The Long Voyage Home.

Key Films / 12.Feb.12

2012-02-12T19:42:00.004+07:00

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green) / Stanwyck can’t read Nietzsche but she’ll smash a man’s face with a bottle without looking at him (a politician no less!)—it’s too bad, then, that what begins as a crusade against all the men that fucked her over devolves into a somewhat generic tale of capitalist ascendance. Nevertheless, this is easily redeemed by the raciest material, and it’s never less than fun. As a director, Green is as unpretentious as they come; although he almost exclusively applies comic book characterizations his approach is never condescending, and his willingness to match the material rather than try to eclipse it should be more celebrated in “art” obsessed critical circles.

College Coach (William A. Wellman) / It’s clear from the opening scene—the university president stands against Gore, against vulgarity and, quite possibly, against Wellman, and while Wild Bill doesn’t exactly identify with his protagonist (although the ethics are, as in so much of the director’s work, a bit confused), I think he admires his gall. Between ’32 and ’33 Wellman made 12 (!) films—he worked in every genre you can think of and many you can’t (what exactly is Night Nurse?), and while College Coach isn’t one of his best the idea of him tackling a football melodrama is too good to pass on (sorry). John Wayne & Ward Bond show up once in a while and Powell & Talbot are effective as the star players, but this movie belongs to O’Brien & Dvorak, playing Mr. and Mrs. Gore with real intensity. Dvorak’s role is a bit generic—frustrated wives who start sleeping around aren’t exactly rare in American precodes—but she was made for this kind of thing and nails the cadences of the gloriously verbose script better than most of the boys do. Dvorak doesn’t get the best double entendre here (that goes to Talbot: I’d like to stick my finger in her coffee) but she does laps with the ones she's handed, and the only reason O’Brien is able to keep up is that he doesn’t share too many scenes with her.

Ladies They Talk About (Howard Bretherton & William Keighley) / These boys know how to start a movie—first a close-up of Stanwyck smoking a cigarette and then a bank robbery the actress doesn’t quite get away clean from. The romance between her and an insufferable evangelist turns out to be a fake-out, at least for a while; instead the film evolves into one of the first women in prison films, and the wonderful Lillian Roth shows up to help break Stanwyck in. Roth’s musical numbers are great, and although the melodrama eventually resurfaces, the best moments here have little to do with the prison breakout or the romance between Stanwyck & Foster.

The Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh) / Rita was the bombshell but she doesn’t look half as good as Olivia does here—in any other movie de Havilland would have stolen the show, and it’s only because she’s opposite Cagney that she doesn’t decenter the whole production. Walsh had a real talent for moving period settings beyond period settings, turning them into something lived-in and raucous and loud, and although The Strawberry Blonde’s time and place might not be quite as personal as his bowery, its fake realness (or real fakeness) is just as apparent. This is the rare movie that builds every scene upon the ones that came before it, and it’s not until its final moments that what all this had been leading up to really becomes apparent.

The Sunset Limited (Tommy Lee Jones) / Calling Jones a great actor is more than a little redundant, and at 65 he’s producing some of the best work of his career—few can do more with nothing, and even his saddest and most savage performances contain an incredibly generous kernel of humor that lingers alongside the overwhelming sense of desperation so many of his characters embody. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada—Jones’ last feature, and to date his only one released theatrically—was a major achievement, a deeply personal and often hallucinatory action movie whose kaleidoscopic visual flourishes were at least as impressive as Jones’ & Pepper’s thesping. The Sunset Limited, his newest film, is not quite its equal, although its flaws have surprisingly little to do with the supposedly uncinematic qualities of a one-act play, & plenty to do with a house style he has absorbed here. Which is to say that although this is mostly a production of real visual distinction, every HBO close-up looks like a HBO close-up, and he would have done better keeping things at a distance. Calling McCarthy’s play schematic might be a bit like calling The Iceman Cometh bleak, and for all its obvious gestures the thing works, and Jones & Jackson make sure the author’s sense of linguistic cadence and rhythm remains gloriously intact. Jones is spectacular as the suicidal New York professor, and it’s great to see Jackson taking a holiday from his usual Comic Con hackery—for my money, this is the first interesting thing he’s done since Black Snake Moan.

The Three Musketeers (Paul W.S. Anderson) / A small contingency of auteurist critics including Jamie N. Christley and Dave Kehr have suggested that Anderson deserves re-evaluation—I admired his most recent Resident Evil film to an extent, although his often absurd violations of elementary spatial logic took some getting used to. Nevertheless, it was easy to see what his champions admired, and with The Three Musketeers I’m pretty much on-board. This is an opulent, utterly bonkers costume drama that only falters when its action scenes become too derivative, and while characterization and plotting aren’t exactly the director’s strong suits, the same could be said of Wellman or Sternberg. & yes, the story, which somehow ties the war between England and France to flying warships, isn’t likely to sustain interest, but the mise-en-scene more than makes up for it; Anderson has a compositional eye that in 2011 seems positively classical, and the camera glides through the cavernous palace halls beautifully, capturing an outrageously anachronistic and bright and colorful world.

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold) / Despite the extreme physicality of the work, Bronte’s novel exists outside place or time—it’s either wildy violent archetypes or wildly violent enigmas running rampant across an undefined frontier, and that’s something many talented directors have had trouble capturing. There is a great, faithful adaptation of the book yet to be made—for all the claims of unfilmability, it’s easy to imagine a director with his (or her) feet on the ground turning the second half of the novel into a profoundly sad examination of temporal disintegration. Like almost everyone else who has tackled it, Arnold’s film begins and ends with Catherine, but the similarities end there—while most directors foreground Bronte’s larger-than-life romance, elevating the archetypal/enigmatic to the mythic, her concern is with the terrain. It’s easy to compare Arnold’s work to that of Denis or pre-Kevin Ramsay, and helpful to a point, but as filmmaking this is far more exploratory—while The Intruder and Morvern Callar come across like deeply rigorous works both conceived of & executed with an unnerving sense of precision, there’s something far more sloppy and spontaneous about this film, and I suspect that long passages of it were discovered in the editing room. There’s no question it’s going to be divisive—I never would have thought I’d get behind a film in which Heathcliff yells fuck all you cunts—but it strikes me as a major work by a major director, and one whose supposed indulgences and excesses have far more in common with Bronte's savage prose than the stateliness of many of the canonized adaptations.

Image of the the Day / 10.Feb.12

2012-02-10T19:37:00.000+07:00

Kay Francis & Kenneth Thomson & Gregg Toland in William Dieterle's Man Wanted

Image of the Day / 9.Feb.12

2012-02-09T11:23:00.005+07:00

From Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights.

I love everything about this movie.

Key Films / 5.Feb.12

2012-02-05T19:15:00.002+07:00

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg) / Auteurist cinema or not, if your movie consists of four people sitting around talking your actors better know what they are doing, and while Fassbender and Mortensen and Cassel do excellent, often witty work, Knightley drags down every scene she’s in (which is to say, most of them). I’ll resist the urge to quote the wonderful Self-Styled Siren too extensively here, but I completely agree when she writes that “none of [Knightley’s] elaborate gestures suggest mental illness; instead they suggest distractions born of a superficial performance.” It's not that the actress is doing work that suffers in contrast with the actors she’s paired with—this is an unambiguously bad performance, and her inability to get a handle on a Russian accent or her “hysteria” unfortunately defines what is the director’s biggest misstep since at least eXistenZ. Nevertheless, this is too intriguing to be a failure, and although Hampton’s script is a bit obvious, Fassbender and Mortensen give the best exchanges between Jung and Freud an extraordinary sense of muted tension that I hope Cronenberg continues to develop and explore.

Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown) / Brown’s actors often seem to be in different movies and that’s sometimes the case here, but he’s a wonderful employer of photographers and he knows how to get the camera to swing across banquet tables and between characters as they move across the dance floor. I always like these middlebrow MGM costume dramas more than I’m “supposed” to, and the best moments here suggest a very special movie—the major set-piece, in which all the people we do and don’t know dance the mazurka, is a thing of beauty, and the way the actors and actresses weave in and out of the frame is remarkable, subtly playing with the way in which decorum both suppresses embarrassing emotions and provokes them. Unfortunately it only occurs a quarter of the way through, and the central romance between Garbo and March never moves beyond play-acting. Still, it’s fun and glamorous and very hard to turn away from.

Dodsworth (William Wyler) / Wyler had a tendency to overthink his set-ups, to work out every technical particular of a shot or sequence without considering how it fit into his film as a whole. If I generally prefer his comedies (The Good Fairy, Roman Holiday), it’s because they required something improvisatory that moved beyond the mechanical (also, Margaret Sullavan and Audrey Hepburn don’t hurt). This is pretty damn good though, and here Wyler employs a direct, likeably stagey style that quite shockingly approaches the workmanlike. Walter Huston, in a must-see performance, plays Dodsworth, an American businessman who decides to retire with his wife (Ruth Chatterton, quite good in a deeply unsympathetic role) in Europe. Chatterton becomes infatuated with a group of Parisian wannabe aristocrats and Huston goes back to America, deeply embarrassed by his wife’s behavior and his own “hickness.” What elevates this, beyond the great lead performance, is an extremely well-written script that doesn’t shy away from what might be called the facts of life; it’s certainly one of the more “realistic” (hate that word) depictions of marriage in an American film of its time.

The Mayor of Hell (Archie Mayo) / Wellman’s wild boy of the road punches a shopkeeper in the face, knocking him through a glass display case and perhaps killing him—Mayo’s camera glides through walls, and after spending time on the city streets and in a courtroom ends up mapping out the grounds of a reform school run by Dudley Digges, brandishing a whip and lining the compound with barbed wire. This is absurd liberal fantasy elevated by Cagney’s performance and a rushed, off-the-cuff sense of visual expression that even in its swoops remains startlingly direct, and Mayo avoids easy sentimentality by emphasizing that even in the movies kids can’t always be cute. Patsy is one of Cagney’s weirdest gangsters, a hood who helps out kids because he thinks their nurse is pretty, and the script makes it clear that just because he’s running a reform school doesn’t mean he’s reformed—or any less willing to ventilate the gut of an underworld rival. It's got a great finale too.

Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle) / Shifting between Selznickian kitsch and expressionist lyricism with alarming rapidity, this is nevertheless one of the quintessential New York movies, and although the central ghost story is fairly compelling, it’s often the on-location photography that excites. Joseph Cotten plays a starving artist who is inspired by (and paints) a girl that appears five years older every time he sees her. A probable inspiration for Jonathan Glazer’s great Birth, the story is frequently undercut by the comically pretentious dialogue and narration, but every time the film is about to collapse Deiterle pulls another photographic trick out of his bag, and I’d be lying if I said I didn't have a thing for these insane melodramas that remain unaware of their own delirium. And as good as bits and pieces of the film are, nothing prepares one for the impressionistic, color-tinted finale, a mini-masterpiece of action filmmaking that flirts with and probably becomes an abstract celebration of light and color.

Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor) / Cukor seems to be collecting elements from various American pictures of the time (cockney hustlers, Parisian thieves, Garboish enigmas, womanizing painters) only to deny them a conventional narrative through line, instead producing something clunky and hilarious and wise that demands that the audience view all these private humiliations and tragedies (and there are tragedies) as things building toward a deeply romantic sense of resolution. As such, it recalls (and, I think, equals) the best of Renoir more than it does “classical” “Hollywood” “cinema,” and Hepburn’s androgyny only underlines the degree to which Cukor’s films (as well as Renoir’s) remain centered around performance. & the director isn’t about to declare that this isn't a horrible place, that old fat men don’t jump off cliffs for young girls that don’t give a shit about them or that the world isn’t for the pigs, as Grant memorably puts it at one point. But, again, these are building blocks, and the musical the film inexplicably becomes thirty minutes in summarizes better than I ever could the potential sense of transformation that's suggested here.

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) / As was the case with Shotgun Stories, Nichols occasionally indulges in the more unfortunate tendencies of today's neo-westerns and American genre films, and although there aren’t as many wailing violins or pretty (and pretty meaningless) landscape shots as there are in The Proposition or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, there’s still too damn many, and they don’t add a thing to the film. Still, Nichols is a more interesting filmmaker than Hillcoat or Dominik, and his willingness to treat economic realities as realities, as well as the intelligent, unfussy way in which he tends to frame his actors, is something that should be celebrated. And while Shannon’s “crazy” scenes are a bit more generic than the ones in Bug or My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and although his whole “there’s a storm coming” bit at the community dinner struck me as kinda unnecessary, his performance does get at something uncanny, and as a portrait of mental illness (and, more importantly, of those that have to deal with the mentally ill) this has a lot more to say, and a lot more worth saying, than Melancholia.

The Tall Target (Anthony Mann) / Kiss Me Deadly’s opening titles four years early and, I mean, did MGM really put this out? Mann had a sophisticated set of thematic concerns but he wasn’t enslaved to them in the way that a Ray or a Hawks was, and he could bang out a killer suspense flick when asked. The period setting may be in some sense negotiating the difference between the noirs Mann had been making and the westerns he was about to—this was the director’s only collaboration with Vogel and their train is a deeply mysterious place, splintered apart by deep shadows and filled with corridors that seem to indefinitely expand outwards. Their camera is often surprisingly mobile, and crawling behind and alongside and in front of the actors it sometimes recalls the more flamboyant work of Ophuls and Scorsese. And while the plot itself couldn't be simpler--the ironically named John Kennedy (a very effective Dick Powell) must stop a network of assassins aboard a train from killing Abraham Lincoln--the atmosphere of dread conjured up by Mann transforms this into something as intense in its own way as the most vicious passages of The Man from Laramie or Man of the West.

Key Films / 29.Jan.12

2012-01-29T16:00:00.001+07:00

Barbary Coast (Howard Hawks) / A deliciously amoral (and un-Hawksian) western set in San Francisco, and although I’d be lying if I said I prefer it to Scorsese’s East Coast update, there’s no question that Edward G. Robinson’s flamboyant creation is the precursor to both Day-Lewis’ Bill the Butcher and McShane’s Al Swearengen. The fatalism and fog are borrowed from Sternberg but the rambunctiousness is all Hawks, and while the saloon can only be a refuge from conventional sentimentality and romance for so long it’s great while it lasts. In other words, things go well so long as McCrea isn’t around, and even once he shows up Robinson’s presence continues to excite; his shrug of a kiss-off is inspired—a knowing articulation of the feeling that he’d rather be hung than around a girl that cares for him less than he does for her.

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer) / Lugosi is remembered more as an icon than an actor today and his descent into grade Z cheapies certainly didn’t help his reputation, but there was a ferociousness to his best performances that’s inimitable. I have returned he announces to Karloff, and the primitive dignity of the part is an ideal match for the actor. The “protagonists” here are vanilla American honeymooners that become pawns in the battle between these two Universal giants, and although the plot is too convoluted to summarize it involves Satanism, incest and wars remembered. There’s an romantic obsession with history here that is very Poe, and Lugosi’s and Karloff’s inability to forget finally finds physical manifestation in the sadistic peeling of flesh, as if it is only through a shedding of one’s skin (& death, of course) that they can work towards a sense of rebirth.

