April 2008: 15 Mini Reviews
April 15, 2008
The last fifteen films I’ve seen.
Enchanted (’07): The best non-Pixar Disney theatrical release in years, thanks in no small part to the wonderful Amy Adams, playing a cartoon princess who lands in the magical realism of Times Square, thanks to a curse put upon her by a wicked witch, and finds the new world unaccustomed to the fairytale clichés of her old world. Writer Bill Kelly’s long dormant script is brought to life by veteran Disney director Kevin Lima, who obviously takes pains to quote from as many classic princess films as possible, while the sweet innocence of Adams, singing “Happy Working Song” to a flock of pigeons and roaches in the key of Snow White, gives the heavy referencing script a perfectly adorable modern heroine. In a fall filled with Anton Chigurh’s and Daniel Plainview’s, Adams’ Princess Giselle was the perfect counterbalance, scoring both with critics, who are usually stubborn to this kind of whimsy, and audiences alike.
The Big Lebowski (’98): The Coen brothers followed up their much praised “Fargo” with one of their strangest comedies to date, a convoluted mystery in the mold of “The Big Sleep”, starring Jeff Bridges as The Dude, a lazy stoner who mistakenly becomes involved in a kidnapping plot against a millionaire with the same name. Admittedly, when I saw this in ’98 I didn’t know what to make of it, but over the years I’ve watched it with more of an open attitude towards the Coen’s emphasis of character over plot - The Dude, his bowling cronies (John Goodman and Steve Buscemi), and the plethora of hilarious supporting characters, most notably John Turturro as an arrogant, sexually suggestive league bowler. It would seem that coming off of their biggest hit to date, and arguably most stylistically sedate, the self indulgence of the Coen brothers runs rampant here, in the bizarre dream sequences – including a bowling themed Busby Berkeley inspired dance number – and the unwieldy kidnapping plot, but thanks to a terrific ensemble cast, the film rightfully earns its status as a cult classic.
Trouble in Paradise (’32): Following a series of popular musical comedies, Ernst Lubitsch gets back to what he does best, witty romance with suggestive pre-code banter, with this sophisticated fore bearer to the more famous screwball comedies of the latter half of the decade. Romancing both Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall is the epitome of handsome rakishness, playing a master jewel thief who schemes with his lover (Hopkins) to swindle perfume heiress Francis, falling in love with the sexually aggressive proprietress instead. Lubitsch’s revered style is surprisingly fluid for a film of the early ‘30’s, and his collaboration with playwright Samson Raphaelson, his most frequent partner, is filled with the kind of innuendo that would be virtually impossible to get away with in the coming code era, but was of a particular fantasy escape for audiences during the depression.
The Merry Jail (’17): Presented as a supplement on Criterion’s excellent edition of “Trouble in Paradise”, along with a first rate commentary by Lubitsch scholar Scott Eyman, is this standard class farce from the master’s silent days in Germany, about a drunken cad who skips out on a mandatory night in jail to attend a wild soiree, where his fuming wife plays a trick to learn him a lesson in love and obedience, certainly a precursor to his more polished Hollywood romantic comedies to come. Of particular note here is the presence of Emil Jannings as the permanently soused jail guard, seven years before “The Last Laugh”, but already one of Germany’s most reliable screen character actors.
06/05 (’04): Crackerjack political thriller from the Dutch activist Theo van Gogh, whose brutal assassination shortly before the film’s release made worldwide headlines. Thijs Romer heads a particularly good looking cast (including knockouts Tara Elders and Caro Lenssen) as a newspaper photographer who inadvertently stumbles upon a conspiracy surrounding the murder of opposition leader Pim Fortuyn, a real life assassination on May 6th, 2002 fictionalized here to satisfy the director’s own political theories. What stands out here is not van Gogh’s conspiracy theory – that Fortuyn was killed by a coalition of rich guys with foreign interests to keep the status quo – but that the film builds a surprisingly taut mystery, and sustains interest for nearly two hours, around a meek paparazzi whose innocent snapshots find him in way over his head.
