Ten recent reviews

I Vitelloni (dir. Federico Fellini, 1953)
A nostalgic look back at boyhood from Fellini? Impossible! OK, maybe not so impossible. In fact, a significant part of his catalog features his memories of provincial youth and this one is perhaps his finest early example of it, centered around a group of friends making that painful transition from their fly-by-night runaround ways into adulthood - most abruptly in the case of Fausto, who is made to marry a young woman he's gotten pregnant instead of following through on his plan of skipping out of town. While they're on honeymoon, the rest of his group scams, schemes, slacks, and dreams big without doing anything about changing their situation. But the specter of their forcibly adult-ed friend hangs over things and they start to worry about really facing up to life. That's basically the thrust of it, though of course in Fellini's hands, he really invests the people with a life that my description lacks. He understands the young, small town dreamers who would like to think they're one big break from turning their lives around and he's in sympathy with their plight, even if he's not uncritical. Before he started making his films into intricate puzzles and three-ring circuses, he made these types of character studies. This is one of the best - possibly the best - of his early works.

Ashes of Time Redux (dir. Wong Kar-Wei, 2008)

Kar-Wei Wong's romantic tangle unwound a bit to be easier to follow and I'm not sure it improves things at all. I found the original version a little tough, but somehow this more circularly organized take on things seems to lose a little of the mystery, even if it's been constructed of the same materials that made up the other version. I liked it the way it was, I guess, even if it meant that I had to come back a few times to really get to the heart of the film. Given Kar-Wei's strengths in constructing multiple layers and multiple timelines in his best works, I'm wondering just why this one ended up being re-worked. It's still a good film and it was a treat to see it again, but I prefer it the way it was.

Ghost Ship (dir. Mark Robson, 1946)

Another solid Val Lewton cheapie that fulfills its ambitions to being a good film, this time without as many of the supernatural/thriller elements that are present in most of his other films of the period. As always, there are 'A' performances from 'B' actors, a script that's way stronger than the unpromising and misleading title would have you believe, and an atmosphere of creepiness even as it works toward a more conventional drama. A seaman takes to a new ship helmed by a notoriously hard captain only to find that he's beyond "hard," he's nuts. But at sea, with the cap'n in charge, what can you do about it? That's the dilemma facing our hero here, and it's done nicely in the film. It's more about how this kind of life can suck out a person's soul, not about said souls returning from the beyond. Maybe less exciting than some of Lewton's other great films of the period, but it's certainly worth seeing.

Ichi the Killer (dir. Takashi Miike, 2001)

I can't figure Miike out. Certainly he's got a flair for the outrageous, and this is by far the most outrageous of his four films that I've seen, but I don't know if he's got anything up his sleeve beyond shock value. I mean, here's a film about a timid and lethal assassin (Ichi), motivated and manipulated by a man tangentially involved in the Yakuza. The second man's motives are dirty, Ichi doesn't exactly draw our sympathy, and the ample time spent with the masochistic Yakuza boss doesn't really draw us into his psyche at all. I guess that's kind of the deal with Miike's films that I've seen - he's got a set of ideas that get no more complex than your average comic book; a character has his simple motivation and that's enough to power the film for him. There's no pathos, nothing believable to grab on to, just a flashy show of violence, blood and guts that's maybe entertaining but hardly something that can make me think much about the characters involved, much less anything beyond the confines of the film.

Tokyo Twilight (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)
This is as overtly (melo)dramatic as any Ozu I've ever seen. That's not to say that it's not good, just that there are dramatic outbursts onscreen that are uncharacteristic of his work and come off as pretty startling and unexpected. Two sisters - one troubled and pregnant, the other separated from her husband - live with their father while they attempt to sort out their lives and deal with the knowledge that the mother they have long believed is dead may well be alive. I've read complaints about the plot, about the drama, but it doesn't really bother me, the film is still shot beautifully and anything with both Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara in it is gonna be worth my time, if perhaps not yours. It's not great, for sure, but it's certainly worth a look, and for those who find his films a little dry, it may even be a good way in to understanding his world better.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (dir. Nicholas Stoller, 2008)

Shall we just accept that I'm probably going to enjoy everything coming out of Judd Apatow's stable of Freaks & Geeks alumni and move on from there? Let me try for a second to explain why though - the thing that Apatow has fostered in his young group of writers that makes his films exceptional (within the confines of comedies centered around insecure young men) is that he encourages them to make character rather than plot the central focus of the films. And so here we have Jason Segel's variation on his F&G character - a slightly weird and obsessive wounded romantic who wants to get into a good relationship but has some trouble figuring out exactly how to make any headway with the opposite sex or any understanding of how odd he really is. So if the film shows women finding him somehow irresistible when his charms actually seem quite resistible, he's still got charms, like most of the leads in the Apatow films. It was funny for sure (especially Russell Brand's egocentric rock star), I bought the drama with a minimal suspension of disbelief, and I think that there's a good solid grounding in writing character here that makes the film far better than it could've been. Maybe it coulda been cut down a bit, maybe it coulda been sharpened, but I always prefer character-driven films to plot-driven ones, so I might have liked it considerably less if so.

Judgment at Nuremberg (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1961)
An exceptional pair of performances anchor this film to prevent it from becoming too preachy - Burt Lancaster and the great Spencer Tracy both set about giving some of the best work of their careers as (respectively) one of the Nazi judges on trial and the American judge brought in to act as part of the tribunal trying them. (Please note that this is not a slap at the rest of the supporting cast, nearly all of whom do superb work here, just that these two roles call for more from the actors, both of whom rise to the occasion.) Where it could easily have wandered into a mere recreation of Nazi horrors and condemnation of them, it's aiming higher, more broadly about the act of making sure that we do not let these things go once they're supposedly over and done with, ready to be buried. Nearly everyone in the film encourages Tracy's character to let bygones be bygones, drop things and acquit the judges but he persists, he wants to understand especially how a judge like Lancaster's moralist - and by extension anybody - could slide to condemning people to concentration camps from which they'd never emerge. The viewer gets to understand it too, understand that each compromise, each lie told to the self to accomodate things moves everyone closer to the atrocities that are only late in the film explicitly shown. I'm not fan of courtroom dramas, but this one really got me.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (dir. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, 1943)Another great one from my chronological examination of Powell and Pressburger. Though it is perhaps not quite as exciting as 49th Parallel - and that's fine - it's yet another nuanced character study, which is what makes their films so great, or at least so interesting to me. Maybe it's a little long at 2 1/2 hours, taking time getting to where it's going in fleshing out the people involved, but there's never a scene where it feels like I don't want to be spending time with Blimp, with any of Deborah Kerr's three characters, or with Anton Walbrook's Kretschmar-Schuldorff - they're all so brilliantly drawn and acted that I don't mind that extra time. Anyway, it's a wonderful character study, putting aside even the extraordinary circumstances of the filming. Not as dazzling as I had expected for a wartime epic, but perhaps all the more affecting for the smart portrayals that it puts across that can cut across time like this.