Caught (Max Ophuls) / Not exactly Letter from an Unknown Woman or The Reckless Moment, and while Ophuls gets some great actors and a script built around one of his key themes, it’s easy to see the film this could have been and isn’t. There’s a very American directness to all the talk of class and image that doesn’t really suit the master, and while he attempts to distract from the (perhaps embarrassing) bluntness of the dialogue by whipping the camera about, eventually he can’t. There's also something rather horrific about the denouement, and the perfunctory, if not celebratory way in which the death of a baby is treated. Still, any film with both Mason and Ryan is a film of considerable merit, and Ryan was rarely more deranged, giving a candid performance of uncanny neurotic intensity.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher) / God keeps reminding me I’m lucky to be alive. My inability to satisfactorily articulate how I felt about David Fincher in a recent discussion with Andrew Gilbert over at his blog Habitué caused me to revisit this, which I hadn’t seen since its theatrical release back in 2008. And I’m not sure what to talk about—maybe it’s all the Oliveira and Ophuls I’ve been watching (or Lazybones), but as an examination of aging this cuts straight to the bone. There are a lot of things I’d like to say here that I know I shouldn’t (Kent Jones has compared it to the best work of Welles & Ford & the Archers, and that’s dead-on), but at the risk of courting absurdity, I suspect it’s one of the great films of the American cinema, or whatever. And while I don’t think I’m capable of writing too much on the film yet, I’m going to try and produce a longer piece on it in the near-future—especially since it’s so tied to the Ford films I’ve been discussing at Wonders in the Dark.

Destiny (Fritz Lang) / Arriving the same year as Sjostrom’s carriage, this was the director’s first mega-hit, and although it’s often said to be inspired by one of his dreams, Intolerance is the more likely source (the sub-title “love’s struggle through the ages” fits it just as well as the Griffith). There’s some great imagery here, although the further Lang travels from his German town the shakier things tend to get—ultimately I wish he had found a way to avoid the three exotic subplots and focus solely on the relationship between the grieving woman and Death, but it’s reasonably entertaining on its own terms.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher) / Rudin’s comments regarding Fincher suggests he got the movie he was looking for—nevertheless, it’s easy to see in moments the thriller the studios may have expected, and one set-piece, in which the director cross-cuts between Daniel Craig wandering through a house and Rooney Mara searching a library, is more than worthy of Hitchcock. But Fincher doesn’t want to be Hitchcock—his films are long and digressive and, more often than not, very sad, and though this moves quicker than Zodiac or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I’m not sure it’s their equal. The director is either disinterested in sidestepping the script’s most lurid moments or doesn’t know how to, and the rape scene, while defensible, doesn’t really work—Fincher cuts away when the door first closes, and he shouldn’t have looked back. The first of the film’s climaxes is a bit over-the-top as well, although the visual parallels with Stuart Rosenberg’s fine The Drowning Pool are intriguing (is it possible that Willis, rather than Pakula, is Fincher’s biggest influence?). & the final scene is an absolute knockout, introducing with the dignified eloquence that informed the best moments of The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Fincher’s key motif—the sense of irretrievable and incomprehensible loss that accompanies the passing of time.

Inquietude (Manoel de Oliveira) / Or “Anxiety,” it’s far uglier English title. Oliveira stages filicide as a comedy complete with Tashlinesque fast-motion only to reveal it as a play, a tip of the hat in itself to Renoir, if not Resnais (whose Melo the film most obviously recalls). And although the story couldn’t be simpler—two men become obsessed with a prostitute (Leonor Silveira, of course)—Oliveira likes to manipulate what we’re seeing, so that the first forty minutes unfold uninterrupted before the curtain is lifted. The theatrical tradition that is so often alluded to, then, is also supposed to move the director’s work beyond Chaplin or Ford or whoever—instead we’re meant to reckon with the film as something not only belonging to “cinema” but to theater and literature and philosophy. And whenever Silveira is framed, whether it’s by a window or a canvas behind her, some long forgotten painting emerges, and the actress’ strange outside-of-time beauty once again is foregrounded, only adding to the sense that this belongs to a rich, inclusive tradition.

The Kidnapping (Dimitri Kirsanoff) / Sibirskaia had eyes you couldn't forget and here again she plays the wounded innocent, looking on in agony as her man falls in love with a foreign woman he's kidnapped. The range war plot is straight out of a Republic western except this takes place on the border of France and Germany, and Kirsanoff similarly straddles the line between the aesthetics of silent and talking pictures impressively, staging much of this with a visionary, ecstatic sensibility that recalls Dovzhenko (although it could just as easily be said that Dovzhenko recalls Kirsanoff). As I mentioned last week, it's astonishing that a Kirsanoff / Sibirskaia / Parlo masterpiece remains so underviewed, but stranger things have happened. This one awaits rediscovery.

The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg) / It’s unfortunate that this is sandwiched between Underworld and The Docks of New York, two of the director’s finest films, and while it’s hardly their equal William Powell makes for an amusing Russian and Emil Jannings is a great ham. But he’s still a ham, and the extent to which a Sternberg movie can successfully assimilate such a domineering personality is debatable. Many of the key ingredients are here—the romance is certainly as sincerely preposterous as the best of the them—but the canvas is far too large and more often than not the details don’t stick. A Dietrich or a Bancroft is desperately needed.

Key Films / 22.Jan.12

2012-01-22T08:45:00.004+07:00

7th Heaven (Frank Borzage) / For all his talent, in my mind Borzage remains tied to the performances of Janet Gaynor and Margaret Sullavan, the two actresses he employed most frequently. Like many cinephiles, I first met Gaynor through Murnau and Sullavan through Lubitsch—but there’s something about their work with Borzage that sticks, and finally getting to see the quiet girl from Sunrise take off her wig and whip her sister within an inch of her life was a revelation for me (and still is). Borzage’s Paris never existed, of course, and while the whole thing is shrouded in a foggy, expressionist sheen, this isn’t necessarily a less nasty or squalid place than a realist treatment would produce. And although Farrell’s and Gaynor’s domestic play-acting is staged by a man with a distinct romantic perspective, history ends up invading these private spaces too, and that final mutilation is the work of someone unafraid of looking the world in the eyes (no pun intended). The concluding miracle—as overt as those in Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson & Dreyer’s Ordet—is admittedly one of those you-buy-it-or-you-don’t moments. But I do.

Faust (F.W. Murnau) / Murnau can (and probably should) be criticized for turning the first third of his impressive adaptation into a “special effects movie”—the director throws every trick he knows onto the screen and for this viewer, at least, it’s all too much, betraying a formal restlessness that isn’t satisfied even with the apocalypse that opens the film. Eventually things do settle down, however, and although Jannings’ performance remains a bit out there for me, Murnau is able to locate a melodrama in the material, and it’s a great one. Gretchen’s descent into destitution is heartbreaking, and that final scene at the stake, in which Faust throws himself towards her burning body, has all the raw and elemental power the opening, fantastical sequences lack.

Judex (Louis Feuillade) / “Domesticated” Feuillade, although anyone who thinks that the actions of the creepy fascist (Judex) are more morally defensible than those of the ecstatic terrorist (Irma Vep) are kidding themselves. And while this isn’t as fun or sexy as the director’s best serials, Feuillade’s countrysides are as haunted by those irrational webs of intrigue as his cityscapes. The plots are soapy and nonsensical, and the whole thing has a vaguely Dickensian atmosphere that isn’t unpleasant (the most bizarre example of this is the Licorice Kid, who, at least in translation, has a cockney accent), but the disturbances remain—it’s hard to forget how much of a weird, domineering shit its ostensible protagonist is, or the mirror hounding Favraux as he walks back and forth in his cell. Also, Musidora. Always Musidora. And so she set out by night into the unknown.

La signora di tutti (Max Ophuls) / A film as a suicide note—and through the narcotic remembrances and daydreams of its central protagonist Ophuls finds the perfect metaphor for his own filmmaking, and stakes out what he stands for as an artist. The director seems to be inventing new cinematographic language every time he moves the camera (this is 1934, after all), and the effortlessness with which he frames dizzying romantic possibility and the suggestion of future disappointment within a single tracking shot will knock you out. Dave Kehr is right to call it a “young man’s film”—and while this is clearly more violent (and openly melodramatic) than much of the director’s later work, I can’t agree that technique precedes meaning here. If Ophuls had gone the way of Vigo and never made another picture, La signora di tutti would probably be cited as one of the best films of the thirties, and it’s only within the context of the director’s filmography that its (non-existent) “deficiencies” become apparent.

Lazybones (Frank Borzage) / Buck Jones’ performance is a bit more measured and calculated here than the one he gave in Just Pals; in those five years he’s learned to act, and there’s something lost in the process (something gained too: those final shots will slay you, and reveal an emotional depth inaccessible to the younger actor). Unlike the Ford, this is Melodrama with a capital M—it would be supremely unfair to spoil any of the narrative details here. Suffice it to say that Borzage deals with some very uncomfortable (and very real) subject matter in an incredibly sensitive and graceful way, and I’m aware of few films that address the inescapable passage of time so eloquently (it warrants comparisons to Limelight and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). At times Borzage seems almost too unembarrassed by what he’s depicting on-screen, but the feelings he’s able to evoke are clearly dependent on the picture’s candor. I don’t know how to talk about this one—just see it.

Lola (Jacques Demy) / I saw a Gary Cooper movie this afternoon. It was beautiful. The people seemed happy. And what else is there to say? A neo-realist musical shot on-location with (barely) one actual song and dance number (though Demy does slip in a bit of Mozart), this warm-up for Rochefort is less rigorous and much, much sadder (who doesn’t mention the war here?). Demy puts forth the radical notion that just because movies are “escapist” or unlike life doesn’t make them bullshit, and although this isn’t the most persuasive presentation of that thesis he ever put forward, it’s a damn fine debut feature.

Monkey Business (Howard Hawks) / Not yet Cary. Not yet Cary. Grant’s monkey comes up with the “most dubious invention since itching powder” and a roomful of lambs who have lost their way holler and scalp and put fish down each other’s pants. At times surprisingly inelegant, and perhaps a better thing for it, Hawks’ film is more of a defense of fifties values than a subversion of them, and the scenes of Grant’s and Rogers’ domestic life (among the most generous in all Hawks) are presented to serve as a counterpoint to the infantilism (and occasional savagery) of their exuberant, stoned episodes. A series of low comedy disasters is how Rogers describes it all at one point—which is true, but it’s only though the staging of these hysterical exercises that Hawks can articulate what Thomas Mitchell couldn’t when he tried to explain to Jean Arthur why those pilots are the way they are. As is the case with most (all?) of the director’s comedies, the very absence of Hawksian professionalism calls attention to itself, and as such it becomes as much of a defense of growing up as To Have and Have Not and Rio Bravo are.

Nana (Jean Renoir) / A camera ascending a ladder, and although the director is clearly infatuated with his actress, he can’t pull off the movie he’s placed her in. Too many characters, too much incident—at two hours it’s either far too long or far too short, and the most rewarding moments are those that look ahead to Renoir’s future career. The close-ups with which he introduces his actors recall the conclusion of French Cancan…as does the actual cancan, which Renoir already knows how to stage. & the great little scene in which the servants get drunk as an aristocrat looks on horrified is an early, beautiful summation of the director’s oeuvre.

The Parson’s Widow (Carl Theodor Dreyer) / Five years we had to wait. But these rooms hold memories of thirty happy years, and in the churchyard is a grave that is never out of my thoughts. Death looms over every frame of this comedy, and by opening the film with an evocation of timelessness, and closing it with a celebration of ritual, Dreyer emphasizes a world apart from the characters’ own awareness, always new and always returning. It's a great film.

Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian) / One can feel nostalgia for places one has never seen. Probably blasphemous to say this of a thirties MGM talkie but it really captures the feel of a silent Swedish film—Mamoulian gets so many of the small details right, and it’s hard to give a damn even when John Gilbert is on-screen (thankfully playing a Spaniard rather than a Swede). Garbo scores one of her best roles and runs with it, transforming the promiscuous and androgynous Christina into what is probably her most playful and mysterious creation. Disguise the elemental with the glamorous Gilbert says at one point, and I’m not sure if he’s defending Garbo, MGM or the movie, but he’s right on. The best scene, of course, takes place in the bedroom at the inn, and watching the enigmatic actress’ face, equally amused and embarrassed, as she begins to undress is as good a defense of the studio system (or art as “industry”) as I know.

Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (Edgar Neville) / A comic ghost story or a creaky, creepy whodunit transformed into a feverish exploration of worlds existent beneath this one—it begins with Basilio (Antonio Casal) winning at the roulette table with the help of a one-eyed man only he can see. This figure, a malicious avenger in any other story, is here a kind and eccentric ghost that wants to protect his daughter from the men who have murdered him, and he and Basilio uncover a bizarre plot involving a subterranean city, the Inquisition and the hunchbacks of the title. The ghost of Napoleon also shows up, bitching about the number of times he’s been summoned, and his humorous cameo highlights the director’s matter-of-fact attitude towards the supernatural. The only thing I remember is something like a dream one character mumbles and the director cuts to the city (movie) he has created being destroyed. But it’s great while it lasts.

War Horse (Steven Spielberg) / The lesson might be “Lean is easy, Ford is hard,” although I think there’s a lot more going on here. So much of this I either have reservations about or actively disliked, and they aren’t the kinds of things I want to spend too much time writing about on this blog. The primary issue is its dramatic structure, though the film’s critics are right to point out that Spielberg’s sentimental streak hasn’t been this obtrusive since The Terminal, if not Schindler’s List. And while the director’s choice to treat death as an absence in the opening acts is inspired, the first hour and a half do not strike me as remarkable (or even particularly good) filmmaking. However, the section that lasts roughly from when Albert is introduced in the trenches to when he is reunited with Joey is something else altogether, and the radical expressionism of these set-pieces is comparable to the greatest moments of visual poetry in A.I. and War of the Worlds (not coincidentally, the best of the director’s more recent films). & for all the talk of Spielberg as entertainer or craftsmen, his uncanny ability to summon strange, loud/quiet imagery that refuse to leave you has more to do with Tarkovsky than DeMille, suggesting genius that, unlike Scorsese or De Palma or Coppola, doesn’t rely on reference.

Way Down East (D.W. Griffith) / Along with The Birth of a Nation, this was one of Griffith’s most popular films, and as is the case with that infamous epic, there’s an awful lot here that needs to be forgiven. No one gave more of herself to the movies than Lillian Gish did, though, and it’s always worth it. Perhaps bored with the modest subject matter of his last few movies (neither Broken Blossoms nor True Heart Susie, his twin masterpieces of ’19, broke ninety minutes), Griffith constructs an epic Victorian melodrama, devoting an awful lot of time to its tragic protagonist (Gish, of course) and the hick family she hides out among. Griffith’s decision to treat the family as broad comic types is an unfortunate one; none of them are a bit as interesting as Gish, and the bumpkin “humor” wasn’t funny then and isn’t funny now. Nevertheless, some of the best work the director and his muse ever did is here, and the opportunity to catch one of the movies’ first and finest romances (that is, between moviemaker and actress) shouldn’t be passed up. I’ve seen it three times, and that finale still tears me apart.

Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Pedro Costa) / Jonathan Rosenbaum has called this the most accessible of Costa’s films, although how much you get out of it will depend on your tolerance for French windbags—mine is fairly high, but I’m nevertheless glad the director dedicated his longer works to the lives of Ventura and Vanda rather than Jean-Marie. And while I can appreciate that it’s hard to be philosophically rigorous when you’re perpetually stoned, his frequently irrelevant, often nonsensical aphorisms do grate. Of far greater interest is his partner Daniele Huillet, the technician (as in the person actually doing shit) with the unenviable task of both editing their new film and trying to get Straub to shut the fuck up. Their often hilarious arguments, along with the genuine insights into the nature of editing, form the body of this sometimes frustrating, but undeniably great documentary.

You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang) / The bottom’s dropped out of everything. A whole history of cinema seems to emerge here, from the landmark noirs (Criss Cross) and lovers on the lam pictures (Gun Crazy) to less probable pieces like Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and, perhaps most startlingly, Michael Mann’s masterwork Public Enemies. Fonda is perfect, oscillating between extreme sensitivity and deep bitterness, and permitted to do some remarkably terrible things. It’s a dangerous performance, the kind he would abandon only a few years later (Tom Joad don’t rob gas stations, dontcha know), and it’s great to see that familiar quiet intensity lashing out at a world that wants nothing to do with him. Lang isn’t generally thought of as a very romantic director but this is, despite its obsession with mechanics and process, an extremely warm-blooded film, and it’s final, mystical celebration of death approaches the Borzagean.

Images from Dimitri Kirsanoff's The Kidnapping (1934)

2012-01-22T01:22:00.003+07:00

One assumes that any film starring Dita Parlo (L'atalante) and Nadia Sibirskaia (Menilmontant) would be a huge cult item, and the relative obscurity of The Kidnapping (or Rapt) is even more baffling as it's directed by the great (and neglected) Dimitri Kirsanoff, and, well, it's kind of a masterpiece. I'll have more to say about it in next week's Key Films, but this is one to see as soon as possible. Just sayin'.

Key Films / 17.Jan.12

2012-01-16T15:41:00.005+07:00

Abraham’s Valley (Manoel de Oliveira) / Oliveira regular/muse Leonor Silveira plays Eva, aka “Little Bovary,” the girl who stands in her garden so she can watch cars crash in this retelling of a retelling of Flaubert’s novel. Eventually marrying a local doctor (sad-eyed Luis Miguel Cintra, of O Sangue and quite a few Oliveiras himself), Eva nevertheless bounces between men of various ages and classes, and the tangled series of conversations she has with them, and they have with each other, constitute the body of this very sad and very wise film. The highlights are too numerous to mention, although those that take a fundamentalist or essentialist view of cinema will probably hate all three and a half hours of it (there’s lots of voiceover, lots of dialogue, and almost no “pure visual storytelling,” whatever the fuck that is). For those that admire the director’s passionately aloof style, however, this is essential viewing, and within the Oliveira oeuvre, a masterpiece among masterpieces. It is also, along with Children of Paradise and Celine and Julie Go Boating, one of the few long movies that feels far too short.

The Convent (Manoel de Oliveira) / The best filmic adaptation of the Faust myth I’ve seen, and although I eagerly await Sokurov’s (no doubt visionary) conception, I doubt he’ll top this. John Malkovich plays Faust, a self-absorbed professor who hopes to achieve immortality by proving that Shakespeare was a Spanish Jew. Luis Miguel Cintra and Leonor Silveira (members of Oliveira’s stock company in the same way that Ward Bond and Harry Carey Jr. were members of Ford’s) play Mephistopheles and Gretchen, respectively, and Catherine Deneuve plays the professor’s wife, a frustrated woman willing to do anything to harm her husband’s new object of affection. None of it plays out in quite the way one expects or wants it to, and as Oliveira reminds the audience we shouldn’t believe everything the fisherman says. That the director is more interested in Gretchen than Mephistopheles or Faust certainly challenges the notion that evil characters are always more compelling, and Silveira, as always, sells it.

Crime and Punishment (Josef von Sternberg) / A“literary” “masterpiece” transformed into a B melo—as a Dostoevsky adaptation it’s unforgivable and as a Sternberg movie it’s problematic, but as a Peter Lorre vehicle it’s pretty great, and the dramatic tension he and Edward Arnold sustain shouldn’t be shrugged off. Still, vulgarity is vulgarity, and the derussification at work here, not to mention the way in which Raskolnikov’s action is reframed as a crime of compassion rather than ideology, would be hard for anyone to justify. Marsh is a good actress but she’s no Sonya, and the film’s over-articulation of the book’s religious themes has the inverse effect, rendering the protagonist’s spiritual struggle a bit silly. But (and there’s always a but) it’s still Sternberg, and his unmistakable directorial touches make this essential viewing.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) / Playful evocations of Leone and Kiarostami, but like Revanche this has Jacques Tourneur and Nicholas Ray movies on its mind, and like the Spielmann it’s at least the equal of its influences. If Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a noir, it’s one of the funniest ever made—all the sadness and humiliation is juxtaposed not only with images of grace but a lot of ridiculous, very worldly humor that keeps the director and his characters honest. Ceylan knows his Tarkovsky but he’s not dependent on it, or any expressionist idiom other than his own—like Malick he’s concerned with the act of forgetting, with the way people come into contact with something bigger than themselves and ignore it; unlike Malick he can still see the ground beneath his feet. This isn’t “slow cinema” or formalism for its own sake; it’s an essential work of twenty-first century art grappling with death and God and very real and private victories and failures. But with jokes, too.

The Sisters of Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi) / “Famously, Mizoguchi’s camera is a spy: peeking in behind bars and curtains and doorways (framing shots diagrammatically on left or right), watching unobserved, waiting, as characters eat and drink and shuffle in and out, for the action to happen,” David Phelps wrote; nevertheless, I’m not quite as over-the-moon about this film as I expected to be. Mizoguchi offers a likeably malicious protagonist and some of the most elegant tracking shots you will see anywhere—however, it doesn’t come together in quite the way one hopes and it’s hard to shake the feeling that the purpose of the director’s often jaw-dropping set-ups is to convince us that this is more than a geisha melodrama. Which it isn’t, despite its overly articulate closing shot. Still, this is one I’m probably wrong about.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson) / Alfredson is a competent technician but nothing more and it shows—there’s not a shot here that’s unexpected and the whole thing unravels at a rapid, unreflective pace that prohibits thrills or drama—which I realize is probably the point. But what it offers remains unclear. The acting is, of course, top-notch, and the story always was and always will be a good one. But by downplaying the eccentricities (and, frankly, the Englishness) of the source material, and foregrounding the sentimentalities built into the narrative, Alfredson turns this into the spy yarn he’s trying to avoid. A better director and an extra hour could have transformed this into something special—as it stands it’s a passably entertaining adaptation of a great novel that often reminds you of better films (for me, Carlos and The Good Shepherd most frequently came to mind).

Programming Note

2012-01-11T18:22:00.003+07:00

I will be attending a special event in the mountains this weekend, and won't have internet. So, this week's Key Films entry probably won't be posted until Monday morning. Also, if all goes according to plan my first piece on John Ford should be up at Wonders in the Dark this Friday. So be on the look-out for that.

Key Films / 8.Jan.12

2012-01-08T09:00:00.004+07:00

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (John S. Robertson) / What we want most to be we are an opening title card reads—an optimistic notion if there ever was one. Like many of the Hollywood interpretations, this is a bit too stately for my taste, but Barrymore’s performance, featuring transformations with minimal cuts, is clearly a defense of a Victorian theatrical tradition, and Robertson fittingly builds a movie of filmed theater around it. The pleasures are small, but they’re still there—Nita Naldi, playing Hyde’s first conquest, is quite beautiful, and one scene, in which Barrymore holds two bargirls up to a mirror, is extremely well-realized and curiously lurid in what is an otherwise bloodless film.

Just Pals (John Ford) / Ford’s first masterpiece? Nightfall across the trail to nowhere, and although the Murnauisms that dominate so much of his thirties work are absent it’s striking how fully formed Ford’s pictorial sense is already—no director in the history of cinema filmed windows or doors better, and we are introduced to Bim (Buck Jones, perfect) framed in the open doorway of a barn, smoking a pipe and making fun of the suckers working for a living (his opinion, not mine). It isn’t long after the director’s familiar outsider themes emerge. Like the later Fords it most resembles (Judge Priest and The Sun Shines Bright, and to only a slightly lesser extent She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master), there’s a direct simplicity to the storytelling that should be at odds with a narrative that refuses to go anywhere, but isn’t. And although a fairly compelling (sub)plot involving missing money and bank robberies does eventually emerge, Ford is far more invested in treating small-town life in a lyrical way, even as his own feelings towards the town oscillate between affection and revulsion. That’s the same ambivalence that would come to define him as an artist, but few of the later films so seamlessly absorbed those feelings into their narratives.

Marketa Lazarova (Frantisek Vlacil) / Comparing A Dangerous Method to Possession in a recent collaborative piece over at MUBI, Miriam Bale connected Zulawski’s striking film to an essay written by the great Molly Haskell many years before. Haskell, championing manners over feelings and the social sphere over the psychological one, suggests we can live out the Lubitsch movies of our dreams, and as much as I love Possession (and it’s clear Bale is pretty fond of it too), Haskell’s (admittedly slightly utopian) position is one I’m sometimes sympathetic to. At the very least, it may help explain the ambivalence I feel towards Marketa Lazarova, an undeniably harrowing experience that ranks for many critics among the best films of the sixties. Released only one year after Andrei Rublev (a film I’m almost certain Vlacil didn’t see), Marketa Lazarova concerns itself with a feud between a Pagan and a Christian clan, and a small regiment who have been ordered to intervene. Although the film opens with a robbery that superficially recalls the stagecoach hold-ups of numerous westerns, this is as far from genre filmmaking as one can get—Vlacil employs a visionary (and incoherent) visual style throughout, emphasizing the grim experiences of these highwaymen. The film is not without its beauty—many of the images here will stay with you and Vlacil delivers one of the most stunning treatments of snow outside of a Welles film. Nevertheless, the lack of anything resembling a conventional shot becomes obnoxious after a while, and the director’s inability (or unwillingness) to treat characterization or fundamental narrative details with a degree of respect renders the film dramatically inert, and the actions of the characters meaningless. And unlike the (great) Tarkovsky film it most resembles, there is an arbitrariness to its formal choices, as if Vlacil just wants to see if he can pull off an upside down reverse tracking shot (as opposed to the Russian filmmaker, whose every aesthetic decision seemed to arise out of profound deliberation).

Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood) / Didn’t think too much of this one when it came out; returning to the film six years later I’m a bit shocked at how much it got inside me. I cried. A lot. Maybe having a proper context of who Eastwood is as a director helped—or maybe I just had to grow up. Either way, this is a great film. A boxing melodrama buoyed by a tough, painfully eloquent script by Paul Haggis, and full of strange rhythmic and tonal shifts that shouldn’t work, few of Eastwood’s films benefit more from the director’s unpolished, off-the-cuff approach. This is a film of complicated, raw emotions, both deeply Catholic and unconcerned with the existence of God. While Michael Mann’s treatment of Muhammad Ali suggested a sense of the transcendent, emphasizing the strange stillness that exists between these thrashing, violent bodies, Million Dollar Baby remains defiantly locked in the physical spaces it establishes, finally finding, despite the squalid banality of so many of the places we become trapped in, reasons to live and reasons to die. & none of the actors here are afraid of recognizing the dark, damaged desires that that all this quiet dignity and tenderness is dependent on, and that merciless sense of discomfort lingers.

The Penalty (Wallace Worsley) / Or, Blizzard v. Lichtenstein. A bizarre horror melodrama put together with more competence than the script necessarily deserves, this is elevated by the degree to which Worsley’s likeably workmanlike direction seeks to legitimize an outrageous premise that only gets juicier as it moves along. In an act of sadomasochism that would come to define his reputation, Chaney strapped his shins to his thighs to play the part of Blizzard, an amputee and criminal mastermind who seeks to punish the doctor that chopped off his legs so many years before. The plot also involves the doctor’s daughter, Blizzard’s piano “pedaler” (actually an undercover agent) and the Red influence of “foreign malcontents.” There’s also a terror subplot involving hats that is never really explained and some discussions of art that approach the hokey (although how serious any of this should be taken is unclear). Still, Chaney embodies his role with a sense of magnetic, brutal glee (at one point almost ripping a girl’s hair out), and by the time the agent who is supposed to be busting the cripple falls in love with him, it’s impossible to turn away.

Scherben (Lupu Pick) / There’s a tradition attached to “train movies”—locomotives remain the most cinematic of objects, and there are always expectations. Forget them. Scherben is the kind of movie that could only be made before the rules were written, and its singular grammar won’t remind you of any other film. Shot on-location at a railway trackman’s cabin in the mountains, and written by Carl Mayer, it’s a film whose lurid elements (sex and murder!) are de-emphasized to the point of ambiguity and which juxtaposes the eccentric, deeply emotional performances of the four characters with the unforgiving natural setting. Pick tells the story almost completely in the form of ellipses, favoring short scenes that emphasize process and repetition (when the father receives a telegraph, the mechanics of the device are emphasized to an almost absurd degree). That sense of repeated action is extended to Pick’s own mise-en-scene, and the number of times he refers to a strange tracking shot of the father walking along the tracks establishes a rhythm in and of itself.

Why Change Your Wife? (Cecil B. DeMille) / A trashy, often ridiculous melodrama disguised as a PSA with a lot of bad advice for husbands and wives who can’t stand each other, DeMille’s film belongs to a long tradition of narratives involving self-pitying men and the nagging bitches that won’t leave them alone. Ideologically, there isn’t much difference between it and the Hangover movies, but it’s actually funny, and for anyone interested in women’s fashion c. 1920 (and you will be after seeing it), the film's essential. Also, a brilliant performance by Gloria Swanson and a bottle of bourbon called Forbidden Fruit.

Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux) / A shocking film even (or especially) in 2012—historically framed as a calculated response to The Birth of a Nation and it’s not hard to see why; although only an hour and a bit it houses enough events for an epic, and splits its time almost evenly between the North and the South. Micheaux is unembarrassed of putting forward a political stance, often aggressively—like many Griffiths, this film seems to be built around an idea as much as a narrative, which both convolutes the plot and gives it an eccentrically digressive structure. Micheaux isn’t quite good enough to pull it off—I got lost here in a way that I never did in the most complex Griffiths and Sjostroms. Still, there’s something to be said for crafting a film that never overstays its welcome, and Within Our Gates’ occasional bouts of incoherence are tied to the speed with which Micheaux is telling his story. And when it comes to the lynching scenes the director refuses to blink, presenting an arena where the bestial brutality of the white folks renders the term “patriotism” meaningless.