The Way I Spent the End of the World (’06): Slow going, episodic, and dreary examination of peasantry in the waning days of communist Romania, but realistic and precise enough to hold a poetic fascination for its characters when a lesser film would resort to melodrama and tragedy. Seen primarily through the eyes of a teenage girl, whose parents want her to marry the boy next door for his father’s political ties, and her school-age brother, who runs around with the neighborhood kids dreaming of assassinating Ceausescu, director Catalin Mitulescu’s film is concerned less with plot and more with the psychological conditions of growing up in a repressive state, where independent thought can get you expelled from school, or worse, locked and tortured in jail.
Shine a Light (’08): It may not be your ideal vision of visual beauty – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood in extreme close up on a five-story tall IMAX screen – but lovingly edited and photographed by longtime fan Martin Scorsese, with a handful of master cinematographers to capture every strut and riff, this intimate concert film is a glowing example of the longevity and endless appeal of The Rolling Stones. Where “The Last Waltz” was a celebration of a band (The Band) at the end of their career, “Shine a Light” is just the opposite, a celebration of a band that, into their fifth decade together, have seemingly no intentions of ever stopping, looking as energetic as a band three times their junior. The carefully chosen set list is filled with Stones clichés that sometimes seem tired, like “Jumping Jack Flash”, “Start Me Up”, and “Brown Sugar”, but on seldom played album cuts like “Some Girls”, “You Got the Silver”, and “All Down the Line”, the true genius of the Stones’ entire canon, the famous and the not so, comes out for full sonic effect.
Michael Clayton (’07): One of the best movies of last year, Tony Gilroy’s riveting study of corporate deception and greed, starring a never better George Clooney as a lawyer called into “fix” a billion dollar deal gone awry, is the kind of film that warrants multiple viewings, if not just to set the record on the back-and-forth story timeline, but to fully grasp the intricacies of the filmmaking and performances. The DVD doesn’t offer any documentaries, and a few scant deleted scenes do little to enhance the already intricate plot, but the filmmaker’s commentary with Gilroy and his editor brother is an ace track, filled with priceless tidbits about Robert Elswit’s precision framing, more intimate than his Oscar-winning work on “There Will Be Blood”, and their countless 70’s era filmic inspirations.
Scandal (’50): Sandwiched between “Stray Dog” and “Rashomon”, this less revered drama from Akira Kurosawa takes on tabloid journalism with a decidedly American flavor. Toshiro Mifune is handsome, and somewhat bland, as a reclusive painter who is exploited in the press for having an innocent lunch with a famous singer, hiring hack lawyer Takashi Shimura to sue the tabloid, if the drunken lawyer doesn’t get more money from the opposition to tank the case. The only knock on this film is that the shots at tabloid journalism are one sided at best, and there’s a decided amount of melodrama in a b-story involving the lawyer’s dying daughter, but I’ve always thought Kurosawa’s storytelling to be crisp, especially in the montage sequences showing the escalating feud between Mifune and the tabloid, and in Shimura’s masterly performance, playing both sides of the fence, we see shades of the angry doctor from the prior “Drunken Angel”, and the dying clerk of “Ikiru” to come.
The Shop Around the Corner (’40): James Stewart won the Academy Award in 1940 for his performance in the romantic comedy “The Philadelphia Story”, but I always thought he played second fiddle to Cary Grant there, so I like to think the award was a defacto win for his turn in this all time charmer from Ernst Lubitsch, though the romantic notion is that it was simply a holdover for the award he should have won for 1939’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”. Here Stewart plays the longtime assistant to a Budapest retailer who objects to the hiring of desperate Margaret Sullivan, unbeknownst to him that she is in real life his secret pen pal who he has fallen in love with without so much as a physical glance. When Stewart finds out before Sullivan of the miscommunication, his feelings change towards the shop girl, playing out a silent cat-and-mouse game that Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson imbue with an innocent sweetness that only the harshest of cynics would find cloying.
