy patron J.L. Grant (Michael Dante) gathering more and more shadows until his secret cloaks him entirely. "Damn right there are people like this" is the theme here and in a lot of Fuller's films; damn right there are prostitutes smart and honest enough to deserve some honor, and damn right there are philanthropists perfectly at home in their own sleaze. So what if the ending's hackneyed and untenable? The final shot is an image of redemption that's more believeable and admirable than most woman-in-trouble films you could name. For this, Towers earned a late career in soap operas and made-for-TV movies. Irony lives.

Robert Altman, 3 Women (1977)

2004-06-19T08:27:00.000-05:00

A problematic yet strangely affecting character study. Nearly every male director who self-identifies as an artist winds up making a film about women -- women as concept and theory, not people. This can be a wonderful thing and get you Bunuel's Belle de Jour; it can also get you the smug condescension that's smeared all over Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. What usually doesn't happen is a character as richly textured as Shelley Duvall's Millie. Taking every cue about living from what she reads in magazines or notices in billboard advertising, Altman could have easily made her a punching bag for every bubbling-under anxiety about feminism available (or, worse, made her a martyr). Instead, she's rigorously human -- flawed and exasperating (it's hard not to feel for the people trying to untangle themselves from her), but more constant and endearing that anybody else around her. To make us fall for Duvall, though, Altman has to do funny things to the plot everywhere else. Sissy Spacek performs some admirable feats of characterization here, inhabiting both mousy naif to real gone gal, but it's hard to know what to make of Pinky by the time the story slides to its conclusion. Which, as it happens, is less satisfying than it should be -- a human connection between Millie and Pinky and the mysterious earth mother Willie (Janice Rule), that suggests that every female gathering is a manipulative, self-immolating coven. 3 Women marked the beginning of Altman's decade-or-so-long slide into mediocrity, but through Duvall, he clings to his strengths for just a little while longer.

Larry Cohen, Bone (1972)

2004-06-11T07:46:00.000-05:00

Cuckolded husband, cuckolded wife, lots of jump-cutting to scary transgressive moments, a script pushing hard to be political though it's really a comedy -- do we blame Mike Nichols or Russ Meyer for this? I'm leaning towards Meyer, if only because the theme of Bone is repressed sexual urge; Cohen knew that, even in progressive post-60s America, a black man invading a white couple's home was going to call up a whole truckload of notions about sexual crudity and eroticism that Bone's name suggests. In other words, this is a porn that doesn't bother with the sex scenes that tend to slow down the plot. Yaphet Kotto settles into this world perfectly -- his every interaction with husband (Andrew Duggan) and wife (Joyce Van Patten) is infused with a certain shame about using his race as a way to violently manipulate, even while he gets off on the power it confers upon him. But it might've seemed less amateurish if the social commentaries were tamped down; the lectures on race and middle class are needless in the face of the film's script. And even in the progressive 21st century, a story about a black man strolling into Beverly Hills can still be provacative.

Penny Panayatopoulou, Hard Goodbyes: My Father (2002)

2004-06-10T18:38:00.000-05:00

For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Mark S. Waters, Mean Girls (2004)

2004-06-10T09:25:00.000-05:00

Because Mean Girls comes attached to the four words that are a sure-fire guarantee of awfulness -- "Executive Producer Lorne Michaels" -- it's easy to be skeptical of yet another SNL-related film. And it might be all the worse for being written by Tina Fey, the second-worst offender of the familiar SNL habit of laughing at your own jokes (Jimmy Fallon, duh). So what's nice is that Mean Girls bolts out of the blocks like the second-best SNL-related film (Stuart Saves His Family, duh). It gives high-schoolers credit for more than they ever do in movies. Instead of giving us Lindsay Lohan as the duckling who'll slowly transformed into a swan, she's immediately pegged as a resident hottie; it acknowledges that sulky art-damaged geek harbor deeper jealousies that they'll admit to; it gives the other resident hotties functioning brains while noting that those brains function only in specific areas and completely neglect the others. All this, however, would just make for a more realistic vision of high-school life, an approach that wouldn't improve matters more than, say, Elephant, a film that gets high school right but doesn't have much to say. So what makes Mean Girls both the best SNL-related film and an excellent high-school film to boot is that it points out that every adolescent is a feral and flawed creature, and our heroine is the worse of the batch, daring to think that she can somehow navigate the various tribes without choosing one. The results aren't perfect -- towards the end, Fey's script strains hard to not do what teen flicks usually do, and the results can be forced. At the very end, it throws up its hands and gives us the spring-dance-hug-and-kiss we go to high school movies for in the first place. But the mad dash for that spring-dance moment -- well, that process has always been feral and flawed too.

Siddiq Barmak, Osama (2003)

2004-06-08T07:50:00.000-05:00

A somber, straightforward study of how gender roles transform (or don't) under the weight of oppression, with enough grace to make the sadness tolerable. Barmak seems to understand how inherently provocative the burka is -- or at least how provocative it is to Western eyes -- and he spends much of the first half of his film exploiting it; the cloaked women slowly expose themselves to one another in cloisters or are hosed down and chased after in public by the Taliban with a fervor that borders on the pornographic. Visually, those moments of women made miserable are ironically the most stunning, and everybody involved seems to know it. Apart from that approach to composition, what's left is a familiar girl-disguised-as-guy movie, the kind that loses its humor and exploitative qualities as you move from the U.S. (Just One of the Guys) to the Middle East (Baran), to Afghanistan, where the lesson here is that living is a fate worse than death. There some dull didacticism here, and even though I know no Pashtu, the clunky rhythms of speech suggest that the acting's only fair-to-middling. But the sense of misery that the Taliban provoked and perpetuated comes through strongly.

George Goehl, King of Bluegrass: The Life & Times of Jimmy Martin (2004)

2004-06-02T07:54:00.000-05:00
For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Sam Fuller, Pickup on South Street (1953)

2004-06-01T08:15:00.000-05:00
The esteem that Sam Fuller enjoyed during his career came in part from the breadth of his interests; in war movies, journalism movies, love stories, noirs, documentaries, the man had a knack for doing his job well and doing it cheap. Pickup on South Street makes a fine case for Fuller as a key noir director -- if he'd made more of them, he'd likely have a place next to Hitchcock and Lang. If the great theme of noir is moral confusion in the face of a dehumanizing world, Pickup brilliantly suffuses each character with a heavy dose of that trait -- and makes each of them interesting. None more so that Richard Widmark's Skip McCoy, who takes an intoxicating glee in messing with authority figures and proclaiming his disinterest in politics of any stripe. Thelma Ritter, as the snitch Moe, takes a minor color role and turns it into a key place in the film -- the sort of person without whom the plot and feel of the film collapses and dies. The basic plot is a Feds-and-Reds scramble for a few swatches of microfilm, but Fuller gets across the wonderfully subversive notion that money trumps Red Scare politics. It's an enduring notion too, which is likely why the film's lasted as long as it has.