2012-01-07T02:02:00.001+07:00

"It's a Heraclitean thing: you come out of the water in different places, you're a different person. And that sense of change is one of the things that makes us, both of us, a little bit suspicious of these rigid theories, these deconstructionists and people who don't add to the canon, who don't discover films. We discovered films, and the new people just reinterpret them, reinterpret the films we discovered. This is the advantage the rigid theoreticians have: they know, they are certain. It's a bit like religious fanatics. The fanatic: he is sure, he knows, he convinces you of that assurance. And we're not sure."

- Andrew Sarris

Key Films / 1.Jan.12

2012-01-01T09:00:00.004+07:00

A lot of these are reformattings or reposts of reviews I've done in the past, so some of these will look familiar; some won't. Information here. Index here.

Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville) / Unhappy memories! Yet I welcome you...you are my long lost youth. An army of shadows--nothing if not an attempt by unseen old men to make sense of their past lives, and it's a remembrance for Melville as well. Some critics, uncomfortable with the more mannered and amoral aspects of his gangster pictures, have done their best to distance this film from his genre work, but Melville bravely intermingles his memories with bits and pieces from his other movies, rendering the past inseparable from the dreams he produced. So the thug from Le doulos becomes a barber and the cop from Le deuxieme souffle is Ventura's C.O., and, quite poignantly, the past becomes the present. What we are left with, then, is a group of supposedly unremarkable men doing work they can only just bear, persevering despite their knowledge that there is nothing else. Watching it, Faulkner's final words on the Compson family echo. They endured.

Chocolat (Claire Denis) / I must also explain this to you. You see the line. You see it, but it doesn't exist. The framing suggests Ozu was always on Denis' mind (not surprising, given her association with Jarmusch), but this is already very much a "Claire Denis film," especially in the direct sensuality of the opening scene. Critics like to call Chocolat autobiographical and it's not hard to see why--the protagonist's knowing mischievousness (do you think we'll be buried here?) is recognizable if you've ever seen the director interviewed, and of course she grew up in Africa herself. Still, I don't think it's the best way to approach any of her films; like Bresson, what she's really after is the way people act and are essentially (as unfashionable a word as that is). It's a different kind of personal filmmaking, too concerned with detail to be biographical (or psychological, thank god). Boschi looks great in her Searchers dress but De Bankolé is even better; he was always handsome but there's something unnerving about seeing him so young, especially since he's playing a servant. The director's underrated sense of humor is here too, and it's very prominent--a scene in which Boschi tries to tell the chef to cook French is hysterical, revealing a sensibility that could be mistaken for Lubitschean worldliness if her later films weren't there to clarify. It's her first attempt at making a movie absolutely faithful to reality (not to be redundant, but again this ties her to Bresson), and although there's uneasy tension between this and her social and political concerns, it's still a haunting and suggestive film.

Day of the Outlaw (Andre De Toth) / For many critics this is one of the great westerns, not to mention De Toth's best film (Fred Camper called the final ride through the Wyoming terrain "one of the most despairing visions in all of cinema"). A bit odd, although almost certainly great as well; it doesn't seem to belong to the studio system in the way that Ride Lonesome and Rio Bravo do (both released the same year), but it's certainly not a revisionist independent either. De Toth was always very much part of the "system" (nothing wrong with that); he started with Scott what Boetticher finished and gave even the most generic scripts a sense of visual style (the muzzle blasts in Man in the Saddle, for instance). But this is something else. Robert Ryan wasn't generally the kind of actor you wrote scripts for but you have to wonder here--no one else could have delivered that soliloquy, and it is only because Ryan himself is so stubbornly uncharismatic (not the right word, but he's a hard one to describe) that you can buy into his moment of self-revelation. Admittedly, De Toth doesn't have complete control over his material in the way that Hawks or Boetticher do; the acting is all over the place and Tina Louise and the matinee idol playing the youngest member of the gang do not belong in Wyoming. But it works, perhaps because it's a film defined by left turns--you know what's going to happen for the first fifteen minutes and then you're clueless until it's over. And while I wouldn't go as far as Camper does he's essentially right. It's a very bleak movie, one of the few where a frontier town really looks like a frontier town. You won't find much mercy anywhere in Wyoming Ryan reminds Louise, and by the end of the film the only important question being asked is why do you want to die? It ends not with a shootout but a sense of disintegration--the final gunman, his fingers frozen stiff, can't even pull the trigger.

Decoy (Jack Bernhard) / Make it like Detour! you can almost hear some poverty row exec screaming, and why else the seemingly arbitrary title? (Although if you think about it, it's really kind of brilliantly titled.) Not much here makes sense--noir archetypes speaking science fiction when they're not making asses of themselves (di-cho-to-my...what a beautiful word), although maybe the folks behind the camera hoped that with the gorgeous Gillie in front of it no one would give a shit. This is the first of her two American movies and she runs with it, matching and then eclipsing all the crazy in the material. Crazy like wanting to resurrect your hubby after he's been gassed rather than trying to break him out of jail before the execution, you know, like normal people do. Also, the way she shrieks they killed for it! they all killed for it! and you! you too! you killed for it! as she shoots one of her lovers over and over and over, although I wonder if she knew this is what she was getting into when she decided to cross the pond (she was married to Bernhard, the producer and director here). Nothing else in the film really compares to her although I love Sheldon Leonard too, the best dressed flatfoot in town murmuring his lines as if he were in a western and pointing his gun at a bellboy as if it were a badge. Gillie and Leonard share a scene that bookends the film, and while the final reel is deliriously over-the-top Gillie's kiss-off, a sneering, malicious gesture, stays with you just as much as the murders do. It's directed at the audience as much as it is at Leonard. And that's why I love Monogram.

French Cancan (Jean Renoir) / You want to put me in a cage like a canary? I warn you, it won't last long. You couldn't stand me after a couple of weeks. You want the Danglard of the theater or Danglard who wears slippers? I've never worn them and never will! I'll give you some good advice. If you want a lover, Alexandre's perfect. If you want a husband, marry Paulo. Choose between jewels and palaces or a happy retirement by the fireside, with honor and dignity, but I can't give you either! Do I look like Prince Charming? Only one thing matters to me--what I create. And what do I create? You! There have been others before. There'll be others to come. In the end, you think it matters what you and I want? All that counts is what they want. We're at the service of the public. Obvious but true: Gabin is more of a stand-in for Renoir-the-director here than Renoir-the-actor ever was; and in a characteristic moment of unflinching honesty he seems to be saying yes, I can be a lout & yes, I'm just putting on stripteases. But so are we all, eventually, and look at what he does with motion, with the hiding and revealing of spirit and feeling as one character tramples across the frame. That's cinema, as they say. And so is the striptease, an initial act of provocation, of performance, that is transformed by its ecstatic nature (and the creator's genius) into a celebration across lines of class, allegiance, temperament...but a celebration of what exactly? Of everything that came before. Of movement, emotion, slumming fogeys who still remember how to dance and romantic princes who don't know how to shoot themselves. And the way a beautiful woman caught between a baker and a prince and Jean Gabin runs across a theater floor.

Last of the Mohicans (Maurice Tourneur) / Tied to the face of Barbara Bedford, paler than pale and expressing almost nothing throughout. She’s the film’s enigmatic center, and at every opportunity Tourneur foregrounds the not-quite-a-romance between her Cora and Uncas, a Mohican leader protecting her and her sister from Magua and his band of drunk Hurons. The plot may be a bit silly, but it’s still a story well-told, and the way the film’s unusually brisk pace juxtaposes with the lyrical treatment of the American landscapes moves it pretty far from the wholesome adventure epic it was most likely conceived as. And as well-staged as the massacre at the fort and the very beautiful, very sad denouement are, this is a film built around gazes. Cora rarely opens her mouth, but the way she shakes her head after Uncas asks if she’s afraid comes to mean an awful lot, and Tourneur’s faith in her resilience, and his insistence that the way she stares off-screen is more significant than the most basic of plot mechanics, really defines the film.

The Law and Jake Wade (John Sturges) / The premise is lean as Boetticher (Sturges borrows Henry Silva from The Tall T), and even if Robert Taylor isn't the equal of Randolph Scott, Widmark is as good as Boone or Marvin ever were. Like many, many westerns, The Law and Jake Wade is a study of male friendship, and here its concern is with what two men can or cannot do for one another, and how possible it is to deal with that disappointment. The opening sequence is lovely only in retrospect, the silhouette of Wade standing beneath the sheriff sign, considering both what he has been and what he is about to betray. Sturges structures the film so that it is only by night that Jake and Clint can discuss their past, remembering and trying to linger in their memories. If you got honor you don't run out on a friend. As Clint Widmark is so good he's scary, but he's not stupid, and Sturges' mise en scene pretty well guarantees the impossibility of reconciliation between the two characters. The nighttime Indian raid may be a bit much, but when Clint and Jake finally stand off in a manufactured shoot-out the orchestra shuts up and Sturges' framing almost resembles that of Man of the West, Anthony Mann's masterpiece of the same year. There's real and startlingly direct physical force in the way Clint knocks out the post holding up the roof of a decrepit porch, but what strikes me even more is the way both actors pause for a half-second, staring at each other before pulling the trigger. As an action movie, everything happens too quickly for real regret to arise, but there's sad and profound power in that momentary stillness.

Le cercle rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville) / We are introduced to cop and crook lying above each other, Melville's symmetrical splitting of the frame echoing his zoom and cut from Vogel's face to Corey's. In most films this would signify a flashback, but there's only one Delon and Melville, as always, knows how to use him, employing the actor's natural passivity to cloak the character's inner rage. This first reveals itself not in the stick-up of his former boss but in the subsequent pool hall brawl, and as Corey kicks a thug's face in we know he's in his element. Melville's use of natural environments here is wonderful, and makes one wish he found himself in the countryside more often. My favorite of these early scenes involves Vogel slipping into the trunk of Corey's car, the falling snow lending the same elemental aspect to their chance encounter as the director's first cut. And of course their shared cigarettes in the empty field is a highlight too, and recognition that they'll get along. Eventually they make it back to the familiar cityscapes and the heist plot falls into place, and here finds its ultimate expression in Melville's oeuvre. As Corey and Vogel struggle to get everything just right, and Jansen struggles to stay sober, the director's police figure, this time named Mattei, tries to come to terms with his superior's cynicism and, as a police officer, his own role. The heist is the best of its kind, and the aftermath becomes almost routine in a sad and beautiful way. We all know how it is going to end up, and as Delon & co. struggle up the hill, riddled with bullet holes, and Mattei fires on and on, as much at himself as the purported crooks, those familiar feelings emerge once again, the ones only the movies give us.

Limite (Mario Peixoto) / Lost, then found, though still mostly unseen, Peixoto’s strange, wildly experimental thing begins with one of the saddest opening sequences I know (several people, stranded in a small boat in the middle of the ocean, look out into the nothing as Satie plays) and then proceeds to explore the subconscious histories of the characters it has introduced. Which is to say it’s a haunted memory film, but unlike Citizen Kane or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance it lacks a sense of investigative rigor—this ends up (slightly) diminishing the almost unbearable sense of longing first introduced, but also gives the film an anarchic sense of kinetic discovery that is alien to the “genre,” if it can be called that (also worth mentioning is the tremendous sense of physicality present throughout). The highlights are almost too numerous to mention, but if the image of a glistening sea evaporating into the eyes of a woman holding up a pair of archaic handcuffs doesn’t haunt your dreams, it might be well enough for you to leave cinema alone. Also, Chaplin, Brazilian landscape photography, and what if I told you she has leprosy?

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman) / Oh, is this where I'm supposed to say, "What is all this about?," and he says, "Shut up, I ask the questions"? And that, of course, is what it’s all about. Chandler’s atypically autobiographical novel turned into Altman’s (a)typically autobiographical film, a labyrinthe series of events and digressions reduced to a handful of encounters that don’t really add up to anything—but that was Chandler’s point too. The startling denouement, so often thought to be Altman’s idea, was actually Brackett’s, but its perfunctory and perhaps too obvious directness gets at something the director and novelist shared—an artistic impulse simultaneously moral and deeply nasty allowed here to be turned inwards. Hayden (giving a performance that is both hammy and poignant, often at the same time) plays Chandler’s surrogate as the world’s worst (and best) Hemingway impersonator, and as he lashes out at his wife we watch Marlowe’s reflection through the window, sidestepping the waves that seem to be diagonally splitting the Wades. What you say doesn't quite make sense and Wade’s right although he could just as easily be talking about Altman. Here he films a gangster quietly mumbling I make love to you to his girlfriend only seconds before smashing her face with a Coke bottle. In the next scene the hood strips naked (as does Gov. Arnie, lingering in the background). It ends, of course, with the scene of senseless, non-cathartic violence, simultaneously a naked gesture in itself and a defiant non-apology. In other words, a sad ending to a funny movie. Or a funny ending to a sad movie. Either way, it’s one of Altman’s best.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Alfred Hitchcock) / Like many Hitchcocks it’s a film built around the characters’ sense of play, and if it’s hard to make sense of Gene Raymond's southern gentleman it’s probably because he’s the only one here who believes he is what he says he is. There’s a beautiful blonde drying her hair in front of a fire and a key, taut sequence at a carnival, but this is a graceful film in its own right, aided undoubtedly by the presence of Lombard, as much an auteur as the directors she worked with. Momentarily forgetting to treat her (and Montgomery) like farm animals, Hitch gives her enough of those glittering light close-ups to make RKO look like MGM, and even her not-quite-a-husband is given unusual latitude, such as when he struggles with the bloodying of his nose (the second time).

The Mysterious Lady (Fred Niblo) / This may not be great art, but some things are justifications in themselves. Moving pictures of Garbo—longingly leaning against a wall with the lights off so only her gown is illuminated—are certainly among them. Vienna before the war an early title card announces and Niblo follows with the most delicate of crane shots, displaying admirable restraint in the amount of close-ups he grants Garbo in that first scene on the balcony. It seems counter-intuitive at first, but by opening up the frame he lets the interactions between Tania and von Raden (Conrad Nagel) speak for themselves, capturing a mutual sense of unease. It also traps each character in the next sequence as they flail about, each searching for the other—von Raden is caught in lateral movement as he is dragged across the frame, and Tania is isolated on a rainy street corner as she indiscreetly glances in every direction. The film that follows is pretty impressive as well, and Garbo’s role as an enemy spy in love is an apt metaphor for the enigmatic persona the actress pretty much embodied by ’28. Like von Raden we’re still wondering what was real and what was show. (Photo Gallery)

The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador (Leonce Perret) / Like Feuillade's Tragic Error in suggesting that movies have always been about making movies, although Perret goes further in arguing that the cinematographic process itself can save us. And cure dementia. And solve a crime. And bring together star-crossed lovers.

The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer) / A few minutes in and Mrs. Neall (the weirdly stunning Marie Windsor) breaks her necklace at the top of a staircase and several beads tumble down to the floor below. A hitman in a fur coat waits, who, along with a perversely predatory heavy with a porn moustache and an unbelievably effeminate snake oil salesman, will spend the next sixty-five minutes trying to find and eliminate the same Mrs. Neall aboard a train. The great Charles McGraw (who had one of Hollywood’s most violent voices) is finally given the chance to star in something and the very capable Fleischer is given a hell of a script—what they come away with is something special. Mrs. Neall, I'd like to give you the same answer I gave that hood but it would mean stepping on your face McGraw growls towards the beginning of the picture, but she still knows how to light a cigarette better than he does and at every turn they come across as an even match, and although this is essentially a cheapie train thriller it’s notable how many scenes revolve around their interactions. Fleischer’s finest moment comes when the camera, without cutting, briefly assumes the point of view of the moustached thug as he is kicked by Brown. Like so much here, it seems equally informed by spontaneity and choreography.

