December 2008: 15 Mini Reviews
December 11, 2008
The last fifteen films I've seen.
Army of Shadows ('68): Jean-Pierre Melville adapts Joseph Kessel's famous book about an underground network of resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation of France, using his own experiences as a junior member and what he remembers about the key players, to fashion what is arguably his most meticulous study of friendship and betrayal under extreme duress. Melville's great star Lino Ventura headlines a brilliant cast as Philippe Gerbier, a heavyweight in the Free France movement, who we see in the film's many detailed set pieces either running, hiding, or escaping from the gestapo, with the help of his tightly knit network of friends (Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simone Signoret, Claude Mann, Christian Barbier, and Paul Crauchet), while remaining a top symbolic figure in the fledgling movement, giving the film a deep sense of what it means to fight for your life, and how you take it when the time finally comes. Of course in Melville's cinematic world that means whether or not you except your death in terms of bravery or cowardice, and given his tremendous respect for these characters, but a slight anti-heroic outlook on their loyalties and methods, especially in two devastating execution scenes, one by strangulation, one by pistol, the outlook can be difficult and blurred. Whether or not this is Melville's best film is a moot point, it is his most personal, and though the style often resembles more of his famous gangster films (“Le Samourai”, the following “Le Cercle Rouge”) of the period than his earlier resistance films (“Le silence de la mer”, “Leon Morin, Priest”), and on the DVD's many extras he even says he wasn't trying to make a film about the resistance, except for the authenticity of the Nazi uniforms, it remains perhaps the greatest study of determinism and struggle in the face of evil in the history of WWII films.
Rio Grande ('50): In order to get the funding to take his stock unit to Ireland to shoot “The Quiet Man” in color, John Ford had to agree to make a quick black and white western, so using the same crew and location (Moab, Utah, along the Colorado River, which looks a lot like Monument Valley) as the previous “Wagon Master”, and a story by the author of “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”, Ford took to the U.S. Cavalry for a third time, and it's a lovely piece of respect, honor, and dedication to a bygone way of heroism and western life. John Wayne is a natural as Kirby Yorke, stubborn Lieutenant Colonel of a badly depleted Cavalry post whose new recruits includes his 17-year-old son (Claude Jarman Jr.), who he hasn't seen in 15 years; when the boy's mother (Maureen O'Hara) comes to take him out of the regiment and put him back in school, a struggle ensues, but not before sparks rekindle between the former lovers. Ford was a grand master at presenting this kind of hammy family melodrama and melding it into a touching portrait of fear and love in a dangerous territory, giving us the usual action dramatics with a band of rogue Indians, the comic relief of bumbling officer Victor McLaglen, the stunning outdoor photography of Bert Glennon, and an unmistakable sense of reverence and joy in creating films in a preferred genre, surrounded by friends, under glorious western skies.
Kung Fu Panda ('08): Terrific action sequences and winning vocal performances highlight this amazingly entertaining animated comedy, that takes Kung Fu cliches and melds them into a funny and touching story about self confidence and heroism. Jack Black is the voice of Po, a lazy panda bear who idolizes the Furious Five, Kung Fu heroes that protect the land under the tutelage of master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman); when it's time to name a Dragon Warrior, who will lead the other warriors in battle against Tai Lung (Ian McShane), Po is accidentally chosen after a mishap involving fireworks and a rocket chair, and the remainder of the film involves Po training, trying to earn the respect of his fellow warriors, and understanding why it is that he was chosen, mistake or not. The characters aren't fully drawn enough to elicit much emotion, though the master-student relationship between Po and Shifu is believable and familiar, and it's hard not to prescribe to a film whose message – believing in yourself is the ultimate weapon against evil – is so universally positive. The DVD extras are slight in the animation department, which is a shame given how gorgeous the film looks, but a commentary track by the film's directors points out visual themes and motifs that may go unnoticed on first view.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army ('08): I loved this film when I saw it in theaters over the summer, confirming my opinion that Guillermo del Toro is the new master of creature infested fantasy film-making, and the care and detail put into the DVD release only improves my admiration. Del Toro guides us through his visually masterful film with the glee of a fanboy, who obviously has affection for Mike Mignola's characters, and the difficulty of making a blockbuster superhero film for under $90 million, in nearly three hours of documentary footage and an informative commentary track, showing us the painstaking construction of sets, costumes, computer effects, and many gorgeously surreal fairies and monsters that roam the film with menace and grace. Of particular note is a feature on the Troll Market, which, with its amazing detail and plethora of creatures, draws comparison to the Cantina in “Star Wars”, but for sheer imagination, and as we see in the doc, complete dedication to the smallest detail, including CGI characters that took 60 hours to animate but get less than two seconds of screen time, is one of the most imaginative set designs of the decade.