Jim Sheridan, In America (2003)

2004-05-31T18:41:00.000-05:00
Any movie that puts a bright and happy spin on poverty-stricken families is going to seem hackneyed and forced, so the real surprise of In America is that it's as likeable as it is. Because, really, everything is set up for failure: Two precocious children, the ghost of a third, the dying artist downstairs who's a cross-breeding of Boo Radley and Keith Haring, some simple moral lessons about letting go of the past and letting love in your life. But Jim Sheridan cares passionately about the worn-out tropes he's dealing in, which means they get layers. Through those precocious kids we get a reminder of how children can find pleasure in the midst of adult turmoil. Through parents Johnny (Paddy Considine) and Sarah (Samantha Morton) there's a vision of tenacity as fierce as any strivers put on film -- there are better comparisons I'm sure, but the first one that springs to mind is the one that populates Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy. And as for the dying-artist cliche, fuckit, Djimon Hounsou is so strong in his role, so willing to believe in all the roles human and mystic that Sheridan ascribes to him, that even the mushiness he offers in the end gets across. This is the vision of American up-from-the-bootstraps self-improvement that the country's indulged in for decades, and even though there's countless proof of how unworkable that dream really is, it's powerfully persistent, and Sheridan almost convinces you of its possibilities.

John Sayles, Matewan (1987)

2004-05-28T08:53:00.000-05:00
Before the ending underscores the problems with making a low-budget film about a union war, Matewan is a successful, if simplistic, vision of early-20th-century class wars. If that doesn't necessarily sound like entertainment, well, it does drag at points; James Earl Jones is under-used, and future mopey indie rocker Will Oldham doesn't quite have the acting chops to make a convincing fiery preacher. But the underpinnings of Sayles' story, and Chris Cooper's reinforcement of it, works wonders. The pro-union sensibility, as it's given to us, is excruciatingly pat -- its a solution to race relations on top of everything else, and it's groan-worthy to see the Italians and blacks learn to play music together, just as it's excruciating to see the obnoxious company men snort and tease. But if the film's morality is obvious bordering on irritating, its milieu is rich: All those beautiful country homes suffused with light, all the dense foliage swaddling the town, and a palpable sense that all that union-inspired goodwill is eventually going to have a body count. This is what Heaven's Gate was supposed to be, but that film dreamed and spent itself into oblivion; Matewan is more patient and foursquare. That doesn't mean that Sayles always knows how to pace this stuff, though. The ending happens too quickly and the climactic moments don't have the weight he hopes from them; a little bit of Heaven's Gate's budget would've helped here. But Matewan's level of care and consideration gets it much farther than most directors could have taken it.

Guy Maddin, Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary

2004-05-18T09:49:00.000-05:00
For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Music Notes

2004-05-18T09:47:00.000-05:00
A preview of the Hot Club of Cowtown, for the Chicago Reader. Online through May 20.

Music Notes

2004-05-14T12:26:00.000-05:00
A preview of the Hot Club of Cowtown, for the Chicago Reader. Available online through May 21.

Music notes

2004-05-14T12:25:00.000-05:00
A concert preview of The Hot Club of Cowtown, for the Chicago Reader. Online through May 21.

Music Notes

2004-05-07T10:25:00.000-05:00
A preview of the Flatlanders. Online through May 13.

Gus Van Sant, Elephant

2004-05-05T08:20:00.000-05:00
More an extended short than a valid feature, Elephant is Gus Van Sant's venting his understandable bafflement at the Columbine High tragedy. Unfortunately, bafflement can be a dead end; in his eagerness to avoid pat answers and simple narrative arcs, Van Sant swings wildly the other way and comes up with a dispassionate, clinical throwing-up of hands. Dispassion has it's uses, though. Perhaps better than most movies set in high schools, Elephant gives us the high school as a living ecosystem, where every emotion is accentuated and every kid struggles to find the proper space to work in. The artsy photographer, for example, needs the cramped solitude of the darkroom; the mousy, picked-on girl needs the enormity of the basketball court to contain her lack of self-regard; the trio of bulemic pretty girls need the chatter of the crowded cafeteria and the attention it provides, which they're then free to bitchily reject. The two killers, incapable of carving out such spaces for themselves, just need the whole of it gone, every room, and the problem isn't as simple as first-person-shooter video games and easy access to guns (though there is that). The boys' life rhythms are both out of kilter with the school and out of sequence with the film. They're not just low on the high-school pecking order, they're completely off the chart, and the space they own is just a dingy basement in one of their homes.

All of this is there on the screen, though Van Sant draws very little attention to it; either he's the most subtle director working in film today or doesn't have a firm command of his own ideas. The former's provably untrue and the latter's unlikely, so the best guess is that Columbine scared him from planting his feet too firmly and making too much of a statement. Its strongest sequences comes toward the end, where, Benny, a teen boy, slowly and silently wanders the halls in the midst of the chaos and confronts one of the killers. This is set up in climax pacing, as if Benny will shift the story to order and peace. No such luck: He's dead as soon as he's noticed, and it's Van Sant's strongest wail of sorrow for the idiocy of what's happened. And it's all the worse because of the look on the killer's face: Order, peace.

David Lean, The Bridge on the River Kwai

2004-05-03T10:00:00.000-05:00
Forced to choose, I prefer Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, where the epic canvas has some emotional depth, and take Holden in Stalag 17 instead of this; the dispassionate, almost churlish attitude that makes him intriguing in black and white makes him look drowsy and bored here. But Alec Guiness was at the heart of his career in 1957 and fully deserving of the best actor Oscar he pulled down for his role as Col. Nicholson; stuffed in a torture chamber, looking down the barrel of a gun, or proudly strolling down the doomed bridge he's constructed, he evokes both military bragadoccio without arrogance and sensitivity without looking wimpy. He's one of the few actors who can easily transcend mediocre scriptwriting, so when the final minutes of Kwai start drifting into overcooked prose ("Madness! Madness!") and preposterous plot devices, Guiness becomes the film's secret weapon. His fatal fall on the bomb plunger can be read as either a brave act or failure to act, which is more complex than Lean probably intended: Mainly he wanted to make a straightforward war-prisoner epic that made room for different shapes of Western heroism but gives us Japanese heroism only as miserable self-immolation. For all the acting, though -- and oh do too many people look like they're acting -- even Lean seems to know that the scenery is going to win the movie over. It's prettiest scene is an enormous cascade of bats flapping across the jungle sky, and the film is bookended somewhat oddly with brief shots of birds in flight. Maybe Lean was seduced by his Sri Lankan location more than by the standard-issue die-with-honor business that fills up three hours; he, like Holden, would rather be kicking back on a tropical beach, close to the sunshine and the lusty blondes who crave damaged men.