No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis) / Shut up! You pack of dogs! Ever see one like this? Did anyone see a cock like this? Or, I don’t like those eyes. They’re empty. They’ll never show me your home. The most neglected of Denis’ early features, and one of the few “neo-noirs” that matter. Its precedents are clear (The Set-Up, The Hustler, Cockfighter), but with the possible exception of the Rossen it bests its influences. & it’s a bleak, seemingly spontaneous film—the voiceover of Dah (De Bankole) implies an understanding or mastery of the events. It evaporates as he loses control. He plays the rock, Jocelyn (Descas, with uncanny intelligence and intensity) plays the dreamer, haunted, silent, and unnerved--he's part of this world but never wanted to be. Like something out of a Nick Ray film, and because he’s in the same picture as the pretentious crook with the pretty girl it’s clear it’s not going to end well. A female is a female...it’s hormonal Dah says at one point and Denis may be whispering the words into his ear—there are things you can’t escape. Or control. She’s already looking ahead to Beau travail too; Jocelyn dances in a nightclub, clinging to a white girl who glances at him nervously, ambiguously—what is she thinking? What am I in the presence of? Eventually she retreats and the camera lingers on Toni dancing in a corner, consumed by the lights and crowds. Toni keeps betting on Jocelyn's cock at the end too. Even though she knows he’s lost. 8,000 on the white she yells. Jocelyn hears. It’s all too late.

The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjostrom) / It’s a spooky place to toast New Year’s, here among the dead. A series of narrative digressions including past histories, tales told too many times and ghastly hallucinations, all built around a dying girl who ends up not the protagonist so much as the rosebud. What we are given, then, is a non-chronological unfolding of the life of David Holm, a man heard about before seen and played with bracing enthusiasm by the director himself. The girl’s death (as well as his own) hangs over the whole picture, and in peeling back the years of degeneracy Sjostrom, among the most moral of filmmakers, doesn’t hope to explain his protagonist’s actions or even make sense of them. His anti-psychological aim, best exemplified by the extraordinary double exposure photography, is relating spiritual and moral struggle to the physical world, and through this character (that is, himself) reminding the audience that all the apparent disunity comes out of some greater unknowable unity. This is filmmaking arising out of a general need on the part of its creator, seemingly built from his own blood and bones and informed by the themes of great philosophy and literature. Wild Strawberries and The Shining start here too.

Pocket Money (Stuart Rosenberg) / If Badlands is a tragedy with a lot of comical touches then Pocket Money is a comedy built around a downbeat scenario. What makes Newman so funny here, and so out of place as a character, is that he listens to what people say to him (an uncommon trait). Early on, asked why he's been hiding he replies I hadn't been hiding. I just need a room is all. (Another great moment like this: Well, I'm not gonna get into bed with him. I'll say that much.) Newman plays it straight as someone constantly bewildered by why people act and talk the way they do, and gives the film its sense of relaxed, humorous character. But he's also always in trouble. It turns out his cattle have the clap (no worse than a bad cold he cautiously tells a pretty and overpolite bank teller) and out of desperation falls in with a Texan chiseler, played with a splendid sense of mischief by Strother Martin. The script could have almost as easily been written by Portis; these opening scenes certainly recall Norwood and Martin, it's worth remembering, was the most memorable presence in True Grit. Still, Pocket Money strikes me as Malick's film, and at the very least the sense of language and place would have been recognizable even if his name was not on it. Newman, under Martin's orders, goes down to Mexico and hooks up with an old friend (Lee Marvin, very, very loose and obviously having a great time) in the hope of acquiring a great deal of cattle for a rodeo. And all sorts of hell ensues. The plot doesn't really matter; the movie kind of falls apart in its attempts to reach a suitable resolution, and the way Marvin karate chops the air as Newman sits on Martin is far more important than how it is they actually got there. Instead, it ends up being all about the characters (or maybe the actors), and the way they bounce their ridiculous schemes and beautiful lies off each other becomes the thing. And there is even time for the odd lyrical touch, looking ahead to Badlands and beyond: You know they say that every man has a star. Now a guy should find his star out there unless he doesn't have one. Which is maybe the case with me. If what they're saying is right guys could just follow their stars. But not me 'cause I don't have one.

The River (Frank Borzage) / There is a river called life. Its source is a hidden fountain. The sea is its goal. Upon it sail the rafts of human destinies. While it goes without saying we would all like to see the film in a more complete form, there's still something deeply moving about watching a still image that was once a moving image. And strange moving images too--a woman with a crow and a man floating towards a whirlpool are some of the first we see, and it's hard to shake the feeling that there are forces moving here beneath the surface. As is the case with many masterpieces, analysis is almost pointless. What can be said, for instance, about the way Marsdon transfers his own spirit into the crow (an obvious gesture that somehow remains impossibly mysterious)? A mystical film, but one of contradictions--its eroticism is inseparable from its religiosity and even though Farrell and Duncan are playing "types" (far more than they would be in City Girl), there is a degree of emotional nuance that seems rediscovered every time you watch it. My favorite touch--Farrell resurrected watching a movie of his life.

Sir Arne’s Treasure (Mauritz Stiller) / One of the few truly Biblical films, and while Stiller explicitly alludes to Jonah it's the often quoted line from Job I think of. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Stiller films snow like Sheptiko, as only someone who has lived with it can, and there's a real bleakness to his images, as if they come out of the same place that the best Murnau and Malick do, out of something unknown and primordial. The massacre the film is centered around is an aberration to an extent, but it's also something that arises out of the landscape, very much a part of an epoch that has to be bled out of the land. The landscape is not the only thing wild and untamed; I hope they are alive so I may rip their hearts from their chests and that's not the murderers talking. Is it that viciousness that ties Elsalill (Mary Johnson, absolutely incredible) to Sir Archi? I don't think so. Instead it's the event itself; she loses her sister and he loses his humanity and all they have is a ghost to cling to. Like a dream. Like a ship rising out of the ice. That's the fabric of the film, something Sir Archi grasps at--pleading for Elsalill to go with him--crying out that he is lost without her--glimpsing something very primal and strange and perhaps unmentionable just beyond his line of sight. He knows he is doomed without her and she knows she is doomed with him. (I am again the man I once was he says, a line that could be out of The New World, and maybe is). Elsalill, caught between a ghost and a man, a film full of impossible choices, or maybe no choices at all. But there's a procession, a re-gathering. And then comes the sea.

Solaris (Steven Soderbergh) / A film transformed by the director's inability to locate the "visionary"; forced to emphasize a very specific and very Hollywood smallness (it could have been made in '59), Soderbergh stumbles upon something very elusive and tragic and a bit beyond Tarkovsky's grasp (which isn’t to say it’s a better or worse film). It's certainly the director's Vertigo. The image is everywhere; first discussed in the therapy session that opens the film, then coming to obsess Kelvin, the creator of the image, and not-Rea, the image itself. But I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong, that somehow I was wrong about everything. Or, even better: I'm not the person I remember. Or at least I'm not sure I am. I mean I do remember things but I don't remember being there. Also, there are no pictures (images) in Kelvin's apartment, yet when he recreates it, recreates an image of it, you know what is going to be on the fridge. Soderbergh ("the formalist") is a thinker, but his filmmaking isn't academic--it is an incredibly poignant and moving movie. Solaris came out a year before The Story of Marie and Julien. I wonder if Rivette saw it. I wonder if he liked it.

The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira) / The ghost of John Ford, a ghost movie about the ghosts of movies. Or, just as fittingly, a case of estrangement. Angelica. First and foremost, it’s a digital film that refuses to belong to the twenty-first century, even as it captures a minivan capturing raindrops in its headlights. Isaac, crucially, is introduced tampering with a radio, coaxing out a series of mechanical sounds that wouldn’t be out of place at a Joe Colley show. A manipulator of sound, then, as well as images, struggling to dance despite his fixed trajectory. Ford is here, most obviously when Isaac recites poetry in the doorway of a mausoleum. So is Garrel, and it’s easy to imagine Oliveira watching Frontier of Dawn, glimpsing in it a script he wrote so many years before. Conversations over breakfast: and what is matter if only energy? For Issac, and by extension Oliveira (and how significant is it that Oliveira wrote this as a young man; the old man only now able to document the young man’s spiritual struggle), reorientation is compulsory. He's not interested in constructing a critical argument--here even scientists talk like mystics. Instead, a scenario is presented. New worlds are glimpsed. Spirit and energy is rediscovered. Dreams are dreamt. And people cross thresholds. At which point, of course, the movie too must end. These things happen.

Svengali (Archie Mayo) / Mayo isn’t anyone's favorite director, and the film is admittedly a bit schizophrenic, veering between coarse comedy and psychological (if not literal) rape in a way that is, at best, disconcerting. Barrymore, quoting Hamlet and sporting a beard that will take your eye out, is likeably hammy as the title character, and the expressionist sets, while not much more than window-dressing, do make for some interesting technical set-ups. The most obvious of these is the crane shot that starts as an extreme close-up on Barrymore’s eyes and somehow ends up going through a window without cutting, but there’s a surprising amount of cinematographic lyricism here—surely enough to suggest that Mayo identified on some level with the text’s (always compelling) themes. Still, it probably wouldn’t amount to much if it weren’t for Marian Marsh’s performance as Trilby, then Madame Svengali. As the American go-getter lost among European artists, hucksters, prudes and bullshitters transformed by the film’s end into a zombie, Marsh keeps you watching her eyes even when her wig (?) should distract from all else. Not surprisingly, the film’s finest moment comes when Svengali tries to seduce her as she lays in her bed in a trance, and Mayo alternates between close-ups of the two actors, always lingering a bit longer on hers. From there, it’s not long until the end.

To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks) / I need someone to love me / need someone to carry me home to San Francisco / and bury my body there. Of course we'll always have Paris, but if it came down to it I would just as easily take Martinique. Bogie introduces himself as an eskimo and the film follows suit, growing up and down with a set of characters who each speak an idiosyncratic language they themselves may or may not understand (you ever been stung by a bee?). Steve's and Slim's conversations recall Grant's and Arthur's (and perhaps serve as a correction, given how Hawks felt about that actress), but they are singular in the way that they expand upon Hawks' vision of romantic interactions without necessarily contradicting them. Which is to say Bogie and Bacall are mad about each other, and while the film should act as a wartime rallying cry (and in some sense still does), even a “man of action” like Hawks is distracted by the way Bacall’s cigarette smoke envelops the edges of the frame.

Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman) / Fuller gets the auteurist street cred but Wellman did it all first; his characters were punching cameras back in '32 and here he pioneers the shot that would appear far more famously in a certain Barbara Stanwyck western nine years later. Like most of Wellman's westerns Yellow Sky is a bit too arty, and lacks the fierce directness of his best thirties melodramas. Still, it's essential viewing, as weird as Track of the Cat and featuring MacDonald's undeniably gorgeous photography (think My Darling Clementine). I love the idiosyncratic touches, such as how all the characters have names like something out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (although Wellman ups the ante by having the only female named "Mike"), and though Peck is characteristically awful as the ringleader Widmark is usually around to make sure the star doesn't say his lines too slow. The director's other oaters are here too--the saloon recalls The Ox-Bow Incident and the flats recall Westward the Women, although the film thankfully lacks the former's speeches or the latter's domestic sentimentality...at least up until the ending, which is terrible. I prefer to think of it as some kind of absurd vision seen by Peck before drawing his last breath, but in any context it's pretty indefensible, especially considering what came before. The shootouts look ahead to Mann but they're different too, more ethereal perhaps, and as the bandits cling to the walls of the cabins and canyons in the eerie half-light, they resemble ghosts more than gunfighters.

Could I Offer You Some Coffee...Or Cognac? / Images from Fred Niblo's The Mysterious Lady

2011-12-29T12:51:00.004+07:00

Announcement / John Ford

2011-12-09T17:16:00.004+07:00

Starting in January, I will be publishing articles at the blog Wonders in the Dark on the films of John Ford. They will appear every other Wednesday, and suffice it to say it's the kick in the pants I really need to start writing on film again. Details will be forthcoming.

Also, the post below this one is on my favorite records of the year. You can find it here. I only mention it because it hasn't shown up on my RSS feed. This one might not either. Blogger has been particularly temperamental lately.

2011 / My Favorite Records

2011-12-09T16:50:00.000+07:00

First, an explanation. I won't be posting a best of '11 movie list this year. I spent much more time listening to music and reading books than watching movies, and although there were a couple I really liked (The Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris, Contagion), I definitely didn't see more than I did. This has less to do with declining cinephilic interests than frequent travel (I split my year between Long Island, California and Thailand)--and hope to catch up with Hugo and We Need to Talk About Kevin and J. Edgar and A Dangerous Method and Take Shelter and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and everything else in the coming year. However, this was the first year in several that I made a concerted effort to keep track of new music, and I'm so glad I did. I love all ten of these records to death, and encourage seeking them out if you haven't already.

#1. Matana Roberts / Coin Coin Part One: Gens de Couleur Libres

Visionary doesn't begin to describe it. This is easily the record of the year--Roberts arises out of a clear tradition (sixties post-bop jazz a la Dolphy & Coleman, before free came to mean something else) but I'm certain you've never heard anything like this, and she's not afraid to inject spirituals or dixieland grooves into the thing. History as something never dead, never past; I was only sixteen. There will never be any pictures of me. A loose concept album built around a slave who Roberts affectionately refers to as the beginning of the female hustling spirit--that is someone through whom history moves (see Godard and, again, Faulkner). Roberts does introduce some lovely melodies; however, she clearly prefers a more abrasive and expressive tone and when she puts her saxophone down her howls put Lennon's primal screams to shame. Harrowing stuff, yes, but if you only listen to one record this year, etc.

#2. The Weeknd / Thursday

The Weeknd's second mixtape (and masterpiece) of the year largely replaced the hooks of House of Balloons with eccentric, hard to pin down grooves, luxuriating in the kind of seductive narcotic stupor I tend to associate with a Philippe Garrel film. This is There's a Riot Goin' On for the twenty-first century, or, more accurately, R&B music for the end of the world, and although Tesfaye employs thuggish bravado throughout (the catchiest lyric: don't make me make you fall in love with a nigga like me), this is a sad, reflective record--& there's no mistaking what's hidden beneath the boasts (I know I got my issues he murmurs later). Tellingly, Thursday doesn't come across like a catalog of conquests in the way that Drake's Take Care often does (an album I like quite a bit); instead it's a demented and beautiful exploration of outer (sonic) and inner (lyrical) spaces.

