April 2010: 15 Mini Reviews
April 12, 2010
The last fifteen films I've seen.
Ran ('85): In 16th century Japan, the Great Lord of a powerful samurai clan abdicates his power to his oldest son, causing a rift between two younger sons and their father, leading to much betrayal and warfare in Akira Kurosawa's 1985 transformation of "King Lear" to the feuding clans epoch. A companion piece, as it were, to three previous Kurosawa films, "Seven Samurai", "Throne of Blood", and "Kagemusha", but "Ran" stands alone as the pessimistic, apocalyptic vision of a master filmmaker who feels his time may be near, and though he'd still make films for another eight years, this is the film that effectively sums up his career, both glorious, difficult, and overwhelmingly dark, a devastating portrait of human frailty, greed, and betrayal at it's bleakest. But the colors, the amazing reds, yellows, and greens, and the Oscar winning costumes, remain warm and bright, a lovely vision of purity amongst constant decay. If you get both the Criterion double disc and the recent Studio Canal Blu-ray in your hands at the same time, you'll be in for hours and hours of in depth study of one of the great action epics of our time.
The Beaches of Agnes ('08): Beloved New Wave pioneer Agnes Varda is a peach narrating and staring in her own remembrance of things past, staging recreations and using hundreds of clips and photographs to tell her autobiography as a pictorial stream-of-consciousness. Funny, insightful, and moving, Varda, 80, doesn't lament old age or approaching mortality, though the ghost of her husband, filmmaker Jacques Demy, who died young of AIDS in 1990, is ever present throughout the narrative, and there is no self-congratulation remembering masterpieces like "Cleo from 5 to 7" or "Vagabond", this is an artistic remembrance of a life that has accomplished much, and still has more to give.
Broken Embraces ('09): Fine, twisty Almodovar melodrama with muse Penelope Cruz at the center of attention as a businessman's mistress who becomes an actress and falls in love with her director, told in a 14 year flashback gap that usually keeps the audience guessing, but begins to falter near the 100 minute mark. Cruz is mesmerizing, as usual, and Lluis Homar is solid as the now blind (one of the mysteries) director telling the story, with Almodovar's familiar lush color palate to keep things interesting when the mystery feels like it's running out of surprises.
How to Train Your Dragon ('10): Computer animation and 3D are really coming into their own these days, and based on the money the films make, it's here to stay, but that's okay with me if the films continue to be as entertaining, visually and emotionally, as this funny and often moving piece about a teenage viking outcast who befriends a wounded dragon while the rest of his clan aims for complete extinction of the winged foes. Directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders cut their teeth at the tail end of Disney's animation resurgence, and they know how to follow a formula, with spectacular flight sequences, child/parent misunderstanding, young, awkward romance, a wicked final beast, and at the heart of the film, the hero's tentative then full fledged friendship with the dragon (when the dragon rubs his head on the boy's hand like a kitten, it's a three hankie moment), makes for the kind of acceptable sentiment usually exclusive to Pixar. A certain blockbuster, well earned.
Greenberg ('10): Noah Baumbach takes his inspiration from Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer one step further with this smart, realistic character study of human relationships and their ever changing awkwardness. Ben Stiller is just on the right side of irritating as the titular hero, a 41 year old coming off of a nervous breakdown; when he arrives back in L.A. after a fifteen year absence, he finds his former friends have all changed, or maybe they just don't like him, except a 25-year-old girl with terrible insecurity issues. The girl is played by Greta Gerwig, who I've never seen before, and she brings a wonderful real-girl sensitivity to the part, which is tricky, because she has to like this guy when everything he does says to not, and to the actors and Baumbach's credit, we finally believe that there might be redemption at the end of the tunnel in the form of this incongruous relationship, and that makes a darkly funny, somewhat sad film, a real joy.
Dillinger is Dead ('69): Pop-art curio from Italian director Marco Ferreri, with the prolific Michel Piccoli wandering around his house in need of spiritual and physical pleasure, I think. The gist: while making himself a gourmet meal after work, Piccoli stumbles upon an ancient revolver in his closet that may have once been owned by Dillinger; he cleans the thing up, paints in red and white, views some home movies, flirts with the sexy maid upstairs, and so on, with little dialogue and American R&B on the radio, until a surrealistic final image suggests a decent into madness, or hell, or irony. Make what you will of Ferreri's motivations in 1968 about war, violence, rebellion, machismo, sex, and living through images, what you have to say has already been said, this being one of Italy's most argued about films of the '60's, and regardless of how often static the actions seem, Ferreri's free form visualization and Piccoli's interesting improvisations make this film, just out on Criterion, worth seeing.
Make Way For Tomorrow ('37): Credit to Criterion for pulling this classic out from obscurity and making it available for a new generation, it's certainly one of the great weepers of the '30's, and that it's said to have inspired Ozu when making "Tokyo Story", that's just another boon to it's legacy. Leo McCarey directs with a sensitive touch, and Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, as an aged couple forced to separate when the Depression, and their disappointing grown children, break them apart, who spend one more night together reliving their honeymoon, are tremendously moving.
Bronson ('09): Can't say I've ever heard of the famous British prisoner named after the actor Charles Bronson, and this movie isn't so much a bio-pic as it is a dark, unique, gross out examination of a psychotically violent dude whose jollies include getting beat by prison guards and fighting, fighting, fighting. Shades of other prison movies, especially "A Clockwork Orange" and "Chopper", are visible in Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's violent, and sometimes comedic film, with a decidedly post-modern visual treatment, filled with New Wave songs from the 70's and 80's to enhance the ironic flavor. The major problem, and it can't be ignored, is actor Tom Hardy, who is over-the-top, even for a performance that has to be, and Bronson comes off less as a comic anti-hero, or a lifer screwed over by the system (ala Alex in 'Clockwork Orange'), but as a purely violent psychopath with no personal reason for his actions or psychological reason for demeanor, and without the character study, the film's only saving grace is the mise-en-scene, and thankfully it's good enough to pass.