City Lights (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
I've always found Chaplin just a hair too sentimental for my tastes, even while being fully engaged by his works - love the gags a lot of the time, but am not always on the side of The Tramp, as I think I'm supposed to be. That doesn't apply here. I found this brilliant throughout, totally engrossed and drawn in to the story beginning to end. The boxing scene in particular is great - I'd seen it before out of context and loved it then - but really, the bittersweet romance, the ups and downs with his friend the drunken millionaire, the ambiguous ending, they all add up to the most consistently entertaining and emotionally engaging of his films that I've seen yet. Helps too that I saw it with the Colorado Symphony performing the score live along with the film. Somehow Gold Rush and Modern Times both seem to have eclipsed this in the Chaplin canon and I don't know why, I think it's the best of the three, and though I haven't seen his entire catalog of full lengths I can't imagine them getting better than this. But unlike the reactions I had to the other two films just mentioned this one has made me really want to make it a priority to see them.

Katyn (dir. Andrzej Wajda, 2007)

Bringing an event heretofore not very public, especially something on the scale of the massacre that forms the main event of this film, almost automatically lends itself to a powerful cinematic adaptation. But it is at times too automatic as filmmaking, letting the event and story itself carry the weight of the film. There's no doubt that this was an event that partially defined the Polish experience of WWII (you can get a hint of its significance just by a quick look at the numerous Polish reviews on IMDB) - an entire generation of Polish officers are rounded up via a secret pact between the Nazis and the Russian army, then executed and buried in mass graves in the Katyn forest, an event later blamed by each entity by the other - but I found that it failed to draw me in the way a film trading in such heavily emotional material should have, relying not on Wajda's skills, but expecting story alone to carry it. In this, it's like dozens of films before it - a well-made, strong but curiously uninvolving film about a weighty, meaningful subject that means a lot to everyone who made it. The seriousness that the film has put across confers a lot of gravity to audiences, but despite fine cinematography, good performances, and a crafty script that juggles several timelines, I find that I'd rather go to his war films of the 50's and read a book about this topic.

Ten recent reviews

Night Nurse (dir. William Wellman, 1931) -
Almost forgot I had watched this relatively inconsequential one filmed during Prohibition (though booze flows freely throughout and a bootlegger is here portrayed in a positive light - gangster with a heart of gold, kinda). But the main focus is on Barbara Stanwyck as a tough-minded nurse assigned to care for an upper crust couple's kids. She starts to suspect something's wrong with them, and not by accident. She and her bootlegger pal plus a kindly doctor crack the case and put the baddies away. That's about it. The writing is OK, though not particularly memorable, and it's interesting that when the gangster has his freinds make a couple *really* bad guys "disappear" it's more or less laughed off on-screen. It's fun to watch, well-acted (note especially Clark Gable as a complete scumbag, along with Stanwyck's tough broad), all good enough while it's going by, but not much is there to stick it in the mind.

A Girl Cut in Two (dir. Claude Chabrol, 2007) -
My first exposure to Chabrol, and I understand that I maybe should've started elsewhere. I liked this quite a bit, though going in I was told "He hates the bourgeois" and that more or less sums up what I got from the film. Both of the wealthy male characters in the film abuse and take advantage (emotionally) of the pretty and somewhat naive girl who is, as the title suggests, cut in two in her emotions that vascillate between the male leads who harbor some largely unexplained hatred for each other. As my first exposure, there will no doubt be more - I'm intrigued - but I somehow suspect that this is not his finest hour, even though I did enjoy it. Le Boucher is sitting as-yet-unwatched on a pile of DVDs at home, so it'll happen soon.


Baise Moi (dir. Virginie Despentes/Coralie, 2000) -
I'm not sure what to make of this unpleasant little cult item. If this graphic sex and violence were presented to audiences by a male director - even with its female anti-heroes - I'm sure it would be savaged critically. And though this mostly enjoys poor ratings around most places I've looked, there are those who see it as some sort of feminist work because the women own their sexuality in the film and go after what they want - both sexually and otherwise. I guess if I felt in watching it that there were any sort of critique of sexism going on rather than just "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" tit-for-tat exploitation, I might be able to buy into some of that. As it is, I feel like I'm watching two female sociopaths posturing for the camera (and the script to some degree acknowledges this, having them at one point discuss finding some more clever one-liners to shout as they dispatch victims - but this ain't Godard, for sure). There's sexual penetration (presented both as pleasant and unpleasant) there's graphic violence (presented as always unpleasant and also presented less convincingly, since you can't, you know, shoot people on film and get away with it usually), and there's very little else. The leads are unlikable, though I guess convincing enough. They're a couple dumb thugs, basically, and when they decide that they just don't give a fuck anymore and are going on a spree, there's very little reason to watch. Feminism here - if you can call it that - is presented as revenge, as getting even, not with as any kind of ideals that the characters follow. You get in their way and they'll fuck you up - whether you're male or female. They're predatory toward some of the men they sleep with (or don't sleep with)(and then kill), they'll go after anyone with enough money to get them to their next stop. I guess I just would've gotten something more out of it than just an unpleasant feeling if these characters weren't such moral zeroes. Luckily the film's only a little over an hour long.


Cabin in the Sky (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1943) -
Unlike the previous film this was an utter delight, beginning to end. It's Minnelli's directorial debut if I recall correctly and I have to say that this is the finest thing I've ever seen his name on. Music - great; performances - great; story and script - great. I'm interested to hear how it is perceived by African-American critics, because it's unique in being a relatively early film to have an all-black cast but I could see how some would find some of the portrayals stereotypical - if they were convinced that every single person who appears on screen is meant to represent the totaily of the black experience. It's like this - the music is great, the film is witty, the performances are spectacular, with the two leads taking top honors, and both main angel and devil turning in memorable roles and Louis Armstrong in a fantastic small role. A great film, all around.

Urgh! A Music War (dir. Derek Burbidge, 1981) -
Fun. Nobody but the stupid Police are given more than one song, and the print I saw did not have the Pere Ubu performance in it for some reason (and that is one of the main reasons I went to see it). Also missing was Magazine and maybe one or two more performances. But still - lots of great stuff remained, with Gang of Four one of the best, Au Pairs quite fine, and Gary Numan perhaps my favorite of the bunch. Inpsired me to pick up Pleasure Principle, which has been on a back burner for years for me to actually acquire. Anyway, it's certainly a fun snapshot of what was going on in 1981 in the underground/new wave scene, but it didn't make me like Oingo Boingo or The Police or Klaus Nomi any more than before, nor did it make me think X or The Cramps or Devo or Joan Jett or any of the above-mentioned bands were more/less godlike that I already imagined them. They all hit it just right, and lots of bands that we now know weren't going anywhere made the best of their moment in the sun. It's a lot of fun to see and there's a lot of good music. And even the not-as-good music sounds fine in this context, at only one song per band.

Equinox Flower (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1958) -

One of the interesting things about Ozu is that while his films are considered traditional, and presumably conservative along with that, he's got one of the most interesting ouevres that focuses on gender relations of any major director out there. And this one, his first color film, is, for me, possibly the most radical departure from tradition that I've yet seen. Over the course of the film, the protagonist - a traditional father figure - slowly (and somewhat reluctantly) relinquishes all vestiges of patriarchal authority. Step by step his assumption of authority over the female characters in the film - his wife, his daughter - is dismantled, and though he resists briefly, he ultimately gives up to it. I love the way it's portrayed in the film and Shin Saburi is incredibly effective at putting this across in his face, with a slightly confused look saying "what just happened there?" as he cedes a decision to his wife, as he comes around to realize that his daughter should indeed be allowed to choose her own mate. Great stuff. My only complaint is that in his desire to use color effectively I feel like his brilliance in composing the frame suffers slightly. There are fewer shots here where I'm blown away by the sheer beauty of the frame, replaced somewhat by shots where I'm impressed with how the primary color palatte is distributed around the frame. But the story makes up for any of these shortcomings.