Book Notes

2004-05-02T21:24:00.000-05:00
A review of Kent Haruf's Eventide, for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Billy Ray, Shattered Glass

2004-04-30T09:27:00.000-05:00
Stephen Glass' fall from grace in 1998 -- he fabricated a few dozen articles for The New Republic and elsewhere before finally being caught by a Forbes reporter -- was as reprehensible as it was sad, and Hayden Christensen's Glass captures his key flaws. Desperate for attention and slyly corralling his colleagues to feel for him, he's perpetually apologizing for himself and sweatily trying to live honorably, as if his dishonorable life didn't exist. We don't get any scenes of him concocting his stories, which emphasizes the disconnection he had with himself; he buried his scheming persona as much as he could, until the scheming became his persona, and by the time his errors come to light you want to smack him for his sucking up more than for his disgrace.

It would have been a better film had this sort of emotional crisis been the centerpiece of Glass, but it mainly wants to be a movie about the inner workings of journalism, which simply isn't that fascinating. Two good actors try their best: Peter Sarsgaard's Chuck Lane is sad, weary, but focused in the midst of the TNR's turmoil, and Hank Azaria's Michael Kelly captures the good humor, sense of honor, and wicked intelligence that are indeed the characteristics of great editors.

That's a good set piece, but it's not a movie, partially because journalism, in itself, lacks drama. Good movies about the trade make space for bigger tales: All The President's Men is about Nixon, not the Washington Post, and Broadcast News is a study of emotional maturity, not an inner glimpse at the nightly news. Apart from that, it's slim pickings: His Girl Friday a movie about comic chatter that just happens to be set in a news room, and Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, a study of madness that has a Pulitzer-hungry hack at its core. The only other exception I can think of is another Fuller, the low-budget Park Row which captures the excitement of making news in a time when blowing up your rival's press wasn't unheard of.

I was working as a young journalist when the Glass case emerged, and it created an air of skepticism towards people just getting their start; it's the sonofabitch's saddest and worst legacy. Glass's fate, and that of Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley later on, inevitably led to a lot of chest-thumping from editors about failing the readers and disgracing the proud traditions and principles upon which thier trade was built. Fair enough, but whenever I hear that, I can't help but think of the fussy mom on The Simpsons who's constantly wailing "Won't somebody please think of the children?!" Which is to say that there's a disingenuous tone to these protestations, and a certain unwillingness to look at the flaws within the star system that a lot of national journalism creates. The film hints at this: the TNR office is slow, self-satisfied, and a little tired, while the Forbes office is speedy, intelligent, has zero tolerance for bullshit, and is hungry as hell for getting the story right (amongst the worst flaws in the film is the limited use of Steve Zahn as the reporter breaking the Glass story). But I wished the movie spent some time tracking the intersection of byline culture with a young man's need for attention -- it might have resulted in a stronger statement about the industry, not just one needy boy who gamed it.

Peter Docter, Monsters, Inc.

2004-04-29T08:38:00.000-05:00
Released late in 2001, Pixar's weakest movie suffered from a bout of bad timing. Sept. 11 may have blunted some of the enthusiasm for a heavily-promoted giggle, but a release a year or two later might have exposed some of its subversiveness. Monsters, Inc., a vaguely public-private firm that powers its surrounding world by collecting the screams of small children when the real power is in their laughter, is both a justification of the Disney behemoth and a shin-kicking to the notion of a Military-Industrial Complex, which requires the perpetual invention of new enemies in order to keep on humming. As characters go, the best ones are venal: Henry J. Waternoose (James Coburn) kidnapping children and watching all with a spray of eyes across his lumpy head, and Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi) turning invisible and dangerous at the right moments. Monsters, Inc. clears the toughest hurdle in giving us scary creatures that are actually adorable -- the final shot, where a child's glee warms the heart of John Goodman's Sulley in a nanosecond, is as clever heartbreaker, and one of the best arguments for digital animation's power to transcend its bits-and-bytes construction. But excepting a brilliantly rendered chase scene in the door vault that takes an hour to get to, the film doesn't exploit its style to any good use, and Billy Crystal's schtick doesn't translate well -- it needs his own weary, smirking face to get over, and the one-eyed Mike lacks those physical tools (humans, though, always winding up looking doll-like in Pixar flicks, which is worse). Pixar would get it right eighteen months later in Finding Nemo, where the glittering colors and a solid script evoked real empathy for a cute widdle cwownfish with a bwoken widdle fwipper. Here though, all that innovation in perfectly invented bouncing and light was used to gives us...a big, cold factory. And even subversion can't make that entirely interesting.

Jafar Panahi, Crimson Gold

2004-04-26T09:39:00.000-05:00
In Jafar Panahi's excellent 2000 film The Circle, he presented himself as a deeply acute observer of class divides; the subtle insults that followed the women in that movie whereever they went had a conspiratorial, almost noir-ish feel to them. For all his acclaim, Abbas Kiarostami is more a poet than a storyteller, and there's real reason to believe that his participation as a screenwriter would blunt the impact of Crimson Gold. Though the results do lack Panahi's feverish class critiques and Kiarostami's own private search for elegance, Crimson Gold does mainly get to have it both ways. What helps is the richness of its humor. Enormous and timid, Hussein's (Hossain Emadeddin) travels as a pizza delivery man brings him into comic confrontations with elitism both capitalistic and governmental; forced to stay where he is as a group of cops quietly raid an apartment, he catches a senseless routing of wealthy kids and has a charmingly laid-back conversation with a scared soldier. Later, in a jewelry store and the home of an enormously wealthy Tehran family, his disconnection from both money and respect are even more deeply underscored. The center of the plot itself -- Hussein and Ali's (Kamyar Sheisi) attempt to rob the jewelry store -- counts as noir, but neither Panahi or Kiarostami are particularly interested in noir conventions, at least not the American or French brands. Instead of giving us a cynical, slick and dark unreality, we get the mundane light of daytime and Hussein's somber stoicism. So when the film does finally arc towards crime and gunplay, the effect is empathetic sorrow instead of the ironic uplift we get from the cleverness of Bogart's scripts. All we're left with is a tightly framed shot of one man trying to bully his way into a world he doesn't belong in, with an inevitable and sad consequence.