#3. The Sandwitches / Mrs. Jones' Cookies

I've got no one beside me. I've got nothing inside me. Dark, unsettling and always beautiful, this is country music from the other side in more ways than one. The Sandwitches come from the strange psychedelic continent of San Francisco, but aside from their occasional employment of reverb you'd never guess it. This was one of the few rock and roll records in 2011 I could really get into (the new Radiohead, My Morning Jacket, Drive-By Truckers, Wilco and Black Keys albums left me pretty cold)--whether that says more about me or the contemporary "scene" I don't really know, or care, but there's something exhilarating about the idea of three girls from California kicking all the superstars' asses.

#4. Shabazz Palaces / Black Up

I listened to too much rap in '11 (I liked records from Kendrick Lamar, Drake, G-Side, A$AP Rocky, Pharoahe Monch, CunninLynguists, Jay-Z & Kanye West and Cities Aviv, among others), but nothing hit me like Black Up did. I can't explain it with words; I have to do it Butler spits at one point, which makes sense to a point--I could describe the tracks here all day without making heads or tails of them, and what Butler is doing is radically different from what most of the rappers I mentioned above are up to (the exception that proves the rule is A$AP and his collaborations with Clams Casino). Which is to say that Butler is a talented emcee but his raps are as textural as the beats, and the product is intentionally more about the sounds than the words. Like Thursday this is the music of the future, indebted to the psychedelic soul of Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone and Prince (as well as, I think, El-P's industrial sci-fi beats on The Cold Vein), but, ultimately, its own thing.

#5. Burial / Street Halo

Only twenty minutes long, and it's pretty clear that Burial isn't interested in offering too many surprises at this point. Still this is strange, timeless music, and "Stolen Dog" was one of the most beautiful things I heard all year, and certainly the saddest--this is the kind of stuff you want to disappear into.

#6. Daniel Levin Quartet / Organic Modernism

Not much to say about this one. There's a line whispered by Mrs. O'Brien as we cross Jupiter in The Tree of Life: I search for you. My hope. My child. Organic Modernism is like that. Exploratory, improvisatory music. Sometimes graceful, sometimes frenetic, remarkably concise--also, the great Nate Wooley on trumpet. Check it out.

#7. Unknown Mortal Orchestra / Unknown Mortal Orchestra

One of Curtis Mayfield's live records reworked, then reimagined--this is clearly an album built piece by piece, which is why the guitar dropouts in "How Can U Luv Me" make sense. I don't know if the whole lo-fi thing was a deliberate aesthetic decision or a financial one, but it gives the bass texture and I like the way the guy(s?) sings. This is very much a let's-make-a-record-like-the-records-we-love record, and as is almost always the case with this kind of thing, its greatness lies in the boys' inability to do this.

#8. Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans / Electric Fruit

Certainly the noisiest thing here, and in many ways the most exciting. You wouldn't guess it looking at her, but Halvorson is an utterly nasty guitarist, and as good as Walter and Evans are, they seem to be following her lead--if, that is, there's a lead to follow. This is everything improvisatory music should be in 2011--fierce, strange, open. It isn't cacophany; these people are really listening to each other. We should too.

#9. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy / Wolfroy Goes to Town

Nothing is better. Nothing is best. We are unhappy. We are unblessed. We are unfound. We are unseen. Nothing is coming. And nothing is clean. Oldham's most downbeat LP in a while. It's nice having the old boy back.

#10. Peaking Lights / 936

Dub. Or something like it.

Death Dog

2011-12-03T20:09:00.003+07:00

"Don't look so blue, Sippy," he said. "They'll gun me down pretty soon, and then you'll be spared days like this."

"Billy, I don't want them to gun you down," I said. "I'd like to be spared that, if I'm spared anything."

"Know what I dreamed the other night?" he asked rather cheerfully.

"I couldn't guess."

"I dreamed I was dead and the Death Dog was licking my skull," he said. "I didn't have a body but I still had my eyes, and that old dog was licking my skull. I can't wait to tell that one to the Tulip. She'll enjoy that one."

"I bet she will," I said.

- Larry McMurtry, Anything for Billy

Moving Beyond Materialism: Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica

2011-11-16T15:49:00.004+07:00

The ghost of John Ford, a ghost movie about the ghosts of movies. Or, just as fittingly, a case of estrangement. Angelica. First and foremost, it’s a digital film that refuses to belong to the twenty-first century, even as it captures a minivan capturing raindrops in its headlights. Isaac, crucially, is introduced tampering with a radio, coaxing out a series of mechanical sounds that wouldn’t be out of place at a Joe Colley show. A manipulator of sound, then, as well as images, struggling to dance despite his fixed trajectory. Ford is here, most obviously when Isaac recites poetry in the doorway of a mausoleum. So is Garrel, and it’s easy to imagine Oliveira watching Frontier of Dawn, glimpsing in it a script he wrote so many years before.

Conversations over breakfast: and what is matter if only energy? For Issac, and by extension Oliveira (and how significant is it that Oliveira wrote this as a young man; the old man only now able to document the young man’s spiritual struggle), reorientation is compulsory. He's not interested in constructing a critical argument--here even scientists talk like mystics. Instead, a scenario is presented. New worlds are glimpsed. Spirit and energy is rediscovered. Dreams are dreamt.* And people cross thresholds. At which point, of course, the movie too must end.

These things happen.

* Did Issac's dream remind any one else of Hirohito's in The Sun?

2011-10-07T06:04:00.003+07:00

The tragic is in realism. Reality is tragic: Man dies. That's Man's limitation: in the end he's just a photograph. What has truly evolved is the technical side of things. But the technical side belongs to science and art belongs to expression. The technical side isn't expression, it's something else. The essential is in the realism, in the fantastic, and in the comic.

- Manoel de Oliveira.

Song of the Thin Man

2011-10-01T02:50:00.002+07:00

It's Gloria Grahame and Marie Windsor and Patricia Morison--in other words, essential viewing. The problem is it's also one of those late Thin Man movies where maybe three great lines are spread across a whole picture (my favorite is Loy's: I'm practically under the table now, but not the way I'd like to be). Nick and Nora are a creation of the thirties, and Song of the Thin Man is a movie of the forties in the worst way. The constipated jazz lingo is probably some kind of crappy metaphor for what the series had become, although I don't think it really merits mentioning. I suspect Buzzell & co. know this, and bring the girls along to get everyone through it. It's the right idea, and justifies the movie in my mind. And maybe even this post.

---

Writing here is probably going to be pretty scarce for the next few months. I'm relocating to Thailand next week and will be pretty busy for awhile, although I'll update when I can. Posts will probably focus more on screencaps than anything else, as that's all I'll most likely have time for--which are the ones I like best anyway.

Key Films / Introduction

2011-09-30T22:50:00.002+07:00

Here's the deal: every Sunday morning (that's Saturday evening in New York) I will post capsule reviews of any movies I have watched that week that I admired, and think deserve to be seen and discussed. Once I have written at least five reviews for a year, a page will go up for that year and, the hope is, a catalog of what the key films from that year are will begin to form. This is not an attempt to canonize masterpieces, and part of the point, at least at first, will be juxtaposing films of interest that are radically different. Eventually I may decide to highlight my favorites of that year, or introduce top fives or tens, but for now the only goal is to make sense of each year in a way that moves beyond simply listing what I have or haven't seen. It goes without saying, but this isn't a project that "ends." Instead, it's just a way for me to try to make sense of my ongoing cinephilic concerns with y'all, and hopefully elicit some interesting conversations.

Back to Index.

Key Films / Index

2011-09-30T22:39:00.003+07:00

Introduction

1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929

Happy Birthday.

2011-09-23T05:21:00.003+07:00

2011-09-22T08:52:00.000+07:00

Very Briefly: Drive

2011-09-21T09:31:00.011+07:00

Movies are still acts of seduction; that's something too many "great" (or canonized) directors have forgotten, and perhaps one of the reasons so many filmgoers are attracted to a movie like Drive. But, for me at least, it's all theory. The subject--of a man trying to give up how he has learned to define himself in an attempt to glimpse the image, either of the girl loves or the world as he believes it can be revealed--is the story of cinema itself, and it's no surprise that many of the best movies of the twenty-first century (Midnight in Paris, The Strange Case of Angelica, Public Enemies, Frontier of Dawn, The New World, The Story of Marie and Julien, Solaris, etc.) have revolved around it. Drive does too, of course, but because Refn is disinterested in the actual act of seduction the movie becomes rather rote, a shadowplay of signifiers the director expects us to have faith in. He gives his audience too much credit, something Woody Allen never did. If Midnight in Paris is the best movie of 2011 (and I suspect it is), it's because Allen demands that we believe in the little world he has created, and brings Marion Cotillard along to convince us. To seduce us. Refn doesn't think he needs her. He's wrong.

Very Briefly: Colombiana

2011-09-16T07:15:00.001+07:00

"She’s not commanding. She’s a very intelligent actress. She is guessing and she’s inventing a relation with each director that creates an addiction to her. She’s not commanding because that would be too easy. She creates a need for her, when she’s an addiction. Somehow the film becomes…her. Commanding would be too easy, you know? It’s much more seducing the way she’s doing it."

- Claire Denis on Isabelle Huppert

What separates Olivier Megaton from Joe Wright or Nicolas Winding Refn or any other moviemaker releasing an action movie in 2011 that will be remembered a year from now is that he never feels compelled to make it a Olivier Megaton Picture. His effortless evocation of Bessonian mythology only confirms this. Megaton trusts his genre elements, and instead of turning Colombiana into a series of isolated pretty pictures he embraces the unexplained motives, absurd caricatures and horrible acting. Which is to say he's not afraid to wait and see where the picture wants to go, and just as the strange chemistry between Jason Statham and Natalya Rudakova became the focal point of Transporter 3 (culminating, of course, with the great striptease scene), here Megaton allows his actors to find the movie they want to make. Colombiana reminded me of Les Vampires a lot (don't tell me that's not Irma Vep's costume in the extraordinary police station set-piece), but most impressive is the way Saldana, like Musidora, ends up defining the rhythms of her scenes and, by extension, the textures of the whole movie. You can watch Film Socialism as many times as you want (I have); sometimes the movies are still about a girl and a gun. There's a guilelessness at work here, a very simple but concrete faith in what a movie can and should be that, frankly, I found inspiring.

2011-09-14T03:52:00.001+07:00

Am I a senile old man? Am I a sentimental old fool? I am not.

Very Briefly: Cold Fish

2011-09-09T13:47:00.002+07:00

Sono knows his Trouble Every Day (as well as, I suspect, Zulawski's Possession), but his employment of an anti-compositional handheld (non) style transforms what was horrific (and, paradoxically, realistic) in Denis' film into a particularly revolting brand of comedy here. Meaning is built into the boundaries of the frame, but because the frame is for Sono only something to contain the fearless idiots he hires nothing ends up sinking in. Artifice matters. The reason L'intrus is not only tolerable but great is that Denis understands this, and Sono's attempts to do away with basic cinematographic and editing patterns (rather than, like Denis & all great directors, expanding upon them and creating their own) introduces an even greater degree of unreality in the name of "realism." Sono is highly regarded in some circles, and I haven't seen Love Exposure (and don't intend to anytime soon), but I don't think he knows what the fuck he's doing. You hear it all the time--whether it's in reference to a late Scorsese, an early Godard, or any Tarantino--that it's a movie that has more to do with other movies than real life. But Cold Fish has more to do with pornos than any movie I can think of, and it's Sono's inability to narratively contextualize the outrageous misogyny and bizarre erotic behavior of his characters that keeps the film from relating to anything other than the director's own sexual urges.

A Screaming Man, Or Rediscovering John Ford in the Twenty-First Century

2011-09-08T02:21:00.004+07:00

"The western is also an important genre for me, because it was all I could see in the cinemas when I was growing up in Abéché. In westerns there is the sense of space, and there is this same space in this part of Chad, which is so desertified. In the last few years I’ve been rediscovering John Ford. His simple stories are still quite layered. Even in films when he was given the story and told to go and make it, he goes off like a good soldier to complete his mission."

- Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Yekaterina Golubeva

2011-08-19T05:34:00.009+07:00

Yekaterina Golubeva died last Sunday. She was 44.

I've written a lot on Claire Denis' L'intrus and I'm sure I'll write a lot more. It's one of my favorite movies, and one of the most formative for me as a moviegoer / thinker / cinephile / blogger / whatever. And it's haunted both by the presence and absence of Golubeva, as integral to the picture as Michel Subor. There's something undeniably terrifying about her performance, bringing to mind Rilke's assertion that beauty is "nothing but the beginning of terror." That sense of danger defines L'intrus, and it's certainly what she brought to the film; haunting it, delivering its opening lines, and ultimately keeping its secrets. Perhaps she is its secret.

(See also I Can't Sleep--which I will get around to writing about sooner or later).

She was an extraordinary actress.

Very Briefly: The Adjustment Bureau

2011-08-18T10:00:00.003+07:00

A deeply frustrating film but one that needs to be seen--at its best the fedoras and on-location photography recall an Anthony Mann docu-noir. The stubborn stupidity of the premise is unfortunate and difficult to ignore, although thankfully Nolfi is building a movie around a place rather than a plot. The digital cameras make the difference; they emphasize spontaneity--of an event as something actual--as well as the physicality of the stars. There is something deeply private about the actors' interactions--watching Damon blush or Blunt dance it's hard not to feel exposed. As it stands it's an unsuccessful genre film driven by a highly idiosyncratic (and hopefully influential) approach to making blockbusters. Next time Nolfi should focus more on the way Blunt gives someone the finger than the importance of hats to extradimensional travel.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

2011-08-16T23:14:00.005+07:00

Like many Hitchcocks it’s a film built around the characters’ sense of play, and if it’s hard to make sense of Gene Raymond's southern gentleman it’s probably because he’s the only one here who believes he is what he says he is. There’s a beautiful blonde drying her hair in front of a fire and a key, taut sequence at a carnival, but this is a graceful film in its own right, aided undoubtedly by the presence of Lombard, as much an auteur as the directors she worked with. Momentarily forgetting to treat her (and Montgomery) like farm animals, Hitch gives her enough of those glittering light close-ups to make RKO look like MGM, and even her not-quite-a-husband is given unusual latitude, such as when he struggles with the bloodying of his nose (the second time).

Great Entrances: Gary Cooper in The General Died at Dawn

2011-08-16T05:43:00.005+07:00

Cooper's get-up here is weird, which is fitting I guess because it's a really weird movie. Kind of like a Sternberg if Sternberg cared about his plots and had his characters talk a lot more; the real reason to watch it are Milestone's lyrical touches, which are entertaining even when they don't work (and often they do). The way his camera follows the billiard balls across the table just before catching its first glimpse of Madeleine Carroll's half-lit face--that's the stuff movies are made of.

2011-08-04T12:30:00.004+07:00

I love the idea this was what was hiding under that Sunrise wig. Perhaps because prints of it resurfaced later, Lucky Star isn't talked about the way 7th Heaven and Street Angel are, but it's their equal and features what may be my favorite Gaynor performance. 1929 was a hell of a year for Borzage; he released The River as well (which I wrote about, briefly, a little while ago) and although Lucky Star lacks that film's notoriety, there's still enough here to make your grandmother uncomfortable. And while I'd be the last person in the world to knock Murnau, there's no getting around the fact that in his film Gaynor kind of resembles a grandmother. Which I guess is my way of saying that he was a great director, but he wasn't necessarily her best director (which isn't to say that Borzage's films are better than Murnau's, obviously). Or, to qualify even further and hopefully put it more simply, you just can't beat the feisty Gaynor of the Borzage trilogy.