Street of Crocodiles (dir. Brothers Quay, 1986) -

Obscure little short meant, I suppose, as tribute to Jan Svankmejer in its unsettling and nightmarish feeling. Also supposedly a tribute to Bruno Schulz, about whom I know nothing that I haven't read in brief on IMDB reviews of this film. Plot is essentially irrelevant, given over to a series of creepy images of dolls with no eyes, inanimate objects animated and a marionette cut loose from his strings wandering around, watching, and trying to make some sense of things as we, the audience, do the same. There's no doubting the craft here and at 20 minutes, it's the perfect length for its slippery imagery to ease in and out of your mind and move on to the next set of nightmarish vision. It's not really as horrific as all that though, really more an incredibly well-made vision of gloom and despair - it's no wonder that musicians like Tool and Nine Inch Nails who trade in "dark" imagery wanted this type of thing for their videos. Without really coming out and grabbing me to make me intrigued by what's going on on-screen, this does hold me in a weird way. Imagery is arresting, there seems to be some sort of purpose to the proceedings, and if it feels like someone else's private nightmare and not mine (or anything more universal) so much, I guess that it gets marks for still keeping me in there. I wish it spoke to me more fully because I like what they're doing, more or less. Looks great.

The Hawks and the Sparrows (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966) -

Pasolini working in religious parable, and if I'm not as intrigued as his earlier efforts at bringing Neo-Realism into a newer era (Neo-Neo-Realism?) or his later adaptations of classical literature, it's probably that he's working details of religious dogma that as someone raised atheist I know nothing about. In that it's not unlike Bunuel's The Milky Way - an obscure film, often funny, that nonetheless is debating the finer points of something that's of little interest to me, whether he's taking an essentially blasphemous point of view or not. It's weird, it's interesting, and ultimately much of goes into territory that loses me. That said, there's still Pasolini's underlying interest in the working class and it colors a lot of how the film plays out. Additionally, some of the religious humor is broad enough that a heathen like myself even gets what he's going on about. It's not as scathingly assaultive as the best film he's made, but it does draw me in regardless. Almost makes me want to read the Bible and understand what some of the more obscure passages are about. But not quite.

The Offence (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1972) -
Lumet's specialty seems to be characters in desperate straits. I'm thinking Dog Day Afternoon, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, even Twelve Angry Men - all of them have people on the edge. And in two of them, plus this film, they're trying to do whatever they can to save themselves, even though they're so fucked up you kind of know right off the bat that it's not gonna work out. Here, Sean Connery plays a cop investigating a series of rapes of children in his town. Once a suspect is brought in, he gets him alone in the interrogation room and ends up beating him to death. This happens before the credits are over and we back up to see how we got to this point. We are then given a detailed accounting of the interrogation and the aftermath, in which a superior interviews Connery to find out what happened. It's a pretty grim little film - not because of the child-rape subject matter, but because Connery's character is so out there that you suspect he's probably a good cop but a terrible person, and everything we're shown in the course of the film - which is only enough to suggest that his psychological problems run pretty fucking deep - corroborates this idea. Unlike Dog Day (and very much like Before the Devil) though, I had a tough time sympathizing with anybody here, a hard time wondering why I should worry if Connery's cathartic confrontation with his dark mirror image resulted in anything that helped him in the long run. It's well made, and Connery really brings this asshole to life, but the film is a tough pill to swallow.

An Autumn Afternoon (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1962) -

Very possibly the most beautiful Ozu film I've seen, and that's saying something given the quality of his other films. The narrative here, with its familiar themes of children of marrying age and their parents worrying about their choices feels almost like it's on the cusp of a breakthrough to new territory for Ozu. In none of his other films that I've seen where marriage is an issue has the parental figure - the great Chishu Ryu - seemed less concerned about whether or not his daughter got married off and to whom. It's not clear whether the daughter actually wants to leave the home and marry or only if it's after the prompting of his friends when Ryu's character begins pushing her toward it that she makes the decision to do so, but it's certainly easy going for both parties, compared to much of Ozu's other work. Other of Ozu's common subthemes proliferate - Ryu's son and his wife are having financial troubles, borrowing money from dad and not sure if it should be spent solely on things to keep up with the joneses or if he should buy a set of golf clubs to make himself look good for his boss. Golf and baseball recur in the film, another signifier of Western (more specifically, American) encroachment on traditional Japan. But the thing that strikes me again is that there is so little friction between the father and daughter about marriage that it almost seemed like Ozu may have been on the brink of finding two generations who understood each other well, who respected the choices the other made. It's common to say that Ozu's sympathies of his late films are with the younger generation, but this one seems to me to be with the older generation, or at least with Ryu's more open-minded father figure. It's the next logical step after the father's resignation in Equinox Flower.

Ten (or so) recent reviews

Desistfilm, Wedlock House: An Intercourse, Cat's Cradle, Window Water Baby Moving, Mothlight (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1954, 1959, 1959, 1962) -

The four films by Stan Brakhage that are part of the By Brakhage Criterion set that precede Dog Star Man.

Desistfilm - Stan and buddies hanging out, and if at first it feels like a drunken Beat home movie, it starts - via some clever camerawork - to evolve into something slightly more than a first person view of their party. Maybe it doesn't go quite as far as Scorpio Rising and maybe it was never meant to, but it's an influence that makes me think of Kenneth Anger's later film regardless. But it still kinda feels like a home movie with cool shots.

Wedlock House - Stan and Jane moodily lit in kitchen and other rooms, in something I'd call sexually explicit in intent, if not execution. It's not meant merely to arouse though, so maybe not. I guess it more sends out a mood of love and marriage, complete with not too heavy meanings, a lot of light and shadow, some pensive glances, some naughty parts - in short, a quick take on the ups and downs of a young person's marriage.

Cat's Cradle - I can't remember this as much, probably because of the abstraction level. While the previous two are certainly more emotive than plot-driven, this one goes further out. Stan and Jane again, plus two friends. They discuss, they move around the room and the frame. They get intercut with shots of the cat. Sound may also have been an element, though again I'm not drawing it to mind. Not my favorite of the early works.

Window Water Baby Moving - The big famous one - or one of them, anyway. Stan is there to document Jane's experiences (and his own) during the late stages of pregnancy. It gives more measure to her experience and joy though it does not exclude his own happiness and willingness to work through the labor with her. It's a really beautiful thing. I'd say everyone should see this to get a sense of the joy and wonder that's possible with a couple having a child, but I'm sure some people would find that idea in itself polemic.

Mothlight - And abstraction goes to its ultimate point. But even so, there's an intelligence behind the design. If you think of it like a moth, flitting from green grasses to colorful flowers to light and shadow and back, you get a sense of what the film's doing. Drink it in and don't worry about the details like that. And if you choose to view it frame by frame, you'll be treated to some lovely stills. But it really was designed to flow beginning to end and it does. Loverly.

Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) -

And here is the absolute opposite of loverly. Hmmm... what to say about this film? Let me tread carefully here, because I've never seen a film as polarizing as this, ever. I've seen it four times now and I think I'm still not quite getting to the heart of the film. I can read a lot about the politics of fascism as it relates to this film and still not think it's necessarily a good idea to watch it as a cautionary tale. Yet I read the reactions of people who think it's vile, worthless garbage with nothing to say and I know they're wrong, because there is absolutely nothing to titillate or excite a viewer here, and those seeking it out simply as an "extreme" experience are bound to be disappointed by its slow pace, its programmatic stretches of dialogue, etc. There just won't be enough shit-eating, tongue-severing and eye-gouging to satisfy them. But the surface of the film - the dialogue, its relentless cruelty, its invariably serious and somber tone - is so difficult to see past to touch the ideas powering it that some viewers may never get there, which is why I don't know how successful it can be considered on its own terms. Coming from whatever side of how one views the atrocities on screen, you may never see past them to Pasolini's intentions to be able to fairly assess them (the intentions). I feel like my fourth time out I'm just starting to be able to watch the film without getting caught up in its powerful visceral draw - it's tough not to - and experience what he's going for. And is it the critique of fascism that everyone says? Yes, I guess so - it only takes a cursory look at the history of Nazi atrocities to see that this shit was not made up and that the brutality on screen is a mere fraction of a fraction of what actually happened to people in WWII. And its relationship to deSade seems nearly as cursory - I haven't read the novel in question, but its main power seems to lie not in any specific imagery deSade sought out, but in the power of his unbroken imagination to run freely over the page, even while incarcerated with the intent of breaking his spirit. No wonder the surrealists enjoyed his writings so much. But how does it translate to this? While I understand that the novel lent a rough structure to the film, the ideas here are all Pasolini. But where his other films take a gritty and realistic tone, there are moments (however few or far between) of levity and even joy to offset the tone, even when he's playing it downbeat. Here it's all grim pessimism - none of the lightness of Arabian Nights or The Hawks and the Sparrows enters into the proceedings to counter the rape, physical and psychological torture, and ultimately murder that you'll bear witness to. To see the crushing reality of what being on the bad side of a fascist state is - again, these are not extremes Pasolini or deSade dreamed up; maybe in the specifics, but not the generalities - there's no more complete vision that I've ever seen. If you're looking for proof that art can go too far, you're sniffing around the wrong place here - the world can go too far and art can hold up a mirror to see it with. If you're looking for the most challengingly difficult film you'll ever see, this may or may not be it, but you'll be going in to it for all the wrong reasons.

The Whole Wide World (dir. Dan Ireland, 1996) -
Listen, I rent tripe sometimes, I admit it. This has a good reputation and co-stars the very handsome Vincent D'Onofrio - the only reason to watch the film. He's good (and handsome) and still isn't able to unburden this film from the concepts it applies to its secondary story of a small town writer (Robert E. Howard) longing for a more bohemian lifestyle than his tight relationship with his sick mother would permit. So his fantasy worlds are externalized on the soundtrack as he acts them out, talks in concepts that begin in capital letters and has an on-and-off relationship with Novelyne Price (played in typically so-so fashion by Renee Zellwegger) - and this constitutes the main story of the film. The basis of a good film is here, based on Price's own account of the pair's relationship, but the central focus on Price (and thus, Zellweger), the overall inability to follow its most interesting character or make its central character more interesting and its tendency to corny old-fashioned-isms makes it just annoying. All I could think was how much better a film this might have been if it were told from Howard's point of view, without the sound effects, the capital letter ideas, and without Zellweger. I'll say this - it's not your typical rom-com, though it's surely Romantic with a capital R, and I still wish they'd done more with it.


The Fall of the House of Usher (dir. Jean Epstein, 1928) -
Of course I wanted to see what Bunuel did on this, but it's really Jean Epstein's film all the way. Poe's story is shifted around a bit to meet his needs and an incestuous vibe radiates from the film that I don't recall from the story (though it's been forever since I read it). Anyway... the visuals are exceptionally striking here - the grand room with almost no furnishings, the painting that's sometimes portrait, sometimes model, and constantly changing regardless, the unrealistic (and I'd say deliberately so) image of the house in the foggy moor, the long hallway full of blowing curtains and leaves; they all go to engender the same kind of doomy atmosphere that Poe created, even if specifics of plot vary between the two versions. But as an adaptation it's quite good, at once honoring the story and making its own vision known. Poe fans ought to be able to overlook the minor story variances in favor of the major success at capturing the dread and horror that Poe sought so often.


Rio Bravo (dir. Howard Hawks, 1959) -
Spectacularly entertaining - so much so, and so well made that I didn't ever stop to think about politics, which fall into a typical "average folks of town vs. rich land/cattle/whatever baron," or to put it more bluntly, the common American theme of capital power and privilege vs. the underclass, represented here by the aged, the young, and sheriff John Wayne, representing the law. But also, interestingly, by Dean Martin (excellent here) who's a recovering alcoholic (from before that term even had any meaning in the public sphere of consciousness), a strong woman in Angie Dickinson, a woman whose past may be tainted but it's not held against her by any of the characters, and a Mexican who works with the Anglos and pays with his life for the transgression. But the siege on the jail where the thoroughly corrupt baron's utterly lawless brother is being held is terrific - a sustained set piece of rising and falling action that Hawks plays masterfully. And the baron himself is a terrific villain in a long line of bad Western characters who pay lip service to the law when it serves them but have no intention of actually following it if it impedes their progress. The more I see this the more I'm convinced it's a masterwork.


Early Spring (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1956) -

The only Ozu film I've yet seen that keeps the primary conflict within the same generation. No wait, I guess there's A Story of Floating Weeds too, though there you have a significant story of a father trying (and failing) to get to know the son who isn't aware of the his true paternity. Here a husband and wife fall prey to infidelity and it tears them apart - seemingly none too soon since they spent quite a bit of screen time bickering before it happened and they separate quickly, cleanly, and without too much fuss. Then again, putting the fuss on-screen is never Ozu's modus operandi - he's all about having the big moments happen when you're not looking and then watching the aftermath. The wife understandably heads out and the husband begins to build a new life, made none too easy by the fact that his friends pick on him about the office romance he's engaged in and quickly realizes was a fling (and probably a mistake). If there's one thing I didn't like about this otherwise very cold-eyed look at how to move on from what could be a shattering event, it's that the film seems to push toward the individuals of the marriage dealing with their situation, but in the final act the film reverses all the movement it has made in that direction and reunites the couple, presumably having learnt a lesson. Doesn't seem to jibe with the tone of the rest of the film, but I guess it's just as likely to happen as the path they were following. Anyway, another fine film from Ozu, as usual.

He Walked By Night (dir. Alfred L. Werker, 1948) -
A bit stiff for my tastes though two things really stand out as superb - Richard Basehart's performance as the sociopathic thief/killer and the big chase through the sewers at the end. Basehart is marvelous, predating the modern cold-blooded killers of any film I can think of by at least two decades. Maybe if I give it some thought... But still - his disinterest in how his actions affect others is chilling and his calculating methods point a line right to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, to a way less glamorized Hannibal Lecter (like Brian Cox's Lecter, not Anthony Hopkins's), etc. There's no big flashy neon arrow pointing at him to say "Evil!" he's just ruthless in his pursuit of what he wants. And the sewer chase - terrific, and predating the famous Third Man chase by a year. My friend Josh suggests that Jacques Tourneur (or was it Jules Dassin? Sam Fuller maybe?) actually shot those scenes, and I'd buy that for sure - the visual flair of the climactic ending goes against the flat, documentary-type style of much of the police procedural that leads up to it. Anyway, an interesting and grim bit of noir with a couple touches that set it apart. I guess in that it's like most noirs that have a couple great ideas and then a lot of shadowy shots of L.A. to fill in the requisite moodiness. No sleazy private dick here though, and no femme fatale. Just a chilling sociopath who uses the sewers.