Book Notes

2004-04-25T18:52:00.000-05:00
A review of Carl Honore's In Praise of Slowness, for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (registration req'd).

Guy Maddin, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Archangel

2004-04-25T18:13:00.000-05:00
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is my least favorite Maddin film, which may have something to do with the fact that it's the only Maddin I've seen that works in full-blown color. The textures of black and white seem to free his ambitions as a director; the focus that iris lenses and Eisensteinian montage styles allows him to concentrate and deepens the emphasis on broken hearts. Archangel, the better of the two, is an early foray into what would become his favorite ideas: Love is unknowable, religion and government are comic devices, there's a close relationship between our emotions and our actual bodies, our viscera. Or maybe not, but how else do you read a scene where a man triumphs over his cowardice by collecting his spilled intestines and using them to strangle his killer? Absurdity is what Maddin trades in, but it's a blessing that as an experimentalist he makes his absurdities so interesting to look at; I love the old-fashioned titles, use of shadow, and filters, the stuff of Griffith and the Soviets, as much as I'm glad he doesn't lean on those old tricks anymore. I'm glad he's argued for their relevance as much as I'm glad that he's found his own style as well.

That style, unfortunately, isn't on display in Ice Nymphs, set in a colorful, Hieronymous Bosch-style pleasure garden. Coated in amber sunlight and anchored in impossibly green grass, it's a perfect setting for the Fall-of-man script, written by long-time Maddin collaborator George Toles. Plus, it's nice to see Shelley Duvall get work and get to present a down-to-earth, sensual character (something about her eyes, teeth, and quirky angularity of her face made her perpetually cast as a hysteric). But color makes Maddin's approach feel stage-y and disinterested; the dialogue, now spoken instead of narrated or given intertitles, seems drearily stilted. The best bits come during the moments set during a ostrich farm; at just the right moments, a head pops up into the frame in the middle of dialogue, bemused, like us.

Francois Ozon, Swimming Pool

2004-04-24T16:54:00.000-05:00
Pockmarked with plot holes and unsatisfyingly resolved plot threads, the pleasures of Swimming Pool come mainly through the lust it tracks. That almost propels the movie to greatness, because the eroticism runs deeper and means more than most erotic thrillers. Julie's (Ludivine Sagnier) breasts, presented to us thoroughly and often, aren't just provocations, they're plot devices: They youthfully mock Sarah's (Charlotte Rampling) age, underscore the divide between the openness that Sarah rejects and that Julie all too eagerly embraces, and, lest we think too hard on this, make two-thirds of the movie sexy as hell. The setting, a quiet French country house, is gorgeous enough and set far enough from the real world, that it's filled with all sorts of intriguing possibilities, and Rampling is excellent at presenting the slow emotional thaw that occurs when she's allowed to escape her tethers of writing work and her dreary London home. Pot smoke and poolside blowjobs might have their pleasures, but, alas, it's not a movie, and the tail end of Swimming Pool takes on a murder plot that's weakly drawn, morally questionable, and throws the emotional pitch of the film out the window. Perhaps Rampling and Sagnier have done their job too well -- thanks to Ozon's rippling, glimmering shots, and the glow that surrounds both of them, the movie has a pleasurable whiff of emotional experimentation to it. But eroticism that tries to wrap itself around plot is still a narrative cul-de-sac, no more affective here than in whatever soft-lit thrustings occur on Cinemax at 1 a.m.

Music Notes

2004-04-24T13:51:00.000-05:00
Concert preview of Josh Rouse, in the Chicago Reader. Online through April 28.

George Cukor, My Fair Lady

2004-04-20T18:23:00.000-05:00
The film that cleaned up at the '65 Oscars -- except, insanely, in the best actress category, where Audrey Hepburn wasn't even nominated, making room for the deeply questionable triumph of Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. The slight is doubly stunning, because My Fair Lady did win best picture, and the "best" part is owed almost entirely to Hepburn, who drops all her aitches in the first half and then, in the second half, dances gracefully around them and picks them up as she moves. This could've been awful -- Cukor was ten years past his prime in 1964, and the songs are mostly unmemorable. It does have a brashness of color going for it -- the floral explosion that marks the opening moments boasts a palette that's richer than even the brightest MGM production of the '50s. But its best moment is the Embassy ball scene, which decks out Hepburn in simple black and white, looking as if a zebra exploded on her, and it's doubtful that a lack of color would have made her performance any less effective. I'm less excited by Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins than in Eliza's eagerness to get 'er 'ands around 'enry 'iggins' neck. Hepburn's passion and ability to shine in a variety of contexts -- oh, that wonderful pout on her face when she suffers through her vowel drills -- trumps the mundane business of the film's plot (battle of the sexes boilerplate) and theme (middle class morality boilerplate). More affecting than either is the sublime vision of Eliza's father gracefully drunk in a top hat and tails, and, of course, Eliza herself, running back to Higgins not out of love but out of self-respect. The elegant, aristocratic, swanning curves of her face and body meant that Hepburn was one of the few actresses who could afford to come across as feminine instead of bluntly sexy, and it makes My Fair Lady a better movie than it would've been with any other actress. She's the smartest woman in the room, in all sorts of ways.

Michael Cimino, Heaven's Gate

2004-04-18T14:51:00.000-05:00
For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Phil Alden Robinson, Field of Dreams

2004-04-16T08:19:00.000-05:00
For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Music notes

2004-04-16T08:01:00.000-05:00
Capsule preview of Air. Online through April 21.