Battle of Britain ('69): I'm sure this film was a big deal in Britain when it was being made, what with the importance of the aerial defense against the Nazi's in 1940, and the big names attached for minor roles, but other than some excellent flight sequences, perhaps the best since Howard Hughes and "Hell's Angels", this is pretty staid stuff. As the Nazi's begin to decimate the RAF's airfields in a calculated attack that has the undermanned air brigade scrambling, the battle turns when a large scale German attack on London gives England their opening for a mass air attack, all but destroying the Luftwaffe. This is for WWII enthusiasts and re-creationists only, for the rest of us we spend 135 minutes spotting the stars in underdeveloped cameos, and that isn't enough of a thrill to make it worthwhile.
The African Queen ('51): One of the most famous of all films, if not just because of the two star performances by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, but because of the myriad of stories about it's making, which is recounted on the new DVD in a wonderful 60-minute documentary. Ostensibly, John Huston's adventure story, about two disparate people embarking on an impossible plan to blow up a German ship in the early days of WWI, is a romantic comedy road movie, with the road replaced by an African river, and the nominal vignettes with human characters replaced with everything from leaches and hippos to mosquitoes and crocodiles, making the triumphant ending all the more well earned. Bogart and Hepburn have a nice chemistry that makes the switch from formal antagonism to instant romance somewhere in the middle totally plausible; Bogart famously won the Oscar over Brando, but Hepburn lost to Viven Leigh's Blanche DuBois, which sits fine with me, she'd still have three in the future to win.
Yokihi ('55): Kenji Mizoguchi's first color film was a co-production with the Hong Kong based Shaw Brothers, taking a famous Chinese parable about an 8th century emperor and the concubine he takes who looks like his beloved dead wife, and awkwardly infusing it with Japanese actors and aesthetics that all but turned off critics and audiences when released. Today it's a curio in his late canon, the color photography is beautiful, as is the attention to period detail (especially the costumes, always a plus in Mizoguchi's jidaigeki), but famous stars Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyo (of "Rashomon") are a bit stiff beneath all of the pretty set dressing.
Battle Royale ('00): Kinji Fukasaku has been making films since the days of the Japanese New Wave, when the films had a rebellious freshness to them that shocked the rigid Japanese studio system, but this violent clunker, and it's sequel, his final two films, is less the work of a rebellious, artistic upstart than someone trying to shock with the vilest of intentions. The appearance of Takeshi Kitano, given his importance to the rise of artistic violence in modern Japanese cinema, is meant to be both ironic and a social comment, but his performance, as a teacher who oversees the systematic annihilation of his class of students in a winner-take-all island version of the Most Dangerous Game, is lackadaisical. The young actors playing the students fare better, but it's hard to pay attention to performance and characterization (whatever of it there is) when each player is subject to death at any minute. This may be a cult classic, or a guilty pleasure, or whatever you want to label it, but I'm not buying, I'd much rather spend my time with Kitano's "Hana-Bi" or Fukasaku's "Under the Flag of the Rising Sun" for more studied, coherent examinations of violence and modern warfare.
Intimate Strangers ('03): Brilliant film from Patrice Leconte, with a grown up Sandrine Bonnaire as a woman who mistakes a bland tax attorney (Fabrice Luchini) for a psychiatrist, and by the time they both admit they know the mistake, a kind of satisfying psycho-sexual therapy game commences that neither wants to stop. In a more conventional film the two would be in bed within the first 40 minutes, but not for Leconte, the man behind such similar forbidden fruit masterworks as "Monsieur Hire", "The Hairdresser's Husband", and "The Girl on the Bridge", he's more concerned with the psychology of attraction, obsession, role playing, and inaction, which makes an eventual hook-up (if possible) all the more exciting.
Bigger Than Life ('56): Dark stuff from Nicholas Ray, who follows "Rebel Without a Cause" with an equally anarchic study of American domesticity and it's troubling underbelly, trading youth angst for drug addiction and megalomania. James Mason brings an air of repressed authority to his role of a meek school-teacher/suburban husband and father who, diagnosed with a fatal disease, becomes addicted on the pain medication, unleashing an outspoken, heavily aggressive totalitarian version of himself on his family and inner circle that dominates with a devastating critique. Ray's descent into Americana hell is splattered with expressionistic shadows and a use of Cinemascope that traps his characters in their outstretched, bland domestic surroundings, suggesting that surface materialism and dressing has behind it a dark, troubled core. Nice that Criterion has finally added Ray to their collection, let's hope the criminally not-on-DVD "Johnny Guitar" is next.
The French Connection ('71): One of the grittiest New York cop films of all time, coming at a moment in American cinema when gritty and European was everywhere, and William Friedkin, ever the brash young punk to take the ball from Godard, Truffaut, and Melville especially, infuses his film with a modicum of dirt and jump cuts that all but changed the action genre forever. Gene Hackman won his first Oscar for his complex turn as Popeye Doyle, a grueling narcotics detective who sniffs out a gigantic heroin deal, almost by chance, at a nightclub, and tirelessly chases down the leads with frustrated partner Roy Scheider, including one mesmerizing scene involving a car and an above ground subway train (and hundreds of breathtaking edits) that remains a linchpin. One of a kind, even though it's imitators are plenty.
By Adam Suraf