The Earrings of Madame de... (dir. Max Ophuls, 1953) -

The title's not being coy, I swear. OK, maybe it is - a touch of playfulness in a film that starts out light and breezy and slowly piles on complicated social issues until it turns tragic. Madame de... and Count de... seem happily married. They go to all the balls, know all the right people, and hardly speak to each other from their separate bedrooms. Madame de... shops to fulfill herself and flirts mercilessly and meaninglessly at the balls they attend. Count de... keeps a mistress in good standing. Madame de... runs up some debts - or claims to, anyway - and sells off the elaborate diamond earrings that her husband gave her on their wedding day and thus sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the aforementioned tragedy - the earrings themselves don't really lead to them, but they accompany the events. The earrings go from her to jeweler to her husband to his mistress to a lovestruck observer back to Madame de... and to her husband and on and on, each time accumulating a new dimension of meaning as they change hands, signifying something different each round for both giver and receiver. Like Rules of the Game the whole thing seems affected at first and slowly turns into something far greater by the end of the film as more and more connections are made, as the spare dialogue acquires depth relating to previous actions. Am I circling around the same ideas too much here? The film does something similar, but I hate to give away one of the primary pleasures of it, which is watching just how it increases the density of meaning, of emotion as it goes on, and I'd hate to rob anyone of seeing it in action. The camerawork and lighting I have to assume you've already heard about. They're spectacular, equal in fluidity and daring to Welles, to Kalatozov, to anything I've ever seen. Script, acting - all superb, and watching the three central characters play their public roles only to slowly have them dissolve as their private passions overtake their need for appearances is just one more of the joys of this film. I get why people call this one of the greatest (or THE greatest) films of all time and though I'm not yet ready to make that kind of statement (and also not big on those types of hierarchal rankings anyway), I would be more than willing to hear out someone who made such a claim.

Control (dir. Anton Corbjin, 2007) -

More marital infidelity - this time not from a bored couple who maybe ought to think about parting anyway, but from a couple that formed way too young, before they knew what they were doing. I didn't love the film, but I liked it. It hews very closely to the Joy Division/Ian Curtis story and leans heavily on making out Deborah to be a majorly sympathetic character (no surprise since it's taken from her (auto)biography of Ian Curtis and she helped fund the film). And therein lies my main problem. It's rendered nicely in B&W by photographer/video guy Anton Corbijn, but sorta like the first Harry Potter movie he had no room to maneuver with the story, seeing as its primary author was on hand to make sure that the truth (as she saw it) got told. As much license as he got was to also add in relationship details from Annik Honoré's point of view (she claims, for example, that she and Ian never slept together, which may or may not have been true - he did seem like a dedicated guy). And really I doubt Corbijn had much interest in going outside the box, so to speak. He's such a geek for iconic music imagery that he wants to put up on screen the legend that people know, not to challenge anyone's idea of Ian Curtis the person or Joy Division the band (in which case he might not have gotten cooperation or funding from Mrs. Curtis - or anything but a lawsuit from her, for that matter). Whatever - the story that's told is all facts - again, as the authors saw them - banged into a workable screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh and then brought to life by the actors, which is where the film is at its best. Even if we've seen this troubled artist story before, we haven't seen Sam Riley telling it, and he really lives in this character for the duration of the film, especially when he and his film band-mates are given the task of performing Joy Division's material in a better-sounding setting than any JD bootleg you'll be able to lay your hands on. That's good shit. Samantha Morton is also great as Deborah and the rest of the cast each hits their part fine, though nobody else is required to give as much to their role as either of these two. It's pretty good overall, but nothing here breaks up and out of the hero worship that Corbijn is engaged in to make this film a great one.

Kiss Me, Stupid (dir. Billy Wilder, 1964) -
And still more infidelity on parade, this time offered up cheerfully and with a good ultimate purpose - wife and husband both fulfill a fantasy and strengthen their marriage by sleeping with other people. How's that for a charming family comedy? This film gets away with murder, metaphorically speaking. Not only do husband and wife sleep with others and have their marriage not just intact but improved by the experience, on the way from point A to point B we get: tons of very physical humor that borders on the outright sexually provocative (gasp!); even more verbal humor and double entendres that do the same; a known prostitute as our main heroine and a wife who's happy to trade places with her (temporarily of course, but still...); Dean Martin playing a downright unflattering caricature of himself as a sex maniac unable to go one night "without it." And there's surely more I'm forgetting. Oh, like the insanely jealous husband assaulting the 14-year old piano student he's supposed to be teaching and accusing the kid of sleeping with his wife. I mean, this really pushes some heavy buttons for its time. My friend suggested that this film may single-handedly have been responsible for our modern rating system and though I don't think this was tit-for-tat responsible for giving us the "R," it'd be hard to argue that between the image of Dean Martin drinking out of Kim Novak's shoe and then feeling her up and the bawdy dialogue throughout that it provided some heavy ammunition for those who'd push for a more child-restricted theater environment. It's funny, yes, but it a really sly and tense way. Ray Walston's performance is a little on the creepy side and I'm sure it's 100% intentional from Wilder. Script is fantastic - good plotting and great dialogue throughout. Billy Wilder is sure to be someone I obsess about soon (though not like Walston's character, I hope).

Ten recent reviews

The Old Dark House (dir. James Whale, 1932) -

James Whale finds a nice balance of creepy and comic here, with breezy dialogue and jovial mood underscoring a nice, eerie performance by Lon Chaney. Problem for me is that it's too breezy - does it want to be a scary "old dark house" movie or an eccentric comedy of errors? Whale does find the line to keep it on so that it remains both right up until the disturbing final movement. Still... a movie called The Old Dark House really does deserve to feature more menace than simply odd behavior until its final act if you ask me, and I was left a little wanting by this, breezy script, good performances and all. My problem, not his.

Chop Shop (dir. Ramin Bahrani, 2007) -

Almost documentary in its shooting style and thematic content, but instead it's another film along the lines of Los Olvidados or Pixote about kids living a tough, gritty life on the streets. What it shares with them is an unflinching view at some hard decisions these kids have to make merely to survive, but where it differs is the sense of hope in the film, more or less non-existent in the earlier films and more in common in that with City of God, for example. Violence is all but absent from the picture, though it's still a dramatic enough story that the tension that could lead to it is always hovering around the edges of the frame. Remarkable performances from Alejandro Polanco and Isamar Gonzales as the brother and sister with naive aspirations to get out of their situation. I'll leave the rest up to you to see. It's pretty damn brilliant though.