Jesus Nebot, No Turning Back

2004-04-13T19:07:00.000-05:00
For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Catherine Hardwicke, Thirteen

2004-04-12T09:25:00.000-05:00
Every generation gets the young scapegoat it deserves. The '60s had Those Damn Hippies, the '80s had Wilding Young Black Men, and now we have The Wilding Suburban Teenage Girl to contend with. Unquestionably, there are lots of bored suburban girls -- the product of a growing working-poor demographic -- who act out their confusion self-destructively. Some of them might even suck down whippets while beating the crap out of one another. But why does Thirteen smell more like Reefer Madness than 60 Minutes? Part of the problem is that it argues that the downward slide is speedy, easily instigated, and the product of the fatal flaw of not being loved enough. Surely Evan Rachel Wood's Tracy holds her low-class surroundings and absent father in contempt, but Hardwicke doesn't quite justify how this translates into shoplifting and cutting, or why Tracy persists in her confusion even while Hardwicke goes to pains to give her a moral tether. Perhaps a stack of sociology studies may help, which is to say that trusting its verisimilitude is probably more trouble than Thirteen's Afterschool Special scare tactics are worth. Regardless, the interesting story isn't so much Tracy's descent as it is her strange bond with Evie (Nikki Reed), especially when the bond blows apart; the capacity for cruelty that swaddles a broken friendship is what rings most true here. That, and Holly Hunter, whose willingness to take her typecast role as the short-stuff spitfire and tear it to pieces borders on the carnivorous.

Music Notes

2004-04-08T10:06:00.000-05:00
Capsule preview of Fantomas, for the Chicago Reader. Online through April 14.

Bob Fosse, Cabaret

2004-04-07T08:36:00.000-05:00
Flamboyance was Bob Fosse's chief skill, and Cabaret works because he understood the mechanics of flamboyance better than anyone. It means being enthusiastic more than beautiful, which made Liza Minnelli perfect casting; when she campily repeats "Does my body drive you wild with desire?" it works because everybody knows it's her energy more than her body that's driving sex. It means giving us transgression that's relatively safe and attainable, so the hint of a threesome is powerful stuff, especially when we have Joel Grey's frightmask guiding us through the festivities. And it means at least nodding towards seriousness, even if the Nazi plot is the least interesting part of the film. Small bits spring out: Natalia's gorgeous broken English, Minnelli and Grey singing about money and clinking as they shimmy; Michael York putting on a loaned sweater with both lust and fear in his eyes. It's a remarkable piece of showmanship throughout, especially so in 1972, and it clearly resonated well enough to give Fosse a directorial career; he internalized the sensuous feel of camp without collapsing into inside jokes and empty bawdiness. But he had his limitations, and '74 Lenny was a serious miscue. There's a difference, it turns out, between flamboyant personalities and merely intense ones.

Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2004-04-06T09:03:00.000-05:00
Issues of his supposed weirdness aside, much of the reason Charlie Kaufman enjoys a rep as a great screenwriter is that he's the most sensitive screenwriter we have. Which is to say he understands emotional wounds better than anyone, and he knows that wounds aren't always tragic matters of death and love; tragedy is asking a stranger out on a date, reconciling your talent with your lack of ambition, failing to create a real-life persona that matches the one you carry around in your head. Jim Carrey's tragedy is that he doesn't want to be the million-dollar dork he's so good at being, so is it any wonder that he's absolutely perfect here? Frightened of everything up to and including love, Joel's attraction to Kate Winslet's Clementine captures the rhythm of attraction to the wrong person; head hung down, wool cap thrust low on his head, he's a man who simply can't forget the least slight and mistake. So the sequences where he accesses the worst of his childhood embarassments are a triumph of Kaufman's humor and Gondry's wry direction, but Carrey's work is particularly stunning; humiliated by his childhood friends, lusting for a neighbor, caught jerking off by his mom, everybody involved has a clear sense of the sort of things that won't go away. Carrey has never seemed so comfortable doing anything so much as this.

It seems to inspire everybody else. Gondry's Super-8-meets-CGI approach makes the weirdness feel completely at home, the supporting roles (Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Elijah Wood, a horny hobbit) are each carefully drawn, and this may finally explain Kate Winslet to the confused. She is sexy, dammit, it's just that she's kept trying to weld her intelligence to her sexuality in roles where it wasn't always merited. In a gaudy orange sweatjacket and ever-changing head of hair, she gets to play somebody whose attractiveness stems from self-confidence, which is what she's been trying to tell us all along. Because the relationship between Joel and Clementine both abrades and attracts, Sunshine has been compared to Annie Hall, but a better comparison might be Sid & Nancy. Not because the relationship is so self-destructively tragic, but because it's the rare love story that looks at the places where love doesn't work, can't work -- the tiny spots scattered on our brain that can't get washed out, the chaotic emotional places that make us...us.

Michael Cimino, The Deer Hunter

2004-04-05T10:06:00.000-05:00
For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Book Notes

2004-04-04T17:24:00.000-05:00
Review of Ben Macintyre's The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan for the Chicago Sun-Times. The review's here.

Liliana Cavani, Ripley's Game

2004-04-04T10:21:00.000-05:00
There's a small moment halfway through Ripley's Game that speaks to John Malkovich's peculiar genius. On a train, as his Ripley helps bail out his Italian neighbor Jonathan (Dougray Scott) from getting sucked into a mob-murder snafu, he notices a no-smoking sign on the train they're on. "There's no smoking on this car?" he says, as he stubs out his cigarette. "How rude." What's rude? That he was smoking, or that the car dares to police it? We're not quite sure, and Malkovich's poker-faced Ripley, amoral and proud, is one of the many charms of this film, which fell victim to studio hiccups and failed to get a proper theatrical release. That's a shame, because it would've been wonderful to see its Italian landscapes on a wider scale, and to feel more engaged with the large, airy rooms that Ripley and his wife lounge about in, paying only as much attention to the "real" world as they absolutely must. And because Malkovich acts at such a low boil, minor shifts change everything: An accidentally-on-purpose spill on Ripley's expensive couch, a rush of children in a zoo's accent room, a no-smoking sign noticed as you're garrotting some Ukranian thugs. The theme is conscience and whether Ripley wants one, and Cavani paces the story softly enough that we get hit with the full power of its ideas even though there's little speaking in the last ten minutes. Ripley simply can't get his head around the idea that somebody would bother doing something solely for the good of others, but the flicker of understanding we get in the film's last scene is a quietly stunning thing of beauty.

Jamie Meltzer, Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story

2004-04-01T09:03:00.000-06:00
A funny, brisk, and strangely affecting documentary about a bizarre corner of the music industry. Tucked in the rear of music and writing magazines are ads from people who are willing to turn your poem into a song, for a price. In other words, it's subsidy publishing for music, and a Frontline-style doc would engage in dreary tut-tutting about how these people exploit folks who want to be pop stars, trade in crappy boilerplate songlets, and so forth. Meltzer resists that instinct, which results in a better glimpse into the human condition. For one thing, the people who write and record these songs enjoy their work -- one of the best scenes features a group of fast-working studio musicians fighting bitterly over the structure of a song, and another has a blast taking an unrhymed poem from first read to completed track in less than an hour. Watch this with the sound off and it looks and feels like a serious documentary about a "serious" musician, and that's part of the point; everybody means it. And a number of the songs included have some validity to them -- "Jimmy Carter Says Yes!" is as good as any political song in that all political songs are catchy propaganda, and another writer's paean to Annie Oakley is pretty crafty as well. None of the songs deserve more than what a quirky, Errol Morris-style doc can offer, but they deserve at least that much. A group of people shut out of the mainstream take the means of production into their own hands and make their own art, conventional notions of song-craft be damned -- isn't that how we got punk rock? Isn't that how anybody uses music to validate what we feel?

Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries

2004-03-30T08:32:00.000-06:00
Neurosis, fear of death, and contempt (for yourself and others) are the core of what remains one of the lovliest film meditations ever made. Part of the reason why it works is that the internal rot it describes is countered by some wonderful shots of landscapes, fields, leafy trees, and stately rooms and campuses. There are the people as well: Victor Sjostrom captures the beauty of a man accessing his better nature just in time, prompted by two charming women, Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Thulin. When we look at our pasts, Bergman says, we see only our flaws -- the illicit desires and emotional fears, and the harshest moment is a dream sequence where Sjostrom declares himself incompetent. But in the real world we're just the person that people see in the here and now, so the theology-slinging beatniks that tag along for the car ride give both Sjostrom and us a lift. The message is that we're better than we give ourselves credit for, and Strawberries is, despite the criticism of Bergman's gloominess, one of the best portrayals of emotional optimism available.

James L. Brooks, Broadcast News

2004-03-29T20:04:00.000-06:00
James L. Brooks, only half-good judging by his his track record, is truly great when his subject is charisma. Look at Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets, playing a sonofabitch equally repulsive and attractive; he leaves his mark on Homer Simpson, a man completely undeserving of honor and professional respect but gets both anyway; and here in Broadcast News, William Hurt knowing that his slowness is both his failing and his meal ticket. These are characters made by a man who is very wealthy yet isn't sure he deserves it. But guilt's a great motivator, and there's great meticulous craftsmanship in Broadcast News a fairly spot-on glimpse into the news business and a thoroughly spot-on take on personality crises. Three fine actors are at the center, but Albert Brooks is the winner; the sequence where he takes on the role of news anchor is so riotously intense it practically doubles as a climax and threatens to overwhelm the film's fairly mundane love-triangle plot. But the script has teeth when it needs to, particularly when it shows off how brittle the line is between love and friendship, and how easily it turns to anger. And I love the tics of the characters involved, even if they're writer's-workshoppy: type-A Holly Hunter unplugging the phone long enough to have a crying jag, William Hurt turning his face boyish and pleading for sympathy. And Albert Brooks, yet again so good as the self-loathing man whose genius goes unrecognized that the wider world hasn't bothered to recognize his genius.

Michael Wadleigh, Woodstock

2004-03-29T18:28:00.000-06:00
A lot of it's dated, or at least snoozy: Ten Years After and Santana are '60s freeform musical idealism taken too far, Canned Heat was less than the sum of its massive parts, and Country Joe and the Fish were the worst of what the Haight gurgled up. But Country Joe alone, singing "Feels Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag," still feels distressingly fresh: The ironic, detached voice of a man angry that a daily body count has made him feel so ironic, so detached. So much of Woodstock is cliche now, but every cliche was once an original thought, and there romanticism that surrounded the event is still deeply affecting, from That Couple stripping down in the fields to the line of kids calling mom at the pay phones to, in its finest twist, the Port-O-San man sucking up the detritus of 500,000 humans as he explains that he's got one son in the crowd and another in Vietnam.

In other words, it's the hippie script before the script got written, but the jokes and Boomer rememberances don't do justice to the images, not least Jimi Hendrix sending "The Star Spangled Banner" off to Jupiter before snapping it back home. Was there ever a musician who felt more at home with his instrument, as if it actually were a part of his body? Michael Wadleigh (with an assist from Martin Scorsese, learning) has a plainspoken, relaxed, off-the-cuff style that echoes the lamer Beatniks, but with more control. Sometimes he's heavy-handed -- that freeze-frame of a nun flashing a peace sign, for instance -- but the only real false note comes in the Who sequence. The camera refuses to stray from the singer, but only a dupe thinks Roger Daltrey is the star -- Keith Moon was always where the action was.

Herbert Ross, Pennies From Heaven

2004-03-27T09:54:00.000-06:00
For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Music Notes

2004-03-25T13:54:00.000-06:00
Capsule notes on American Music Club and The Darkness for the Chicago Reader, online through April 1.

Ethan and Joel Coen, Blood Simple.

2004-03-25T08:38:00.000-06:00
There's only a flicker of The Coen Brothers in the Coen brothers' first film; most of its plot and style is nicked from Alfred Hitchcock, Eugene O'Neill, a passel of '70s slasher flicks (not least I Spit on Your Grave), and especially Sam Raimi, their first mentor. Blood Simple. feels as rough as any cheaply made first film does, but here it looks like a deliberate choice instead of economic compromise. So many of its settings -- the roadhouse bar, the burial plot lit by headlights -- come so cheap anyway, and the Coens know how to give us just enough detail (a chrome lighter, a group of rotting fish) to give these places weight. The economical approach extends to the script, which features practically no dialogue after about halfway through. That makes Frances McDormand's eyes the stars of the film; scared, distrustful, and eventually stoically independent, they echo our own responses to the preposterousness of murder plots -- and murder plot films. In other words, a hard film to make well for first-time directors; Alfred Hitchcock kept working on it to the last, it took a decade's worth of work for Sam Raimi to try his own hand at the style in A Simple Plan. And the Coen brothers? They never quite figured out if they were satirists or realists, and its our good luck that they're so talented at both. Blood Simple. is a lesser film in comparison to their later output, but only in comparson; alone, it's a formal triumph.

Ethan and Joel Coen, The Ladykillers

2004-03-23T08:46:00.000-06:00
Filmgoers, critics, and perhaps Tom Hanks himself have all had a hard time reconciling the strangely schizophrenic career of Tom Hanks. There is the early Hanks, the man with all the gravitas of Ashton Kutcher, the star of such grade-A crap as The 'burbs, Turner and Hooch, Dragnet, and other contenders in a ten-year run of potential career suicide. And then, starting in the early '90s, Hollywood fairy dust: Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, The Green Mile, all films that gave him that gravitas he wanted, even if he didn't change much as an actor to achieve it. His Oscar-worthiness isn't so much a triumph of acting as it is of successful agentry and good lighting. Watching Hanks in interviews, seeing the way he constantly undercuts himself, cracks wise, giggles self-effacingly, it's not hard to think that Hanks feels like he doesn't quite deserve his good fortune. Not that he's complaining, either.