Slumdog Millionaire ('08): In the poverty ridden slums of Bombay, young Jamal, his older brother Salim, and orphan Latika panhandle and escape child slavery after religious riots leave them homeless; years later, when the metropolis has changed its name to Mumbai, and Big Money has infiltrated India, Jamal goes on a TV game-show and answers questions that flashback to key moments of his life, while Salim, now a gangster's apprentice, hides the location of Latika, the gangster's wife, from Jamal, who believes it is destiny they find each other again. Director Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”) infuses this tale of survival, chance, and love with a colorful exuberance that highlights the multi-cultural boiling pot of the city, be it the cramped slums of the beginning, the gangster's hide-out in the middle, or the high production values of the TV show at the end, lending the improbable nature of the story a hint of prescient realism. With an impressive narrative structure that creates incredible tension, from the game show, where millions are at stake, to the growing divide between the brothers over the whereabouts of Latika (Freida Pinto), who at various points in the narrative is used as a pawn in a male dominated society for her tremendous beauty, the film plays best as a character study of three people who choose different paths to escape crushing poverty and tragedy, and as they move towards their destinies, come to represent a country divided between tradition, commerce, modernization, and the exploitation of such beauty and tradition for an ultimate payout.
Sleeping Beauty ('59): Disney's old fashioned Princess epic was a transition for the studio, using a simple and well known fairy-tale, like the past 'Snow White' and “Cinderella”, and updating it with new film-making techniques (70mm photography) and a modern art design that looked forward to the next decade in animation. The result, while a crowd-pleaser, was a financial loss for the studio, which spent nearly six million dollars in over half a decade of production, but history has been kind to this most beautiful of Disney classics, generally regarded as the artistic pinnacle of the goals Walt set two decades earlier with black and white shorts. The new two-disc DVD has a commentary track featuring animation historian Leonard Maltin with Disney animators John Lasseter and Andreas Deja, who intersperse their own ravings with archived audio clips of famous animators like Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, and Frank Thomas, and a documentary that shows how painstaking it was to animate in the large 70mm format, a process so rare in animation that the original aspect ratio has been virtually unseen until this new release, which makes it a must have for any true animation fan.
The Red Shoes ('48): Stunning Technicolor camera-work and a 17-minute fantasy ballet sequence are just two of the highlights of this most famous of all British films, directed by Michael Powell from a script by partner Emeric Pressburger, about two rising stars in a post-war ballet troupe led by a tyrannical, brilliant impresario. Anton Walbrook is chillingly effective as Boris Lermontov, director of the Ballet Lermontov, who takes young dancer Moira Shearer and composer Marius Goring under his wing for an adaptation of “The Red Shoes”, which makes them all instant stars, but when the two youngsters fall in love, the mad and jealous dictator nulls the success by destroying the team. Pressburger's script suggests the sacrifices an artist has to make to create one-of-a-kind performances, and though the film ends in tragedy for all, it's ultimately Lermontov who pays the most for his psychotic obsession with perfection, reduced to a babbling ball of rage and tears that Walbrook milks for tremendous dramatic effect. Following the entirely studio built “Black Narcissus”, Powell's production, the last of a fruitful contract with the Rank Organization, globe-trots around Europe, from London to Monte Carlo to Paris, with an eye for color composition and performance perfectionism rarely matched in film history.
Pilgrimage ('33): John Ford's style for this undervalued melodrama, about a stubborn mother who drives her son to enlisting in the war, after discovering his affair with a local girl, leading to his quick death, is heavily influenced by his mentor D.W. Griffith and fellow Fox auteur F.W. Murnau, whose 1927 “Sunrise” and 1930 “Country Girl” share a similar country fog and beautiful hazy sun that Ford employs throughout his film. The pilgrimage of the title comes in the second act, when the mother, played with prickly gusto and shattering sentimentality by stage veteran Henrietta Crosman, joins a government sponsored cruise with fellow Gold Star Mothers to visit the graves of their hero sons overseas. This remarkable section all but ditches the early Murnau expressionism for bawdy humor and stark melodrama, as Crosman confesses to her fellow devastated mothers how she doesn't belong in the presence of true grief, a sentiment we second until she kneels on the grave and collapses in heartbreak. Ford's trademark mawkishness is nicely blended with broad humor as the ladies, mostly country girls with little travel experience, soak in culture and new experiences on the cruise and in France, but there's no denying the emotional power of the central story, which both sympathizes and criticizes the mother for driving her son to an early grave, a rare instance in Ford's canon where a son is held to bear for the sins of an overcompensating mother.
Born Reckless ('30): Slight early talkie from John Ford and Dudley Nichols, presented on the B-side of the much better “Pilgrimage”, with Edmund Lowe as a hood who is sent to WWI rather than jail and comes back from the front with a newfound respect for life and society. That's all well and good, but when he gets mixed up with his former mob partner (Warren Hymer), and a scheme to kidnap a wealthy society baby, than the line between friendship and law and order becomes a moral no man's land. The fraternal bond between the eternally evil Hymer and the reformed Lowe is interesting stuff but it flames out fast in a Mexican standoff that seems to come out of nowhere, and at a meek 75 minutes, this is one of the shortest, and least satisfying, films of Ford's career.