Top Hat (dir. Mark Sandrich, 1935) -

An absolute delight, beginning to end. Songs don't stop the movie cold to have people suddenly start a number, they actually grow out of the dialogue, and having Astaire play a dancer is a great stroke, gives him a good reason to be dancing whenever he feels like it. And the songs are excellent, dancing is excellent - as might be expected. What is not necessarily expected is that the script and the acting - comedic acting, I mean - are also excellent. They're not just funny for a musical, they're just funny, period. Great plot movement around misunderstandings and bad communication - a comic staple - and sharp, snappy dialogue help make it. My only regret is that most accounts place this at the top of the Rogers/Astaire pile, so it feels like I have nowhere to go but down. Except for maybe the highly regarded Swing Time.

Jarhead (dir. Sam Mendes, 2005) -

You can have your war film checklist handy when watching this as they tick off references to Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, to MASH - it's basically an amalgam of a lot of war films. I wonder how much of Anthony Swofford's memories and detail of the film were influenced by his familiarity with those films. Or maybe the screenwriter adapted his writing as he'd seen in other films. Or maybe director Sam Mendes - not my favorite guy in Hollywood, I have to say - decided that the visual and dialogue references would help bring this otherwise very odd "war" film home to its audiences more readily. I don't know, but they were distracting for me. The crux of the film is about the mental and emotional pressures these kids in an elite group of snipers are put under in a war where the skill is more or less obsolete. Build the tension, go through the basic army training, but then have these guys mostly sit around with nothing to do except masturbate or talk about masturbating and basically be on alert to pop off at a moment's notice - but that moment never comes. It's an interesting idea for a film that I don't feel is explored fully in the film which relies too hard, as noted, on now-cliched scenes of training, on banal dialogue, on the skill of its actors to convey the sense of tension that script and direction only momentarily give up. I guess it provides a convincing enough picture, but I felt like it was lacking the full depth of psychological drama that the subject material deserved.

Withnail & I (dir. Bruce Robinson, 1987) -

The script is a perfect autobiographical labor of love from writer/director Bruce Robinson - maybe too perfect. Felt like I had to listen intently for every single perfectly crafted word. The movie's funny as hell - touching, even - but it requires some dedication from the viewer to catch everything. Not in the plot, of course, which involves a lot of drinking, but in the dialogue, which fires out quip after quip that's worth quoting - no surprise that the film has quote-happy cult following like This Is Spinal Tap or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And of course that's what makes a cult film, the sort of perfect little lines that you want to come back to again and again. Which I'm sure I will, since like any really great cult comedy it's also well made and totally serious in its intention to make you laugh. It's also a film I ended up reflecting on a lot while reading a William Kotzwinkle book a friend loaned me - The Fan Man - featuring another sort of comic-pathetic wastoid as our "hero." I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I need to watch again with sound up louder and distractions (like a summer fan, or someone snoring in the room) at an absolute minimum.

A Story of Floating Weeds (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1934) -

Silent-era Ozu in which - guess what - two generations of a family have their differences. But here things are a bit different indeed. Instead of the typical Ozu nuclear family falling apart, these floating weeds are a traveling acting troupe, the leader of which has been to the rural town setting of the film nearly 20 years before and left a local woman with a surprise. Now he's rolling through with his troupe, suffering financial hardships and visiting (and accepting patronage from) the woman he didn't marry because his lifestyle could neither be bound to a rural town nor support a wife. He's also visiting and offering anonymous support to the young man who doesn't know who his father is, or rather, has been raised to believe that his father died years ago. It all makes for a familial drama with situations and dialogue so universal, or at least understandable, that the film could've been made yesterday, not the 74 years ago (!) that it actually was made. I feel almost embarrassed gushing yet again over the stunning compositions and absolutely true-to-life drama as I have with a half-dozen other Ozus in the last few months, but the guy really was a genius. Great stuff, again.

Why Does Herr R Run Amok? (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970) -

One of the best early Fassbinders, maybe the best. It's funny in a way because instead of signifying via his character's behavior or dialogue that Herr R. is living a boring life, he shows you just how boring it is, in more or less real time. Trite dialogue about nothing and stretched out (though realistically rendered) scenes show Raab at work, sitting quietly and passively at a gathering of relatives, drunk and foolish at a company holiday party - the mundanity of his life is almost too much to handle at times. And then, abruptly and with no warning signs whatsoever, he runs amok, causing you to reflect on what's happened, to search your mind for triggers, for conflicts that could've provoked the brutal ending of the film. And the answers are not forthcoming - there's no easy answer here of "embarrassing situation with the boss caused this" or "friction with the wife caused this" or anything so readily pat to explain things. I loved it, and the pain and boredom of watching the non-events leading up to the ending is all part of the package, albeit not even remotely entertaining or infused with the melodramatic Sirkian or overtly Brechtian overtones of much of Fassbinder's catalog.

Accattone (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961) -

Pasolini's debut feature film is a remarkably assured outing outlining pretty much everything he was to embark on in his later filmmaking career. I watched this in anticipation of the re-release of Salo and I have to say that while he developed as a filmmaker, I haven't seen a better film from him than this one, in which he follows the life of a self-assured and proud pimp (the title character), taken only halfway seriously by the other pimps and criminals he consorts with and taken not at all seriously by his main whore. It's also quite brutal and grim in a sort of neo-realistic way; a nasty beating is delivered to a naive prostitute, Accattone seemingly thinks nothing of stealing a gold necklace from a child, of unceremoniously dumping one whore when she refuses to give him respect. It's a tragedy in the classical sense, not surprising given his affinity for classical literature and his constant affinity for people of the lower class and the outsider world of criminals. A great debut signaling a great career.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1973) -

Elegaic and enjoyable Peckinpah about the dying breed of "real men" in the Old West - men who value honor and a quick gun over just about anything else, including the law, which is seemingly only an arbitrary divider between men of principle. Garrett and Billy are both clinging to a dying way of life, most famously when Kris Kristofferson (as Billy) responds to Garrett's observation that times are changing with "Times maybe. Not me." A perfect summation in four words of what Peckinpah is all about. This film doesn't break any new ground for Sam, but it'll please anyone who's a fan, and perhaps also interest those who aren't.

Brand Upon the Brain! (dir. Guy Maddin, 2006) -

A weird one. I don't know why I suddenly got excited to watch this, but I did and was glad to have attended to it, even if I didn't love it. A heavy David Lynch influence in addition to the obvious love (and understanding) of silent film conventions plus Guy Maddin's own strange blend of sexuality, familial issues, and gender ambiguity all add up to an intriguing story that like a lot of avant-garde art may live more readily in the artist's head than on the screen (or whatever medium). That Maddin does make it intriguing is an accomplishment worth seeing. I don't know how this stacks up with the rest of his catalog, but I'm interested enough to find out.

Woody goes on vacation to see a famous opera singer, who's contemplating an abortion, in a French Mediterranean village... or just four recent views

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Woody Allen | USA/Spain | 2008 | 97min
Getting out of Manhattan has done Woody a whole world of good. Matchpoint, set across the pond in a very unmerry old England, was a surprisingly focused, dismal work reaffirming that Allen still had his chops. His latest film, set in the eternally spry, golden hue of Barcelona, is even more of a cobweb-clearing sweep of the mausoleum Woody was rapidly sealing himself in. It’s amazing what a simple change of scenery can do.

