August 2008, Part II: 15 Mini Reviews
August 27, 2008
The last fifteen films I've seen.
Patriotism ('66): Yukio Mishima presages his own carefully staged suicide by seppuku four years earlier with this stunning silent short, his only film as director, about a young soldier who commits ritual suicide with his devoted wife when his pro militarist rebellion is squelched. The black and white images are dreamy and beautiful, especially in a poetic episode where the pair make love for the final time, starkly contrasting with the bloody, violent, and painstakingly accurate depiction of the suicide to follow. Released alongside Paul Schrader's glorious Mishima bio-pic, Criterion's release of this long unavailable and controversial film is a DVD milestone, presenting the 30-minute short with a documentary nearly double the length of the original, filled with survivors who remember fondly Mishima's independent production, shot secretly on a Toho sound stage, and the shocking day in 1970 when he stormed a government building, declared his dedication to the Emperor, and like a samurai 200 years in the past, so publicly took his own life.
Witness ('85): Harrison Ford and director Peter Weir both received an Oscar nomination for this unique film about two very different cultures, following Ford's Philly detective to Pennsylvania Amish country undercover to protect a young boy (memorable Lukas Haas) who witnessed a murder that connects high police brass to a drug ring. Cinematographer John Seale's golds and greens of Amish country so perfectly contrast the dark muck of Philadelphia's underbelly, while Weir carefully plays with our notions of screen violence against the Amish notions of peace and brotherly friendship. It's that divide between a violent, consumerist culture and a culture completely dependent upon itself, that makes the biggest impact, but to keep the film from preaching too much, there's a believable forbidden romance between Ford and Kelly McGillis that heightens the emotions, especially after the particularly bloody finale.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters ('85): In the tradition of “Taxi Driver” and “American Gigolo”, Paul Schrader's understanding of Yukio Mishima is that of an expressive artist burdened by a troubled past and a conflicted psychology, where egotism and a sense of self satisfaction run counterbalance with the lyrical poet of such masterworks as “Temple of the Golden Pavilion” and “After the Banquet”. Schrader presents Mishima's life in three distinct variations; real life flashbacks shot in black and white, which show us Mishima's sheltered childhood through to his days as an obsessed bodybuilder, present day cinema verite on the last day of his life, prepping his independent army of followers for a suicidal attack on a government institution, and most impressively, with three amazingly detailed book selections ('Golden Pavilion', “Kyoko's House”, “Runaway Horses”), each one representing a differing Mishima personality, from shy student to outspoken militarist. This is by far the best film Paul Schrader has made as a director, and he had some talented hands helping him, from the complex script co-written by his brother Leonard, which neither criticizes nor glorifies Mishima's life choices (a decision not kindly accepted in Japan, where Mishima is still scandalous), to Philip Glass' sweeping, famous score, and the artistic, theater-like production designs of Eiko Ishioka, which turn Mishima's novels into lurid color drenched dreamscapes, the nearly entirely Japanese production is a marvel to behold. Criterion's DVD is receptive to that fact, presenting not only an informative feature BBC doc on Mishima's life (a good primer for the film), and new interviews with Eiko and cinematographer John Baily, but a terrific Schrader commentary track, helping us to understand why the film has never been screened publicly in Japan, and why Mishima, arguably Japan's greatest modern author, who was so celebrated in his day, is still so taboo to the national consciousness today, nearly 40 years after his death.
Kiss Me Deadly ('55): Ralph Meeker is the quintessential Mike Hammer, a no morals shamus who extorts money from philandering husbands, using his lover/secretary as bait, but when he's shoehorned into a murder conspiracy after picking up a robed Cloris Leachman on the side of the road, things get messy in this all time great noir from Robert Aldrich and writer A.I. Bezzerides. Notable here, besides Meeker's cynical Hammer, as tough an anti-hero as noir ever produced, and the way Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo present Hammer's hazy predicament in striking angles and mysterious P.O.V. shots, is the way Bezzerides morphs Mickey Spillane's novel into a treatise on Cold War fear, putting a hotbox of nuclear material at the center of the far flung murder conspiracy and letting the characters work themselves into a tizzy over it. I always rate this film as one of the ten best noirs of all time, it looks good restored on DVD, but a deluxe edition, with a commentary track from a noir specialist like Glenn Erickson, Eddie Mueller, or Alain Silver is much needed, given the importance of the film to the genre, and its status as an American classic.