Steamboat Round the Bend (’35): Will Rogers and John Ford do Dixie proud with this Southern flavored cornpone, about a ratty steamboat captain who pilots his beloved bucket of bolts into a race to save his nephew from a wrongful lynching. Rogers, working with Ford for the third time, delivers his usual brand of homespun comedy, both heartfelt and instantly recognizable, in a neighborly way, while supporting players Irvin S. Cobb, Eugene Pallette, Francis Ford, Berton Churchill (Ford’s favorite windbag, Scott Eyman calls him on the commentary track), and comedy stereotype Stepin Fetchit fill in the guffaws where Rogers lacks in the slapstick. This was Rogers’ last film, before his premature death in an airplane accident, and if every actor could have a swansong as charming as this, with a beauty of a finale in the steamboat race, departure indeed wouldn’t seem so tragic.
Walker (’87): Ed Harris as 19th century American politico William Walker, who invades Nicaragua in the name of freedom but winds up ruling it with an iron fist, though seen through the eyes of self indulgent auteur Alex Cox, he’s a Peckinpahian anti-hero who sacrifices himself and his men for the good of the country. Try to find symbolism in Cox’s anachronistic hints at modern American capitalism and aggression, and the Sandinista revolution of the ‘80’s, and you’ll be analyzing the film too much; it’s all just too sloppy and bombastic to warrant such critical devotion. That said, credit Joe Strummer with an impressive improvisational score, suggestive of The Clash’s own masterwork “Sandinista!”, and to Criterion for presenting a film that was reviled in its day, but might still have a few followers in the far regions of cultdom who think their film is deserving of such a lofty DVD tribute.
Un chien andalou (’29): Made in Paris at the height of the surrealist movement, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s 16-minute short film is sensational in the way its interconnected scenes and images of death and sex lead practically nowhere upon interpretation, despite decades of analysis to the contrary. Scene after bizarre scene of sexual aggression and frustration compound Bunuel and Dali’s notion that an unhealthy obsession with sex is both futile and absurd, suggested in such images as severed hands (one with ants crawling through a hole), a man tied to a piano with rotting donkey carcasses and live priests stopping his advances, a woman willfully allowing her lover (supposed) to slice open her eyeball (in the film’s most shocking and famous image), and finally to lovers buried in sand, dead for no apparent reason than their happiness at finding each other. Despite a lack of cohesiveness in the symbolism, the surrealist images are still fascinating, and in a way disturbingly beautiful; a crowing achievement of Bunuel and Dali’s short-lived partnership.
Mafioso (’62): Alberto Sordi stars for director Alberto Lattuada in this very dark comedy about a city man who brings his wife and kids back home to Sicily for the first time, to find the local mafia Don all too willing to press him into service after he does his family a favor. This is a film of two halves, the first being a ribald examination of the differences between city living and ancient Sicilian customs, while the second, much darker in tone and style, begins when the Don tasks our hero with an assassination job in New York City, giving the story obvious moral complications. Criterion’s DVD edition of this rediscovered gem features numerous interviews with Lattuada’s surviving relatives, as well as a TV documentary featuring an interview with the master himself.
The Freshman (’25): One of Harold Lloyd’s most beloved feature films, with his stock glasses character going off to college where all he cares about is courting popularity with the elder classmen, which includes holding a fall social and trying out for the football team. He achieves his goals, but little does he know that he’s the school laughingstock, much to the dismay of the adorable cigar counter girl (Jobyna Ralston) who is hopelessly in love with the enthusiastic newbie. The relationship between Lloyd and Ralston is endlessly sweet, as it was in so many of his best films, but what we remember most of this timeless masterpiece is Lloyd’s comedic timing and brilliant setups, including the famous social, where his cheap tuxedo is on an endless last stitch, and the Big Game, where Harold finally wins his classmates favor, the girl, and an audience of devotees for life.
by Adam Suraf