2011-06-25T06:04:00.001+07:00

Your Worst Enemies Are Hiding Inside: The Films of Claire Denis (No Fear, No Die)

2011-06-25T05:22:00.004+07:00

Shut up! You pack of dogs! Ever see one like this? Did anyone see a cock like this?

I don’t like those eyes. They’re empty. They’ll never show me your home.

The most neglected of Denis’ early features, and in my mind the best. It’s also one of the few “neo-noirs” that matter, and while its precedents are clear (The Set-Up, The Hustler, Cockfighter), with the possible exception of the Rossen it bests its influences. & it’s a bleak, seemingly spontaneous film—the voiceover of Dah (De Bankole) implies an understanding or mastery of the events. It evaporates as he loses control. He plays the rock, Jocelyn (Descas, with uncanny intelligence and intensity) plays the dreamer, haunted, silent, and unnerved--he's part of this world but never wanted to be. Like something out of a Nick Ray film, and because he’s in the same picture as the pretentious crook with the pretty girl it’s clear it’s not going to end well. A female is a female...it’s hormonal Dah says at one point and Denis may be whispering the words into his ear—there are things you can’t escape. Or control. She’s already looking ahead to Beau travail too; Jocelyn dances in a nightclub, clinging to a white girl who glances at him nervously, ambiguously—what is she thinking? What am I in the presence of? Eventually she retreats and the camera lingers on Toni dancing in a corner, consumed by the lights and crowds. Toni keeps betting on the white at the end too. Even though she knows he’s lost. 8,000 on the white she yells. Jocelyn hears. It’s all too late. I love that.

A couple months ago I saw Serge Bozon present his two favorite films about male friendship. They were Allan Dwan’s Tennessee’s Partner and Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage. I might have went with No Fear, No Die.

Expand Your Horizons

2011-06-25T00:43:00.002+07:00

Posted at Avon Theater in Stamford, CT.

The River

2011-06-24T05:50:00.002+07:00

There is a river called life.
Its source is a hidden fountain.
The sea is its goal.
Upon it sail the rafts of human destinies.

While it goes without saying we would all like to see the film in a more complete form, there's still something deeply moving about watching a still image that was once a moving image. And strange moving images too--a woman with a crow and a man floating towards a whirlpool are some of the first we see, and it's hard to shake the feeling that there are forces moving here beneath the surface. As is the case with many masterpieces, analysis is almost pointless. What can be said, for instance, about the way Marsdon transfers his own spirit into the crow (an obvious gesture that somehow remains impossibly mysterious)? A mystical film, but one of contradictions--its eroticism is inseparable from its religiosity and even though Farrell and Duncan are playing "types" (far more than they would be in City Girl), there is a degree of emotional nuance that seems rediscovered every time you watch it.

(When Farrell is resurrected, he watches a movie of his life.)

Griffith / Costa

2011-06-22T04:29:00.006+07:00

A title card that should be carved into the inner eyelids of every filmmaker. Griffith, who invented nothing but did everything better than anybody else, grew up with actualities, and even though his films are built around "ideas" or "messages," their greatness lies in the director's refusal to cut, and the extraordinary tension between the narrative purpose of a shot and its own living realness.

Pedro Costa understands this:

When the Lumière brothers did a shot, the movement inside the shot is almost impossible to re-create today. I am always very afraid when I see a little dog crossing the street in a Lumière brothers film, afraid it’s going to be crushed by a Model T. It’s something very concrete, this menace. Then Chaplin did the same thing consciously, and Stroheim took it further. We could see so many things in those films that, today, you only see in some Filipino or Chinese films, or sometimes on TV, in some documentaries. Everything beautiful and everything dangerous and everything that has to do with society disappeared a little bit from films. I’m becoming very reactionary, but Straub would say you have to go back to the past to push things forward.

2011-06-19T02:59:00.002+07:00

"But these issues--of public and private taste and the ways they intersect--are becoming more germane for civilians as well, as Facebook and Goodreads and Yelp and Netflix urge us every day to share our Likes and four-star ratings with the world. And I think it’s a source of anxiety for many, as it is for me: this sense of wanting to stay engaged with the culture, both high and low, but feeling, rightfully, that we no longer have the energy to take it all in."

- Dan Kois, "Sometimes a Vegetable Is Just a Vegetable"

"But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face; it was not his manners. It was him--his point of view. When they talked about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they complained of about Charles Tansley was that until he had turned the whole thing round and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them--he was not satisfied. And he would go to picture galleries they said and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not."

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

2011-06-18T23:07:00.001+07:00

Prima Ballerina (Edgar Degas, 1876)

2011-06-17T10:29:00.001+07:00

Life Imitating Movies

2011-06-17T03:00:00.004+07:00

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel, 2008)

I only recently became aware of a news item (linked here) startling in its suggestion that not only does life sometimes end up imitating movies, but that everything in a Garrel film is perhaps for real. Which makes sense, in a way. I can't think of a more autobiographical filmmaker, and even in something as (relatively) conventional as Frontier of Dawn, in which he seems to really be telling a story (again, relatively), there's still that horrific sense of danger, of a gun held to the head. I've only been watching his movies for about a year now, but what makes him one of the most astonishing filmmakers (of his time or any) is that by returning cinema to ground zero (to a shot, a glance, a woman drinking, a young photographer slowly looking away), he captures both the origins of the cinematic process and his own becoming, not only as an artist but as a human being. It's hard to express. There were silent movies, and then there was something else. And Garrel was born after all this, but it seems he was made before. While Godard was watching Renoir I suspect Garrel was still watching the Lumieres.

What Calls for Thinking?

2011-06-09T04:17:00.006+07:00

The moment in The Tree of Life I remember best, and maybe affected me most: Mrs. O'Brien spinning in circles with one of her sons in her arms, then extending one of her fingers outwards and softly speaking that's where God lives as the Smetana piece reaches its first crescendo. So much of what Malick has been up to in his last few movies can be traced, I think, to Martin Heidegger's essay "What Calls for Thinking." The lack Welsh speaks so beautifully of is related to, if not synonymous with, the sense of withdrawal Heidegger discusses, just as it's hard not to suspect that the voice that urges Smith ever on isn't related to the mysterious calling referred to in the conclusion of the essay. And I think it's in The Tree of Life too--or rather I think Heidegger's thoughts on "pointing" might have been a jumping-off point for the sequence. I've included an excerpt from the essay below:

To the extent that man is in this draft, he points toward what withdraws. As he is pointing that way, man is the pointer. Man here is not first of all man, and then also occasionally someone who points. No. Drawn into what withdraws, drawn toward it and thus pointing into the withdrawal, man first is man. His essential being lies in being such a pointer. Something which in itself, by its essential being, is pointing, we call a sign. As he draws toward what withdraws, man is a sign. But since this sign points toward what draws away, it points not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal. The sign remains without interpretation.

2011-06-08T03:12:00.004+07:00

Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)

---

Respect man's nature without wishing it more palpable than it is.

(Robert Bresson)

Briefly: Island in the Sky / Midnight in Paris

2011-06-07T10:50:00.001+07:00

It's not one of Wellman's best, or even one of his better late films. Still, moments surprise, none moreso than a key sequence in which one of the characters gets lost in a snowstorm. The bitter irony, of course, is that he's mere meters from the plane and shelter, and as a standalone piece of filmmaking it's comparable to the best bits of The Ascent and Sir Arne's Treasure.

---

I kind of loved Midnight in Paris. You know--really, really loved it. Allen makes great use of Wilson's sincerity and Brody's eyebrows, but as hysterical as the whole thing is, it's finally Cotillard's movie. She gives a disarming performance (the movie seems to stop, startled, whenever she gets a close-up), defining everything the movie is and isn't. And it's a film of real feeling and rhythm, in which the contradictory impulses and longings that should be kind of familiar by now seem to have been discovered anew.

2011-06-07T10:31:00.002+07:00

Wedlock House: An Intercourse (Stan Brakhage, 1959)

(And a huge influence on The Tree of Life, methinks.)

2011-06-06T19:57:00.000+07:00

That's Where God Lives: Initial Thoughts on The Tree of Life

2011-06-02T04:00:00.004+07:00

Note: spoilers, obviously. Big ones. Read at your own risk.

“This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with his being, does not know love, even if he should ascribe to it the feelings that he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love is a cosmic force. For those who stand in it and behold in it, men emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness; and the good and the evil, the clever and the foolish, the beautiful and the ugly, one after another become actual and a You for them; that is, liberated, emerging into a unique confrontation.”

- Martin Buber, I and Thou

“You know what subjective means?” Mr. O’Brien asks his son Jack at one point. There’s a lot going on in the scene. Jack watches his father teasing the waitress the same way he teased a girl in school (“I’m more like you than her,” the son says at one point, referring to his mother). “It’s something you can’t prove to other people,” he continues. That’s probably not an exact quote.

If The Tree of Life is the subjective experience of one man’s childhood (and I don’t think it is), it’s worth asking whose experience it is. The film’s central framing device suggests that this is all going on in Jack’s head, even though the first images we see are those of his mother’s childhood and the film often seems to be expanding far beyond the character’s consciousness. Which is nothing new for Malick—as a director, he has always excelled at interrupting the subjective (often self-absorbed) ruminations of his protagonists, but never before has he dealt with the chronological shifts or the temporal structure that is employed here. And I really don’t think the “birth of the cosmos” sequence occurs in Jack’s head—there’s an ontological reality to it that strikes me as fairly unshakeable.

So—I guess the place to start is: what exactly is going on? I’m not sure, and I don’t think I’m supposed to. To put it another way; by so radically confusing the senses of interiority and exteriority that seemed to be a lot more digestible in his other films, Malick may be repudiating that sense of dualism. Or not—words cannot really catch the meaning here.

Let’s skip to the end. A lot of people have described it as heaven—which is complicated at the very least by the fact that both Jack and Mr. O’Brien are still alive. Again, there are odd things going on. If Jack’s mother is dead, and it’s not clear that she is, then perhaps it is being suggested that it is only through the eldest son that she can finally give R.L. back to God. But that doesn’t seem right either. A couple critics have derisively compared this scene to the psychic sequences in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter (a film I liked quite a bit, by the way), but I thought of Inland Empire, and the final credits sequence in which all the characters hang out in a big mansion, drinking and singing and dancing.

There are no easy reference points, and although many critics will continue to bring up 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s more comparable to something like Andrei Rublev or Intolerance, works of jarring transitions and bizarre, sometimes goofy impulses that don’t try to cloak their insanity with a sense of clinical exactitude. Even Brian De Palma’s wacky, undervalued Mission to Mars is a better point of comparison.

Several times I thought: was this film made about my childhood? And I don’t think I’m the only one. The story appears to be rooted in a very specific time and place; a Texas suburb in the fifties, presumably culled from the director’s own memories. But I grew up in a Long Island suburb in the nineties, and this often seemed to be about my own upbringing. Is it specific to the experience of growing up in an American suburb in the last hundred years? In America in general? Or is it even more universal than that? I really don’t know, but the familiarity is unnerving. Events from my own past, things my father said to me—and like I said, I suspect there were others in the audience that felt the same way.

It wasn’t until the final sequence that I realized just how much Jessica Chastain looks like Liv Ullmann.

Mr. O’Brien could be John Smith’s great-grandson.

There's too much to digest, but I've been living with it since seeing it. It's a great film.

French Cancan

2011-05-27T08:00:00.002+07:00

You want to put me in a cage like a canary? I warn you, it won't last long. You couldn't stand me after a couple of weeks. You want the Danglard of the theater or Danglard who wears slippers? I've never worn them and never will! I'll give you some good advice. If you want a lover, Alexandre's perfect. If you want a husband, marry Paulo. Choose between jewels and palaces or a happy retirement by the fireside, with honor and dignity, but I can't give you either! Do I look like Prince Charming? Only one thing matters to me--what I create. And what do I create? You! There have been others before. There'll be others to come. In the end, you think it matters what you and I want? All that counts is what they want. We're at the service of the public.

Gabin is more of a stand-in for Renoir-the-director here than Renoir-the-actor ever was; and in a characteristic moment of unflinching honesty he seems to be saying yes, I can be a lout & yes, I'm just putting on stripteases. I mean, come on;

But so are we all, eventually, and look what he does with motion, with the hiding and revealing of spirit and feeling as one character tramples across the frame;

That's cinema, as they say. And so is the striptease, an initial act of provocation, of performance, that is transformed by its ecstatic nature (and the creator's genius) into a celebration across lines of class, allegiance, temperament and anything else...but a celebration of what exactly? Of everything that came before. Of movement, emotion, slumming fogeys who still remember how to dance and romantic princes who don't know how to shoot themselves. And the way a beautiful woman caught between a baker and a prince and Jean Gabin runs across a theater floor.

Dreyer / Malick

2011-05-24T04:45:00.001+07:00

Because I did you a great wrong. I never asked if you wished to be mine…I took you. I took your youth. That is a wrong for which I can never make amends.

Yes, it is true. You took my youth. My joy. I burned for someone to love. I dreamed of a little child to hold in my arms. Not even that did you give me.

I think you still love the man, and that you will not be at peace until you see him. In my vanity I thought I could make you love me, and one cannot do that, or should not. You have walked blindly into a situation you did not anticipate. I will not rob you of your self-respect.

You are the man I thought you were. And more.

Peixoto / Thoreau

2011-05-21T06:27:00.003+07:00

Limite (Mario Peixoto, 1931)

"Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live and begin to be. A boatman stretched on the deck of his craft and dallying with the noon would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze."

- Henry Thoreau

Godard / Griffith / Ford / Malick

2011-05-18T22:04:00.004+07:00

Do you understand it's not Eglantine's story but a moment in history--history moving through Eglantine?

It's only appropriate to think about Malick the way we think about our greatest film artists, about Griffith and Ford. History moving through Smith, through Pocahontas; just as it moves through Eglantine or Henriette Girard or Ethan Edwards.

Some Thoughts on Terrence Malick

2011-05-16T21:45:00.003+07:00

One day while taking a look at some vistas in Dad's stereopticon it hit me that I was just this little girl born in Texas whose father was a sign painter who only had just so many years to live. It sent a chill down my spine and I thought where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody? This very moment if my mom had never met my dad? If she had never died? And what's the man I'll marry gonna look like? What's he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now by some coincidence even though he doesn't know me? Does it show on his face? For days afterwards I lived in dread. Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land and this never happened.

"In this voice we hear language itself in the process of struggling toward sense, meaning, insight—just as, elsewhere, we see the diverse elements of nature swirling together to perpetually make and unmake what we think of as a landscape, and human figures finding and losing themselves, over and over, as they desperately try to cement their individual identities or 'characters.'"

- Adrian Martin

I spent the weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image, where Malick's four features were screened. Matt Zoller Seitz was there, as was one of the producers of The Thin Red Line. It was an incredible two days.