Battleship Potemkin ('25): As cossack troops rhythmically march down the steps of Odessa, executing mothers and trampling on children's hands, savagely flaming out a proletariat uprising, Sergei Eisenstein presents the film textbook on symbolic editing, crosscutting the downward motion of the troops with the fleeing peasants, inserting random actions, like the slaughter of a woman in glasses, or the out of control plight of a baby carriage, with such temporal accuracy that it all but screams for our sympathy to the defeated citizens. That's the basic idea of Eisenstein's montage theory, a staple of any Film 101 class (I know I've written my share of essays on it), to cut two or three pieces of film together to elicit a basic human emotion, as in the case of three separate stone lion statues, each one at a different point of rest, which edited together in three quick shots and placed just before the film's uprising, symbolically represents not only the waking of a lion, but the waking passion of the peasants against the Czar's atrocities. The film remains fascinating outside of its historical context as well, especially in the sequences leading up to the Odessa Steps massacre (as famous a scene as any in film history), where an uprising aboard a deplorable battleship spills over to the receptive citizens at port, with Eisenstein's editing and Edmund Meisel's score heroically charging the peasants to a brave, but ultimately unsuccessful, fight for their rights. Kino's two-disc DVD does a good job of restoring the original title cards and presenting it with Meisel's original score, but the lone doc on the disc is nothing but a 45-minute lecture on the film's history of cuts and restorations, a historical commentary track about Eisenstein and his famed editing techniques would have been more appropriate.
Billy Liar ('63): John Schlesinger's second feature film is one of the last, and best, of the British New Wave, featuring a never better Tom Courtenay as the titular dreamer, a northern lad who escapes the doldrums of his life (boring job, boring fiancée, frustrating parents) with wild fabrications and daydreams. Based on the acclaimed novel and play by Keith Waterhouse, the film presents a variation on the Angry Young Man, stuck somewhere between the alienated boy of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and the already jaded and cynical rugby player of “This Sporting Life”, where our hero is still frustrated with his situation and lack of prospects, but on the verge of the culture change of the mid '60's, he's no longer as hopeless as his predecessors. Audiences of the time were already tiring of the New Wave and were ready for The Beatles and James Bond, but Schlesinger's film stands the test of time for its imagination, examination of a certain kind of lower middle class malaise, and if nothing else, for introducing the lovely Julie Christie, in the role of Billy's free spirited dream girl, to film goers everywhere.
Tropic Thunder ('08): Ben Stiller hits a satiric home run with this crude and smart insider spoof of war movies and big budget film-making, about a vain troupe of actors trudging through the jungle of Southeast Asia trying to make a “Platoon” like Vietnam epic. The only problem, when their flighty British director is accidentally blown up on a land mine, and a guerrilla gang of drug smugglers mistake the actors for real American troops, the line between play fiction and actual danger gets hilariously blurred. Stiller receives top billing as nearly washed up action star Tugg Speedman, making a play at a comeback after some ill advised choices, but as co-writer and director he spreads the laughs throughout an all-star cast, none better than Tom Cruise as a foul mouthed and frisky studio boss, and an on fire Robert Downey Jr. as an Aussie method actor in black face, on and off camera. Some of the insider jokes about the vanity of actors and the sycophantic ploys of agents and studio lackeys are obvious, and Stiller isn't beyond toilet humor to get a cheap laugh, but for the most part this is first rate comedy, and if the Academy took this kind of work seriously, Downey would be tapped for a Best Supporting Actor nod for his total dedication to a role, that in lesser hands, could have been an embarrassing disaster. The same could be said for the entire production itself, but this is a film that rarely betrays it's bizarre notions of fame, identity, and second chances, and for it we've probably got the best Hollywood satire since Robert Altman's “The Player” or The Simpsons' classic “Radioactive Man” episode.