The Hitch-Hiker ('53): William Talman is unforgettable as Emmett Myers, a psychopath who hitches rides and kills his benefactors, in this classic noir from co-writer/director/co-producer Ida Lupino, perhaps the most famous and important film of her directing career. After a string of unseen murders, Myers hooks up with fishing pals Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy and demands at gunpoint they drive him deep into the Mexican desert, where he promises instant death before his escape to a remote island. What follows is an intense series of psychological stand-offs between the gunman, who sleeps with one bum eye always open, his finger never removed from the trigger, and the hostages, war survivors who seem to be living an entirely different nightmare capture scenario they never faced in Europe, as the authorities stay one agonizing step behind. Ace cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (“Cat People”) uses heavy shadows to portray a deep menace in Talman's scarred and jagged features, a key strategy of most studio set film noirs, but used effectively here in the middle of the desert, it's altogether horrific and shocking. This film isn't often mentioned amongst the greatest of the genre, maybe because Lupino has never received much of a critical appreciation from historians, but it's a short (70 minutes), spellbinding thriller, one that deserves a DVD release with proper restoration, captioning, and commentary, all missing from Kino's no bones 2000 release.
Bob le flambeur ('56): Jean-Pierre Melville's first unquestionably great film is this famous heist yarn from the mid '50's, which was so original in its independent spirit, shot on the fly when money was available, that it became the template for the New Wave three years later. Roger Duchesne is Bob Montagne, a “high roller” who is constantly betting his last dollar, but like many Melville heroes, the adversity of bad luck doesn't stop him, it only compels him to get more, leading eventually to an impossible heist plan of a heavily fortified casino vault, a mission that seems to spell doom at every turn. But Melville isn't concerned with the heist as much as he would be a decade later with “Le Cercle Rouge”, here he's interested in Bob and his lifestyle, the young hood who idolizes him (Daniel Cauchy), the sexy teenager he adopts off the street for the boy (Isabelle Corey), and the way in which Bob uses compulsive gambling less as a means of living than as an adrenaline for living. By comparison with the first films of the New Wave, “Bob le flambeur” is still classical in design, with little improvisation, and Melville's meticulous mise-en-scene, which pays homage to American gangster films, is tightly controlled.
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson ('08): With tremendous access to archived footage of Hunter Thompson and new interviews with those closest to him, Alex Gibney fashions a thorough and engaging portrait of a writer whose spectacular rise to journalistic stardom was almost as complete as his drug addled flam-out. With a soundtrack that perfectly incorporates the counterculture with which Thompson was a leading voice and participant, Gibney traces the key moments in the author's development – riding with the Hell's Angels, running for Sheriff in Colorado, “researching” the American Dream in Las Vegas, covering the '72 Democratic primary, blowing an assignment for Rolling Stone at the Ali/Forman Rumble in the Jungle – and never once betrays the spirit of Thompson's persona, which was devil-may-care at best, but always passionate about the prose. Most poignant is an interview with Rolling Stone chief Jann Wenner, who put up with most of Thompson's crap during a long collaboration, but whose iconic pieces helped make the magazine the political zeitgeist forerunner of its day.
Get Out and Get Under ('20): Quintessential Harold Lloyd two-reeler directed by Hal Roach, with Harold having all kinds of difficulty with his precious new Model T en route to his girlfriend's amateur theater play. My favorite gag: after uncovering the car and preparing to take it out of the garage, Harold backs through the rear of the garage and into a neighbor's garden, gets out and looks at the bumper, shrugs and drives off, the inter title exclaiming “no damage”, as the fuming neighbor hops up and down in an uncontrollable rage.
Number, Please? ('20): More Lloyd/Roach antics, this one being the last Roach would personally direct, before understudy Fred Newmeyer took over. Here Harold is trying to win back the girl (Mildred Davis) who recently dumped him by besting a rival on an outing to a carnival, which includes getting the mother's permission over the telephone, and running from the cops (a Roach trademark) when a missing purse lands in his lap. The carnival scenes are nice to compare with the famous Coney Island sequences in 1927's feature length “Speedy”, to see the seeds of genius being planted.
The Big Sleep ('46): Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and director Howard Hawks repeat their sultry success of “To Have and Have Not” with this all time classic mystery yarn, adapted from Raymond Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel, famous for its impossibly difficult plot of blackmails and murders. Bogart is in top ironic form here as Marlowe, a shamus hired by a wealthy old coot to find out why a book dealer is blackmailing his daughter; when that book dealer turns up dead, and death upon death seem to follow, the case becomes more than a simple blackmail gig. The plot is virtually impossible to follow upon first view, though after consecutive views (including a much different 1945 “preview” cut included on the DVD), using a pad and line chart you can successfully trace every blackmail and murder, even if Raymond Chandler himself couldn't when asked about a certain death during production. Of the wealth of babes who seem to fall over backwards to flirt with Bogart throughout the film, Dorothy Malone steals the show with her one scene seduction in a bookstore, shedding her spectacles and bun to reveal a repressed literati goddess all too eager to share a shot of rye and suggestive innuendo with our obliging PI. It's that mixture of sexy dialogue and film noir mystery that keeps this film forever fascinating; it's arguably Hawks' best film, and the happiest collaboration of Bogart and Bacall's whirlwind decade together.