Seitz was the ideal presence for something like this and he did a great job. Film critics have worked hard to earn the reputation of being some of the least likeable and charismatic people on the planet; in any context Seitz would have come across as very down-to-earth, and here that was kind of miraculous. He introduced The New World with the most articulate and direct of words: "my favorite movie."

I've seen Malick's films many, many times, although not on the big screen and never in such a compressed period. Like a lot of people I tend to group The New World and The Thin Red Line together (same goes for Days of Heaven and Badlands). But I don't think that's right. Watching these movies close together you really appreciate how much each film builds upon the ones before it. Malick may be the only filmmaker who has managed to make every one of his movies the best thing he's done up to that point.

The Thin Red Line benefitted most from a big screen viewing. Undoubtedly, this is partly rooted in the fact that the only thing I've seen it on is an old VHS and the original "War Classics" DVD. But even on Blu-Ray I cannot imagine it being comparable to seeing it in this context. It's simply impossible to appreciate the relationship between gunfire and the humming of insects otherwise.

There are obvious things that you feel like an idiot for not catching originally. There's a scene in The Thin Red Line that I never quite got, I don't know why. Not that I thought it was bad, but I didn't even realize what was going on. Caviezel stands over the body of a dead Japanese soldier. Only his face remains unburied. The soldier speaks to him. Know that I was too. Extraordinary stuff, and really key to understanding Malick.

Another thing that I never really appreciated--Malick's male protagonists really aren't as alike as I thought they were. And they may be as written, but the director gives incredible latitude to his actors and they end up becoming their own men, perhaps even apart from the creator's conception. This is important, I think. A "touch" isn't unique to Lubitsch; many directors find a way of imprinting a singular style upon the way their players act. In a Weerasethakul movie there's an extraordinarily uniform way in which characters interact and bounce their dialogues off each other. That's not really present in any of these movies, and creates a fascinating dynamic. It also helps emphasize the disconnect between his characters' half-hearted displays of machismo and their inner melancholic longings. That's also present in the films of Scorsese and Mann (both of them), among others, but Malick goes beyond that by extending this sense of inner and outer lives beyond male, female, animal or plant. What his films are defined by is a sense that these contradictory interiorities and exteriorites aren't unique to the self but fundamental to understanding our universe as it exists (as opposed to how it is experienced).

The first reviews of The Tree of Life are in and they're decidedly mixed; apparently some critics are surprised to learn Malick is religious. Have they watched any of his movies? "I feel like I'm fourteen again and Return of the Jedi is about to come out," Seitz said at one point. Amen.

Your Worst Enemies Are Hiding Inside: The Films of Claire Denis (Chocolat)

2011-05-11T03:00:00.004+07:00

I must also explain this to you. You see the line. You see it, but it doesn't exist. The framing suggests Ozu was always on Denis' mind (not surprising, given her association with Jarmusch), but this is already very much a "Claire Denis film" especially in the direct sensuality of the opening scene. Critics like to call Chocolat autobiographical and it's not hard to see why--the protagonist's knowing mischievousness (do you think we'll be buried here?) is recognizable if you've ever seen the director interviewed, and of course she grew up in Africa herself. Still, I don't think it's the best way to approach any of her films; like Bresson, what she's really after is the way people act and are essentially (as unfashionable a word as that is). It's a different kind of personal filmmaking, too concerned with detail to be biographical (or psychological, thank god). Boschi looks great in her Searchers dress but De Bankolé is even better; he was always handsome but there's something unnerving about seeing him so young, especially since he's playing a servant. The director's underrated sense of humor is here too, and it's very prominent--a scene in which Boschi tries to tell the chef to cook French is hysterical, revealing a sensibility that could be mistaken for Lubitschean worldliness if her later films weren't there to clarify. It's her first attempt at making a movie absolutely faithful to reality (not to be redundant, but again this ties her to Bresson), and although there's uneasy tension (absent in her later masterpieces) between this and her social and political concerns, it's still a haunting and suggestive film.

Your Worst Enemies Are Hiding Inside: The Films of Claire Denis (An Introduction)

2011-05-08T03:32:00.004+07:00

Movies in Movies: Robert Aldrich's Hustle

2011-05-05T03:47:00.002+07:00

Day of the Outlaw

2011-05-03T09:00:00.002+07:00

For many critics this is one of the great westerns, not to mention de Toth's best film (Fred Camper called the final ride through the Wyoming terrain "one of the most despairing visions in all of cinema"). A bit odd, although almost certainly great as well; it doesn't seem to belong to the studio system in the way that Ride Lonesome and Rio Bravo do (both released the same year), but it's certainly not a revisionist independent either. De Toth was always very much part of the "system" (nothing wrong with that); he started with Scott what Boetticher finished and gave even the most generic scripts a sense of visual style (the muzzle blasts in Man in the Saddle, for instance). But this is something else. Robert Ryan wasn't generally the kind of actor you wrote scripts for but you have to wonder here--no one else could have delivered that soliloquy, and it is only because Ryan himself is so stubbornly uncharismatic (not the right word, but he's a hard one to describe) that you can buy into his moment of self-revelation. Admittedly, de Toth doesn't have complete control over his material in the way that Hawks or Boetticher do; the acting is all over the place and Tina Louise and the matinee idol playing the youngest member of the gang do not belong in Wyoming. But it works, perhaps because it's a film defined by left turns--you know what's going to happen for the first fifteen minutes and then you're clueless until it's over. And while I wouldn't go as far as Camper does he's essentially right. It's a very bleak movie, one of the few where a frontier town really looks like a frontier town. You won't find much mercy anywhere in Wyoming Ryan reminds Louise, and by the end of the film the only important question being asked is why do you want to die? It ends not with a shootout but a sense of disintegration--the final gunman, his fingers frozen stiff, can't even pull the trigger.

Pocket Money

2011-05-01T07:10:00.002+07:00

Hey, did you ever think about colored salt?

What?

Salt. Colored salt. So you know when you've shaken too much on your food. I don't think most people can tell when it's white.

I never thought about that.

Well, there's lots of salt down here. And the dye you could get from the states. Something to bear in mind.

If Badlands is a tragedy with a lot of comical touches then Pocket Money is a comedy built around a downbeat scenario. What makes Newman so funny here, and so out of place as a character, is that he listens to what people say to him (an uncommon trait). Early on, asked why he's been hiding he replies I hadn't been hiding. I just need a room is all. (Another great moment like this: Well, I'm not gonna get into bed with him. I'll say that much.) Newman plays it straight as someone constantly bewildered by why people act and talk the way they do, and gives the film its sense of relaxed, humorous character. But he's also always in trouble. It turns out his cattle have the clap (no worse than a bad cold he cautiously tells a pretty and overpolite bank teller) and out of desperation falls in with a Texan chiseler, played with a splendid sense of mischief by Strother Martin. The script could have almost as easily been written by Portis; these opening scenes certainly recall Norwood and Martin, it's worth remembering, was the most memorable presence in True Grit. Still, Pocket Money strikes me as Malick's film, and at the very least the sense of language and place would have been recognizable even if his name was not on it. Newman, under Martin's orders, goes down to Mexico and hooks up with an old friend (Lee Marvin, very, very loose and obviously having a great time) in the hope of acquiring a great deal of cattle for a rodeo. And all sorts of hell ensues. The plot doesn't really matter; the movie kind of falls apart in its attempts to reach a suitable resolution, and the way Marvin karate chops the air as Newman sits on Martin is far more important than how it is they actually got there. Instead, it ends up being all about the characters (or maybe the actors), and the way they bounce their ridiculous schemes and beautiful lies off each other becomes the thing. And there is even time for the odd lyrical touch, looking ahead to Badlands and beyond: You know they say that every man has a star. Now a guy should find his star out there unless he doesn't have one. Which is maybe the case with me. If what they're saying is right guys could just follow their stars. But not me 'cause I don't have one.

Solaris

2011-04-30T11:01:00.000+07:00

As we study Solaris, the most interesting thing is it seems to be reacting almost like it knows it's being observed. We can't explain it.

"If Malick has indeed found a way to transpose such thoughts for our meditation, he can have done it only, it seems to me, by having discovered, or discovered how to acknowledge, a fundamental fact of film's photographic basis; that objects participate in the photographic presence of themselves; they participate in the re-creation of themselves on film; they are essential in the making of their appearances."

- Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed

A film transformed by the director's inability to locate the "visionary"; forced to emphasize a very specific and very Hollywood smallness (it could have been made in '59), Soderbergh stumbles upon something very elusive and tragic and a bit beyond Tarkovsky's grasp. It's certainly the director's Vertigo. The image is everywhere; first discussed in the therapy session that opens the film, then coming to obsess Kelvin, the creator of the image, and not-Rea, the image itself. But I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong, that somehow I was wrong about everything. Or, even better: I'm not the person I remember. Or at least I'm not sure I am. I mean I do remember things but I don't remember being there. Also, there are no pictures (images) in Kelvin's apartment, yet when he recreates it, recreates an image of it, you know what is going to be on the fridge. Soderbergh ("the formalist") is a thinker, but his filmmaking isn't academic--it is an incredibly poignant and moving movie.

Solaris came out a year before The Story of Marie and Julien. I wonder if Rivette saw it. I wonder if he liked it.

Yellow Sky

2011-04-28T09:10:00.003+07:00

Fuller gets the auteurist street cred but Wellman did it all first; his characters were punching cameras back in '32 and here he pioneers the shot that would appear far more famously in a certain Barbara Stanwyck western nine years later. Like most of Wellman's westerns Yellow Sky is a bit too arty, and lacks the fierce directness of his best thirties melodramas. Still, it's essential viewing, as weird as Track of the Cat and featuring MacDonald's undeniably gorgeous photography (think My Darling Clementine). I love the idiosyncratic touches, such as how all the characters have names like something out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (although Wellman ups the ante by having the only female named "Mike"), and though Peck is characteristically awful as the ringleader Widmark is usually around to make sure the star doesn't say his lines too slow. The director's other oaters are here too--the saloon recalls The Ox-Bow Incident and the flats recall Westward the Women, although the film thankfully lacks the former's speeches or the latter's domestic sentimentality...at least up until the ending, which is terrible. I prefer to think of it as some kind of absurd vision seen by Peck before drawing his last breath, but in any context it's pretty indefensible, especially considering what came before. The shootouts look ahead to Mann but they're different too, more ethereal perhaps, and as the bandits cling to the walls of the cabins and canyons in the eerie half-light, they resemble ghosts more than gunfighters.

The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador

2011-04-25T04:35:00.005+07:00

Like Feuillade's Tragic Error in suggesting that movies have always been about making movies, although Perret goes further in arguing that the cinematographic process itself can save us. And cure dementia. And solve a crime. And bring together star-crossed lovers.

Decoy

2011-04-23T07:45:00.009+07:00

Don't let that face of yours go to your head.

Or to yours?

Wouldn't matter if it did. People who use pretty faces like you use yours don't live very long anyway.

How do you think I should use my face, Jo Jo?

Make it like Detour! you can almost hear some poverty row exec screaming, and why else the seemingly arbitrary title? (Actually, if you think about it, it's really kind of brilliantly titled). Not much here makes sense--noir archetypes speaking science fiction when they're not making asses of themselves (di-cho-to-my...what a beautiful word), although maybe the folks behind the camera hoped that with the gorgeous Gillie in front of it no one would give a shit. This is the first of her two American movies and she runs with it, matching and then eclipsing all the crazy in the material. Crazy like wanting to resurrect your hubby after he's been gassed rather than trying to break him out of jail before the execution, you know, like normal people do. Also, the way she shrieks they killed for it! they all killed for it! and you! you too! you killed for it! as she shoots one of her lovers over and over and over, although I wonder if she knew this is what she was getting into when she decided to cross the pond (she was married to Bernhard, the producer and director here). Nothing else in the film really compares to her although I love Sheldon Leonard too, the best dressed flatfoot in town murmuring his lines as if he were in a western and pointing his gun at a bellboy as if it were a badge. Gillie and Leonard share a scene that bookends the film and while the final reel is deliriously over-the-top Gillie's kiss-off, a sneering, malicious gesture, stays with you just as much as the murders do. It's directed at the audience as much as it is at Leonard. And that's why I love Monogram.

Note: This is the first of many revised and compressed reposts from the old site I will be doing so if a bit of it looks familiar that's why, although I've tinkered with it quite a bit. On the plus side, this will allow me to be updating this blog at a very regular pace at least for a long while.

Sir Arne's Treasure

2011-04-21T09:20:00.006+07:00

Here's one of the few truly Biblical films, and while Stiller explicitly alludes to Jonah it's the often quoted line from Job I think of. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Stiller films snow like Sheptiko, as only someone who has lived with it can, and there's a real bleakness to his images, as if they come out of the same place that the best Murnau and Malick do, out of something unknown and primordial. The massacre the film is centered around is an aberration to an extent, but it's also something that arises out of the landscape, very much a part of an epoch that has to be bled out of the land. The landscape is not the only thing wild and untamed; I hope they are alive so I may rip their hearts from their chests and that's not the murderers talking. Is it that viciousness that ties Elsalill (Mary Johnson, absolutely incredible) to Sir Archi? I don't think so. Instead it's the event itself; she loses her sister and he loses his humanity and all they have is a ghost to cling to. Like a dream. Like a ship rising out of the ice. That's the fabric of the film, something Sir Archi grasps at--pleading for Elsalill to go with him--crying out that he is lost without her--glimpsing something very primal and strange and perhaps unmentionable just beyond his line of sight. He knows he is doomed without her and she knows she is doomed with him. (I am again the man I once was he says, a line that could be out of The New World, and maybe is). Elsalill, caught between a ghost and a man, a film full of impossible choices, or maybe no choices at all. But there's a procession, a re-gathering. And then comes the sea.

Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match

2011-04-19T14:29:00.002+07:00

The Law and Jake Wade

2011-04-19T14:10:00.003+07:00

The premise is lean as Boetticher (Sturges borrows Henry Silva from The Tall T), and even if Robert Taylor isn't the equal of Randolph Scott, Widmark is as good as Boone or Marvin ever were. Like many, many westerns, The Law and Jake Wade is a study of male friendship, and here its concern is with what two men can or cannot do for one another, and how possible it is to deal with that disappointment. The opening sequence is lovely only in retrospect, the silhouette of Wade standing beneath the sheriff sign, considering both what he has been and what he is about to betray. Sturges structures the film so that it is only by night that Jake and Clint can discuss their past, remembering and trying to linger in their memories. If you got honor you don't run out on a friend. As Clint Widmark is so good he's scary, but he's not stupid, and Sturges' mise en scene pretty well guarantees the impossibility of reconciliation between the two characters. The nighttime Indian raid may be a bit much, but when Clint and Jake finally stand off in a manufactured shoot-out the orchestra shuts up and Sturges' framing almost resembles that of Man of the West, Anthony Mann's masterpiece of the same year. There's real and startlingly direct physical force in the way Clint knocks out the post holding up the roof of a decrepit porch, but what strikes me even more is the way both actors pause for a half-second, staring at each other before pulling the trigger. As an action movie, everything happens too quickly for real regret to arise, but there's sad and profound power in that momentary stillness.