State of Play ('03): Paul Abbott weaves a masterful plot involving government conspiracy, big oil, murder, and big league journalistic investigation in this highly successful BBC mini-series directed by David Yates, whose steady hand here literally won him Harry Potter, the biggest franchise in the world. David Morrissey is terrific as Stephen Collins, an MP on an energy commission whose life spins out of control when his lover/secretary is murdered and the story of their affair hits the tabloids, while his ex-campaign manager, and current investigative journalist Cal McCaffrey (John Simm), begins to uncover a link between the murder and a much bigger conspiracy between an oil firm and the energy commission. Big names filling out the all-star cast include Polly Walker as Collins' spurned wife, BAFTA winner Bill Nighy as the newspaper editor, a brilliant Marc Warren (“Band of Brothers”) as the twitchy link of the conspiracy, and Kelly Macdonald and James McAvoy heading McCaffrey's deep and far reaching investigation. There is an American remake on the horizon, with Ben Affleck as the disgraced politico and Russell Crowe as the journalist, but whether Abbott will be able to condense this six-hour masterpiece into an effective two hours remains to be seen.
The Long Voyage Home ('40): Often overlooked in the John Ford canon due to the enormity of it's sister 1940 production, the famed 'Grapes of Wrath', this absorbing yet stagy tale of a tramp steamer and it's crew during the early years of the war nonetheless features some of the most beautiful studio photography of all time, courtesy of Gregg Toland and his superior eye for lighting and deep focus compositions. Culled together from four one-act Eugene O'Neill sea plays, Ford and his favorite writer Dudley Nichols focus on the interactions and friendships between the crew, who in various scenes barter booze from local island women, deal with a potential Nazi spy, bury one of their own out to sea, and try to send their youngest ensign (John Wayne) home to his mother, as a rival ship courts him with a mickey. This isn't a anti-war film as much as “They Were Expendable” would be a dark rumination on Ford's service and time spent with the Navy, but there is a level of pessimism and sadness about the men that is only heightened by the constant barrage of bombs and fighter planes they have to duck on their way to England. The cast is uniformly good here, from Wayne idealistically struggling through a Swedish accent, to Ward Bond, Barry Fitzgerald and Thomas Mitchell as tight knit seamen, but the star remains Toland's shadowy genius behind the camera, a tour de force that undoubtedly caught the eye of Orson Welles, who later that year tasked Toland with the job of a lifetime on “Citizen Kane”.
The Bad Sleep Well ('60): Beginning their third and final decade as star and director, Toshiro Mifune once again headlines a stunning morality tale for Akira Kurosawa, utilizing elements of “Hamlet” to tell the story of a young executive who marries the boss's daughter under an assumed name to get revenge for the murder of his father, a company lackey forced to commit suicide to cover up corruption. Told in three distinct acts, beginning with a masterfully elaborate wedding sequence, and ending rather abruptly and boldly at a bombed out munitions factory where all of the Shakespearian tragedy comes to a head, Kurosawa opens up his tale of deception, corruption, and murder to include Mifune's Ophelia-like bride (Kyoko Kagawa), Claudius-like boss (Masayuki Mori), Laertes-like best friend (Takeshi Kato), and a host of corporate stooges (Takashi Shimura and Ko Nishimura best of all) haunted by the ghosts of the past in Mifune's dense revenge ploy. This is one of Kurosawa's longest non-action films (Mifune doesn't speak for 30-minutes), and like “The Idiot” and “The Lower Depths” before, he takes his time meting out characterizations while plot points only slowly emerge, but the criticism of post-war Japanese business is sharp and stinging, capturing some deplorable business with a crisp, expert wide-screen focus.
Caravaggio ('86): Independent auteur and artist Derek Jarman creates a wonderfully impressionistic setting to tell a loose biography of important baroque master Michelangelo Caravaggio, whose highly realistic religious scenes were modeled on drunks and prostitutes the painter knew in his orgiastic private life. Jarman uses a flashback structure, from Caravaggio's (Nigel Terry) deathbed, to highlight the important moments in his life, starting when he was commissioned as a kid by Cardinal Del Monte to be the church's artist, to his bi-sexual adult relationship with a model (Sean Bean) and his scheming lover (Tilda Swinton) that ultimately ends in double homicide, painting a portrait of an artist whose hedonistic tendencies tortured an otherwise brilliant mind. Jarman's films are often difficult, filled with frustrating period leaps, anachronisms, and languorous long takes, but this is one of his most accessible films, and many of the staged tableau vivants are as meticulous and stunning as Caravaggio's originals.