This is precisely what Vicky Cristina Barcelona is all about: two credulous American girls, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlet Johannson), taking a holiday abroad in hopes of finding something, anything that can inspire them. What finds them is a sultry Catalan painter, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), and his tempestuous ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), who fascinate and repulse our heroines along with us as an audience. They embody everything our American culture is not and will never be, with their gutturally instinctive, art-loving bohemian way of life, free of the moral hang-ups that paralyze Allen’s characters. It’s impossible not to fall in love with Bardem and Cruz like Vicky and Cristina do, especially when situated in a Woody Allen movie. They’re everything his characters ever wanted to be, yet couldn’t due to a lack of courage. Simply put, the screen presence of Spain’s two most current and yes, talented, actors is what makes Vicky Cristina Barcelona so damn good.


But don’t get me wrong. Everything that makes a Woody Allen movie a Woody Allen movie is still here, namely pretentious socialites nowhere near the worth of their own useless knowledge, who do the exact opposite of their self-assured and frequently proclaimed morale (this goes for our Spaniards, too). And of course, Allen’s own signature neuroses still serve as the backbone of the story. Where his recent films depart (the murder mystery/comedy Scoop and the somber Cassandra’s Dream included) is with their inclusion of the Foreigner in the Allen canon, from a decidedly American viewpoint that proves both insightful and stereotypical in that double-edged sword sorta way so characteristic of Allen’s films. With Vicky Cristina Barcelona, one gets the sense Woody finally let out a sigh and took a European vacation, yet couldn’t keep from making a movie in between his seaside piña coladas. This filmgoer hopes he has every intention of extending his holiday. 4/5

Diva
Jean-Jacques Beineix | France | 1981 | 117min
Think of this film as the cusp to the thematic concerns of Neil Jordan and Luc Besson, but that has its style rooted more firmly in classic French crime cinema. Sparse, economical and dotted with abstract moments sometimes resembling the simplicity of Jean-Pierre Melville, Diva is oddly focused on the ethical implications of audio recordings and their significance as a record of the past. The plot is derived from the chase that ensues once Jules (Frédéric Andréi) illegally records the performance of opera singer Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez) and then has this unauthorized tape confused for the confessional tape of a prostitute, who planted hers into Jules’s moped satchel before being killed. Now Jules is being pursued for both recordings by the corrupt police officer in charge of the prostitution ring and Taiwanese gangsters seeking the only existing LP of Cynthia Hawkins.

In a brief interview on the DVD, Beineix (perhaps the real diva here, at one point claiming to his producers he invented the crane used in crane shots) goes great lengths in pointing out how his first film broke new ground, had a long theatrical run, is timeless, etc etc. My feelings about Diva, however, remain somewhat lukewarm. The biggest problem with the film is its villains, both the thugs of the prostitution ring and the Taiwanese gangsters. They are scarcely menacing and hardly convincing, which of course does not make me worry too much about the well being of our heroes. Their criminal acts and the innocent people implicated in their attempted cover-up matter little when compared to the much more interesting, chaste love between Jules and the diva.


The redeeming qualities of Diva lie in the questions it raises about artistic integrity. An artist as distinctive as Cynthia Hawkins will have to inevitably compromise her pride and record her voice, as her manager points out, in an effort to beat the gangsters to the punch and to capitalize on the illegal LP. The strength of her voice will not live forever, but a recording of it will. The idea of an opera diva’s first consumable album holding as much power as a prostitute’s exposé proves more exciting than the actual hubbub stirred up to obtain each track. Within the context of a mediocre French thriller, here is where Beineix can call Diva groundbreaking and where I find the film to be worth watching. 3/5

Tokyo Twilight
Yasujiro Ozu | Japan | 1957 | 140min
Boy, they weren’t kidding when they called this Ozu’s ‘darkest hour.’ Tokyo Twilight is the story of two sisters, Takako (Setsuko Hara), who is running from her unwanted child’s useless father, and Akiko (Ineko Arima), who is dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. They discover the mother their father had always told them was long dead is in fact alive and well, still running the brothel she has tended to her entire life. After aborting her pregnancy and confronting her estranged mother, Akiko kills herself and Takako puts all blame for their troubled lives on their mother before returning home to an uncertain future. Pretty grim stuff, especially for Ozu, and it makes the illicit office romance central to his last film, Early Spring, look like a picnic in the park. Yet as one familiar with Ozu’s work would expect, these topics are executed as subtly as possible. In Tokyo Twilight, his direction is particularly impressive when handling the scene involving Akiko’s abortion. The ‘A’ word is never uttered once between Akiko and the surgeon who presumably will perform the procedure, and Ozu is clever to weigh the scene with enough uncertainty on Akiko’s behalf so as to make her decision unknown until several shots later (insert a succession of Ozu’s signature nature stills to convey change/transcendence), upon which Akiko seems to regret her decision and cries all alone in her bedroom.

Ozu is all about the ebb and flow of familial relations, but in Tokyo Twilight, this ebb and flow feels a little disrupted. So far through my trek of Ozu’s work, I have not yet seen more uninhibited displays of anger and sadness, nor have I encountered such a dysfunctional family in any film previous. Perhaps not surprisingly, these anomalies feel somewhat contrived and a tad melodramatic, especially in comparison to his work as a whole. Ozu is better when focused upon concepts, such as generational conflict, instead of the hard-knock tribulations of two sisters and their withdrawn parents. Tokyo Twilight is not a bad film by any means, but is missing a certain Ozu calm that awakens an introverted conversation with myself about my life and my family.

Next up, it’s Ozu in color. 3/5

La Pointe Courte
Agnès Varda | France | 1956 | 80min
La Pointe Courte has more in common with the intellectual calisthenics required by the likes of her fellow Rive Gauche filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, than it does with, say, the leisurely bicycle jaunts of the other New Wave group, including Truffaut and sometimes Godard. Her second film, Cleo from 5 to 7, has more in common with the latter camp, but her first effort belongs entirely to the former. I’ve been anticipating this film ever since Bruce Kawin, one of my film history instructors at CU, pointed out it is the true first film of the French New Wave. Hmmm. Even before The 400 Blows? Or even Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows? Kawin and other scholars may be right about Varda’s place in history, but La Pointe Courte is nowhere near as coherent and engaging as other early New Wave(esque) films. To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what Varda was going for after finishing the film and was left wanting an explanation. An explanation, thankfully, Criterion DVD extras are always willing to provide.

After watching La Pointe Courte, I discovered Varda’s intention was to mimic the narrative structure of William Faulkner’s long overlooked Wild Palms. That novel has two totally unrelated stories told side by side; one is a love story, taking place in 1938 and the other is about the ordeal of a prisoner in 1927. The two stories only physical link is a prison in Mississippi. La Pointe-Courte, a small Mediterranean village on the coast of France, is the physical setting of the two unrelated stories being told in Varda’s film; one is a love story and the other is about the political ordeal of the village fishermen.