Which might be why, recently, he's been attracted to films about aging scam artists. Road to Perdition and Catch Me if you Can allowed him to start sniffiing around that milieu, and in The Ladykillers he fully invests in it, diving deep into his role as a southern con artist whose utterances are dense thickets of pompous 19th-Century prose -- a man who makes millions by putting people on. When he giggles, it's an irksome, curious cough-laugh, the sort of noise made by a person who discovers he's the only person who's just found a joke funny. In short, a charming, old-fashioned guy who old ladies find just adorable, which is him as an actor, and here in the film. But it works beautifully, both in the jokes and the quirky camera angles they exploit (some of its most beautiful shots feature a garbage scow).

The Coen brothers are two of the few directors who think of actors as scenery, and that idea works beautifully here with Hanks' partners in crime: the Coen's homeboy, Mr. Fixit, lunkhead, and fascist general are all great comic fodder. But so's everybody else, because everybody's flawed: Police authorities are fat and food-stained and southern matrons are easily deceived (though its hard not to admire Irma P. Hall's toughness). It's a raucous celebration and indictment of righteousness; crime doesn't pay, but playing nice means being a bit dull in both mind and spirit. The morality here is deliberately and hilariously confused: The kindest, most righteous person wins, but winning means an endowment for Bob Jones University. It's another example of the Southern paradox, which for some reason Minnesota boys like the Coens have embraced. But when it works, it's produced some of the most engaging, funny, and endearing American movies in years.

Tim Story, Barbershop

2004-03-22T10:02:00.000-06:00
In structure, essentially a remake of It's A Wonderful Life; Ice Cube is George Bailey, the South Side of Chicago is Bedford Falls, and local usurer Lester Wallace (played with a perfect evil eyebrow by Keith David) is the evil Mr. Potter, who wittingly profits off of the community he's wilfully destroying. The problem with such a plot is that it's just as mawkish as Capra, so Barbershop is only as good as the jokes are fast, which is pretty speedy -- somebody's launching a grenade of truth every five seconds, so you pay less attention to how the script takes pains to give equal time to each modern black archetype. Nobody's better than Cedric the Entertainer, though, who does a brilliant job of turning the tired cliche of the Wise Black Elder on its head; this time around, the wisdom he espouses is designed to make audiences uncomfortable. A complaint that Barbershop doesn't go far enough because everybody already knew about MLK's philandering doesn't wash; knowing something and speaking confidently and comfortably about it are two different things. So credit Cedric's nerve, and a script and director with enough space to let him spout off.

Olivier Assayas, Demonlover,

2004-03-22T08:38:00.000-06:00
Sexual abuse as a symbol for corporate abuse...or is it the other way around? And did Assayas bother spending much time contemplating the question? Circling around a familiar corporate-intrigue plot -- two rival companies gunning for control over lucrative Web-porn market niches -- Assayas captures the amusing strangeness in how earning money is erotic but spending time with erotica feels empty and cold. That's an intriguing idea for a thriller -- and the screen does leap a little when we get keyed in to the latest frontiers in Internet porn -- but we're not given a hero. Just three distant women who leave you cold: Connie Nielsen as the tormented corporate mole, Chloe Sevigny as the vengeful young turk, Gina Gershon as the stereotypical Ugly American. The feel's consistent, but the feel is flat: The cold blue of an unattended computer screen buzzing after midnight.

Billy Wilder, Stalag 17

2004-03-17T09:58:00.000-06:00
William Holden's Sgt. Sefton is probably the strangest hero to ever appear in a mainstream war movie. Smug, self-satisfied, a collaborator and a passive-aggressive emotional thug, he's supposed to be The Guy Who Doesn't Play By The Rules, but he mainly comes off as a misanthropic anti-hero who's hard to respect and impossible to cheer. (The sole justification for Tigerland is that it made Colin Farrell so strangely charismatic in that stereotype.) That's not Holden's fault, but it does say a lot about Billy Wilder. Wilder's perfect man is somebody who is constantly put-upon but somehow soldiers through (The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., The Seven Year Itch), the sort of men that Paul Schrader would turn into the heart of revenge fantasies a decade or so later. Wilder's so obsessed with being accurate about mens' flaws that it can be hard to figure out who to get behind in his films. Certainly not women, who are perpetually schemers; when Animal mistakes Sugar Lips for Betty Grable it's not so much drag humor as a lecture in how manly lust can rudely shame a man. So maybe the best way to enjoy Stalag 17 is to include it as the better part of a double feature with The Great Escape. It certainly has more humor and grit than that Steve McQueen vehicle, and the black-and-white shadings mean a lot in a POW flick. The better to see the layers of evil that cloak the Nazi captors, the better to concentrate on the dark misdirected bruises on William Holden's noble face.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Red Shoes

2004-03-16T08:45:00.000-06:00
Even if not much of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale actually finds itself in the story, it's still a wonderful fairy tale: Color and movement and melodrama and a fine tragic love story. Technicolor musicals weren't particularly new by 1948, but Powell-Pressburger exploited a more interesting palette than Americans did. MGM wanted an explosion of color on screen, but The Red Shoes chooses to go deep into red, which jumps out in the midst of cool greens and blues surrounding it. Moira Shearer and Marius Goring's hair are the stars of the show, though that's not a knock on Shearer and Goring; both are magnificent top to bottom as ambitious artists struggling to balance love with professional dreaming. It's melodrama, and there's a few too many scenes of Anton Walbrook punching his hand in anger as the head of the ballet company. But the dance scenes trump any plot problems -- there's some excellent use of editing to capture the magic of the "Red Shoes" ballet itself. And no American musical would so thoroughly pursue the cynical idea uttered by Lermontov: "A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dance." And no American musical would make the result look so sweet and perfect.

David Mamet, Spartan

2004-03-15T09:50:00.000-06:00
Survival is the only theme that seems to really excite Mamet: Survival in the workaday world (Glengarry Glen Ross), survival in social standing (The Winslow Boy, Oleanna), survival against a large angry bear (The Edge). Context matters little to the man, so exploring the idea in an espionage thriller probably strikes him as little different than any other context he's pondered. And for a while there, Spartan looks to be just as clean and smart and exciting as The Spanish Prisoner; the stiff-shouldered Secret Service agents, exemplified by Val Kilmer and, bless him, Ed O'Neill are engaging both in the rhythm of their speech and their no-b.s. body language, even if you don't know what they're fussing about right away. But that stiffness starts to become a problem when the film starts asking us to be emotionally invested in Kilmer's character; the first half of Spartan is so concerned with process that it's hard to jump into the second half, which is character study. Eventually, it just falls into the dreariness of plot, with a bit of lecturing about the mendacity of governments. But plot and government mendacity we can get from TV.