The Small Back Room ('49): Following the grand color spectacles of “Black Narcissus” and “The Red Shoes”, the Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) revisit the war with this dark character study, starring David Farrar as a crippled weapons expert whose troubles with women and alcohol mirror the frustrations of his most recent job, decoding a German booby trap bomb. Pressburger's script jettisons the first person narration of Nigel Balchin's wartime book, but the emphasis is always on Farrar, his troubled relationship with beautiful secretary Kathleen Byron, his constant battle with the bottle (with scenes reminiscent of “The Lost Weekend”), the politics of big business and weapons grading, and the intense difficulty of dismantling a live bomb after a weekend bender (it's tough, but makes for riveting drama). As much as I know and love about the Archers and their many great films, this is one that has always escaped me, so Criterion's DVD release is especially welcome to film buffs, though according to the fine scholarly commentary track by Charles Barr and 20-minute interview with cinematographer Christopher Challis, the film was a flop in England, too soon, apparently, to revisit the war with such a dark subject matter, but today it remains striking and expressionistic.
Mary of Scotland ('36): One of John Ford's stiffest films is nonetheless acceptable to watch thanks to the master's tight pacing, directing of actors (in or out of regional accents), and studio craftsmanship (with the help of master cameraman Joseph August). Katharine Hepburn's mid '30's decent to “box office poison”, as the trades so casually noted, wasn't helped much by her routine and over acted portrayal of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, who escapes a mutiny at home for England, where her ruthless cousin Elizabeth (Florence Eldridge) has her prisoned and executed for no particular reason. This is a curious choice for Ford, whose historical epics before this were about railways, war, and presidential assassinations (“The Iron Horse”, “Four Sons”, “The Prisoner of Shark Island”), not soap operas about regal Queens and their squabbles, but this was made at RKO, where the director found slightly more artistic freedom than he did at Fox, and for Ford completists it's essential, if ultimately slight.
On Dangerous Ground ('52): Robert Ryan gives one of his best performances as a loose canon night shift detective in Nicholas Ray's psychological noir, about a lonely and angry cop who, while on a cool off assignment in the snowy mountains of Colorado to capture a child murderer, meets and finds a kindred soul with blind woman Ida Lupino. The twist of course is that the murderer is Lupino's younger brother and sole benefactor; she plays to Ryan's sympathy to help the boy find justice peacefully, but that doesn't sit well with the father of the dead girl (Ward Bond), out for vengeance as a one man lynch mob. What's so jarring about the narrative, written by A.I. Bezzerides from Gerald Butler's obscure “Mad with Much Heart”, is the shift in tone, from gritty night noir in the first half hour to psychological character study in the second, where Ryan's rage and loneliness in the noir segment finds equal outlets in Bond and Lupino in the mountain half. It's a unique film, naturally mishandled by RKO chief Howard Hughes at the time (much like Ray's earlier “They Live By Night”), but it holds up well, despite the drastic location change between acts, with terrific performances from the three leads and beautiful location photography by George Diskant, one of noir's ace lensmen.
The Counterfeiters ('08): Winner of the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, this remarkable Austrian drama about a group of Jewish printers and counterfeiters rounded up by the ever desperate Nazi's from concentration camps to forge British and American bills, is all the more special for being a true story of deception, survival, and heroism. Karl Markovics is master forgery expert Sally Sorowitsch, who for five years stayed alive and healthy in various camps by painting heroic murals of his captors, but when he's tasked to lead a team to perfectly forge the British pound, in an attempt to flood the market with bogus money and destroy the resistance economy, his fellow prisoner, a revolutionary named Burger (August Diehl), questions his loyalty and whether or not they are in fact helping the Nazi's fund their dying war effort, especially when it comes time to forge American dollars in the millions. Director Stefan Ruzowitzky adapts Burger's true life book with unflinching accuracy; the concentration camps are a brutal contrast to Sorowitsch's Berlin life of parties, gambling, and women, while in their special laboratory, some prisoners find out about the deaths of their families by stumbling upon passports they are to use to forge for Nazi officials. How this group of prisoners delays the reproduction of the dollar just long enough to help with the German defeat is triumphant, but Ruzowitzky smartly downplays the glory; thousands of people died while these men were being fed by the Nazi's to criminally fund their war machine, the moral complications of which, especially to Burger, and finally to Sorowitsch, is simply devastating.
By Adam Suraf