I quickly lost interest in the love story portion of the film; the couple’s pseudo-intellectual voiceover musings on the nature of their affection and relationship comes across as phony, pompous and irrelevant. Their boring story never sits well with vignettes of a destitute village and its crumbling economy threatened by the disintegration of its sole export. Perhaps it’s not supposed to. Like Faulkner’s novel, no aesthetic or narrative device is attempted by Varda to link her stories, literally cutting from one to the other in a completely arbitrary way. The result is frustrating and dull. What might have worked in the realm of literature does not necessarily translate well to the realm of cinema. Sure, I can see why this technique blew everyone’s hats off in 1956 and why La Pointe Courte is considered the precursor to the French New Wave; it is on many levels something fresh and entirely different. Yet despite the boldness of its narrative structure and moments of amazingly journalistic cinematography reminiscent of neorealism, it lacks any real emotion (see photo below). 2/5

Ten recent reviews

Chichi Ariki (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1942)

A father and son (mother deceased from before the movie starts) move around over a period of 20 years, with father trying to make a good life for his son but limiting their personal relationship in the process by making choices that keep them apart and unable to form familial bonds. It's really that simple, but as always with Ozu the beauty is in the details - the stunning framing and cinematography choices, the superb acting (Chishu Ryu especially, but also Shûji Sano as the older son), the dialogue that cuts right through the melodrama that drenches 98% of films and gets to the heart of human interaction. Really a beautiful thing by someone I'm starting to think may end up as my all-time favorite director. Well, top 3 anyway.

Hulk (dir. Ang Lee, 2003)

Another Ang Lee exploration of a love that's not just unrequited, but can never happen. He's all about tragic romance like that. But also like most Lee films, there's a conflict between parents and children - a disconnect really, that keeps them apart, ultimately resulting in conflicts when they're forced by circumstance to confront each other. Do I like it as much as Crouching Tiger? As much as The Ice Storm? Brokeback Mountain? No, not quite, but it's right in there with his basic thematic material and a solidly made film to boot (especially love those very comic-y transitions between scenes contained in comic book frames, better even than Lucas's use of classic adventure serial wipes in Star Wars). Those going in because their favorite catchphrase from their comic book days was "Hulk Smash!" are sure to be disappointed. Those looking for a way for an artist like Ang Lee to insert his ideas into the Marvel Universe will find a lot worth seeing.

The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008)

And speaking of adult adaptations of comic book material... Like Hulk this one also takes comic book situations that can be read as absurd or totally unreal and then invests the intelligence in saying "OK, but what if this really happened to you?" and showing the results on screen. What would a flashy comic villain like the Joker be like in the real world? What happens when people get menaced by costumed villains? - they die. They get shot, blown up, etc. And Nolan, like a lot of people making comic movies these days, wants to know how that would impact on real people in the real world. This may be the best comic book movie yet in terms of placing things in a real-world situation, even while retaining a comic-booky feel - how, for example, could The Joker possibly have planted all the bombs in the hospital? But those questions don't come into play when you're watching because it's not the point of the film - once that does happen, what are the choices people will be forced to make as a consequence? And ultimately that's what the film is about from beginning to end. In the first scene there are fake Batmen all around, trying to thwart a drug deal. It's the first step in suggesting that until average citizens feel empowered to take on crime on their own, there will be a need for vigilante justice like The Batman represents. That's the central thrust of the film and Bruce Wayne's dilemma throughout - can the person whose genesis as Batman in Batman Begins find it in himself to give it up? The movie doesn't really make him answer it - it lets him off the hook, I think - but it's the point of the final scenes that could've been edited out for brevity's sake, but would have disrupted the logic of the central idea running through the film. I think it's the right length myself, and right on the money. For what it's worth, I think the political allegory people are drawing from the film right now doesn't hold a lot of water, except that like any film it reflects its time and thus the idea of terrorist action and public response to it are in the air.

Powaqqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio, 1988)

A little more pointed than its predecessor and much more focused on people rather than spaces, buildings, and whatnot - though not so much that it actually endorses a strict point of view or course of action, mind you. But it's probably the equal of the first film overall. And musically Philip Glass steps it up a notch, warming up a little from the austerity of Koyaanisqatsi. Altogether it's a worthy sequel, if that's even the right word, taking the ideas of the first film and running with them, showing a real warmth and feel for the people it's portraying on screen, never losing touch with the beauty of either the filmmaking or the subjects in front of the camera. A great one.

Time of the Wolf (dir. Michael Haneke, 2003)

Haneke is quickly moving up the ranks of contemporary filmmakers whose work I love. This one's probably his least harsh film that I've seen, despite some very brutal moments (like the startling first scene of the film), mainly because the severity is undercut by the humanism on display here. In a post-apocalyptic world, what kind of society would emerge? In this particular unspecified post-apocalpyse, we first find something almost exactly like our current world - the people with the weapons and the supplies control the fate of everyone around them, until a different group of people with different ideas of how to do things move in. It's pretty basic as a film idea, but pretty powerful in how it plays out. Onward to Code: Unknown.

She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (dir. John Ford, 1949)

My least favorite of the cavalry trilogy. I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with Mr. John Wayne that the film should've ended before its final coda, with him checking his watch and saying he'd been a civilian for two minutes. Much more ambiguous about his future, much more intriguing if you ask me. But it is Hollywood, and wrapping things in bows is the specialty of the studio system, and Ford knew how to navigate the studios to get what he wanted. So the ending could've been less mushy, but overall the film provides a really great look at a man about to retire and what to do with his life after giving up what he's invested decades doing. I don't find the story as compelling as Fort Apache or the interpersonal relations as interesting as Rio Grande, but it's still a fine film in the Ford catalog, well worth seeing.

Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942)

Bette Davis turns in a great performance, yes, but my main memory of the film is how absolutely horrid Gladys Cooper is as her mother (I mean, she's great, not horrid, but the character is horrid). I love the basic trajectory of the Davis character, though the transformation from ugly duckling into Cinderella is awfully quick and complete. But still you're rooting for her, want her to not fall back into old patterns, to fall under her mother's thumb once again. The pivotal scene where she finally stands up to mom is pretty much the best thing here, certainly more affecting for me than the perfunctory romances - one of which is (amusingly) severed with a "thank you" and a handshake, the other more profound but doomed from the start. Anyway, a fine model of a strong woman's drama from the classic Hollywood period.


Once (dir. John Carney, 2006)

I'll say this - it's charming. It's hard not to like these two musicians and hard also not to see that the music they end up making together is so much the focus of this story that hardly anything else matters. Romantic angle is underplayed and good - it's not what makes the film go, though chemistry between the two is necessary to make things work. I'm glad that when they went for the montage of things coming together in the studio I didn't feel like fast-forwarding. A movie about making music that's worth seeing, unlike... well, most of them. Is it great? No, but again, it's charming.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism (dir. Dusan Makavejev, 1971)

Wacko stuff, drawing explicit lines between Freud's sexuality studies and Marx's political studies via Wilhelm Reich, about whom I know nothing aside from the perfunctory "documentary" this film offers in its first portion. But overall, the film seems to be saying (over and over) that the sexual revolution equals a political revolution, which apparently upset Reich's admirers enough to have them denounce the film. Still - interesting viewing if not exactly the revolutionary critique I had hoped, with the recurring thread of the revolutionary rhetoric interspersed with real and simulated sex, Stalin, the pseudo-documentary and other stuff to make sure it's not too linear, too programmatic. The overall effect is exhilarating, but still I found myself looking for a little more cohesion.

Rio Grande (dir. John Ford, 1950)

Ford's final Calvary trilogy film might actually run the deepest, even if I prefer Fort Apache. I love the sharply drawn family relationships here and action is kept pretty minimal in favor of the personal stuff - which I'm also usually in favor of. Ensemble is great yet again, and if more time is spent on manly camaraderie than on heavy plotting, I'm down with it - the film gives a great sense of what it at least could have been like in the situation given. Only a conflict between the son and the father who hadn't seen him in 15 years feels like it's missing from the film to me.