James Cox, Wonderland

2004-03-13T20:55:00.000-06:00
Exhausted trope #5,362: The intersection of drugs, porn, and rock 'n' roll in the '70s today provides a useful window for directors to explore the American Experience. It's not exclusively a '90s-'00s idea -- Joe tinkered with it back in 1970. But between Boogie Nights and Blow and 54 and on and on, there's no new light to shed on how wealth and drugs make claims on our morals. James Cox is a young director, and I want to see more of what he comes up with in the future. Clearly, he knows his way around actors, and he gets excellent performances out of Val Kilmer, Eric Bogosian, Kate Bosworth, Josh Lucas, and Dylan McDermott, who's surprisingly convincing as a bullying piece of biker trash. Kilmer's intensity is always welcome too, but Wonderland mainly looks like a better-than-average student film; you can see Cox experimenting with split screens and fast-cutting and some great use of L.A. Thomas Guide maps to tell the story. Because he's having a great time with a genuine production budget, though, he neglects to figure out whose story he wants to tell. The cops investigating the druggies' murders? The teenaged girlfriend of John Holmes? Holmes himself? Cox eventually decides that what the viewer cares most about is the life of John Holmes, which is a mistake. A washed-up cokehead, even a famous one, doesn't anchor a film. The only star a movie like this can have is the humiliation and degradation and shame that the cokehead's life creates, which means that -- never thought I'd say it -- the movie needs more Lisa Kudrow.

Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop

2004-03-12T10:25:00.000-06:00
For filmcritic.com. The review's here.

Francois Dupeyron, Monsieur Ibrahim

2004-03-10T13:49:00.000-06:00
A gentle-natured coming of age tale that takes on too much. The moral heart of the story is Omar Sharif, who's charming as an aging Sufi Muslim quietly operating a Paris bodega and playing father figure to Momo (Pierre Boulanger), an adolescent Jewish boy who lives with his melancholy father. Ibrahim is excellent at showing how a block or two in a city can mean the entire world to a young man. We get lots of perspectives on Momo's interactions with his neighbors, the shopowners, and especially the local whores, and even if we've seen this story many times before, Dupeyron is especially deft at showing how naivete shifts back and forth between maturity when you're a 15-year-old boy; its best moments give us Momo interacting sweetly with the red-head girl next door (Lola Naynmark). He learns, slowly, that love is more than a transaction. Old news, but the look in Boulanger's eyes make it new again. But Ibrahim also wants to be a story about religious tolerance. That's an honorable idea in and of itself, but it's weakly explored; some comments about comparative religion, shots of whirling dervishes, musings on the Koran...but nothing that feels particularly spiritual, nothing that feels like Dupeyron's particularly invested in the issues of faith his movie gives lips service to.

Martin Scorsese, The Last Temptation of Christ

2004-03-09T14:18:00.000-06:00
For Mel Gibson, Jesus Christ's key utterance was "Forgive them father, for they know not what they do" -- his concern was with Christ's martyrdom above all else. For Scorsese, Jesus' key utterance was his last one: "It is accomplished!" What's accomplished, exactly? In Last Temptation, something a bit more selfish than what the Gospels suggest: Christ finally coming to terms with his status as someone both human and divine. It's rich ground to explore, though dangerous too -- Nikos Kazantzakis fell afoul of religious authorities for pursuing it in his original, excellent novel. When Scorsese pursues it in the last half hour of The Last Temptation it makes for some fascinating viewing. Playing a game of what-if about Jesus's life, charmed off the cross by Satan and turned into a family man, the film underscores both the fracture and fusion of ideas of mortality and divinity; when Willem Defoe appears to us as an aging Jesus, nobody looks so sad simply for being human, and contrast it to the brief, brutal and transcendant shot Scorsese gives us of Jesus wearing his crown of thorns. The problem is that the rest of the film is dull and disinterested at best -- Scorsese cares more about Christ's dying than his living. So when it comes to the sermon on the mount and Lazarus' resurrection, his shots and approach piggybacks off of Nicholas Ray's King of Kings. There are serious mistakes in casting too -- Harvey Keitel's Judas and Harry Dean Stanton's Saul most notably (David Bowie's Pilate works surprisingly well). Peter Gabriel's score has aged poorly as well, giving the film a slick feel when it should be grittier. But mostly, there's a sense that the controversy surrounding the film (production was scrapped once) made Scorsese more cautious than he usually is -- the films he made before (The Color of Money) and after (GoodFellas) are much more freewheeling and engaged. The very end gives us a Brakhage-style freakout, a spray of colored celluloid, looking like film flying off of the projector, as if Scorsese was trying to remind us it's only a movie. Well, so was Taxi Driver and Casino; only a great director made timid would offer such apologies, feel so moved to state the obvious.

Jane Campion, In the Cut

2004-03-08T15:09:00.000-06:00
Jane Campion wants to scrutinize the problem of the male gaze in film? Fine. Meg Ryan wants to annihilate her typecasting as a chaste good girl? Wonderful. Mark Ruffalo wants to spend some time chewing on the internal contradictions of male sexual morality? Excellent. Would've been nice, though, if In the Cut paid some attention to the mundane business of plot, and if it gave us a story that's a little less transparent when it condescends to do so. The opening sequences, which places Ryan in a world that's highly sexualized yet dangerous at the same time -- lots of jump-cutting, lots of fuzzy focus -- evokes a moody erotic style that's different than most erotic thrillers. Creating that thick atmosphere is no small feat, especially when you consider how empty and cliched Cinemax-style erotica is, or how Campion's previous film Holy Smoke failed to create any atmosphere at all. The first part of the film looks and feels so good that Campion doesn't want to let go of her new bag of tricks, so things get messy when she has to resolve the various threads of its silly murderer-on-the-loose story. I mean, what do you do when you find your best friend's head in a sink? Right: Time for a whiskey bender and sex with your lead suspect. Nudity and undulations shouldn't kill Meg Ryan's chance to do and be more than she is; in a fair world, she gets a Monster-style room of her own. But she needs a story that's more that just a ticklish attempt at provocation.