February 2009, Part II: 15 Mini Reviews
February 23, 2009
The last fifteen films I've seen.
Berlin Alexanderplatz ('80): Rainer Werner Fassbinder's detailed and sprawling 14-part adaptation of Alfred Doblin's 1929 modernist tract is one of the director's most revered films, brutalized in its day for over indulgence, vulgarity, and incomprehensibility, but since has become, thanks to the Cult of Fassbinder, and recently, the Criterion Collection's impressive DVD transfer, a landmark of long format storytelling. That the story takes nearly five hours to finally settle into place is an example of the care in which Fassbinder puts into faithfully adapting Doblin's multiple narrative structures, painting a portrait of Weimer era Berlin, through the eyes of recently released prisoner Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht) and his various ill-fated friendships, teeming with life, subjugated by corruption, hedonism, and swirling political change. Fassbinder's direction is fascinating, employing a constantly moving camera and huge, but intimate sets designed as a careful study in browns and refracted lights, dancing through Biberkopf's waking nightmare (which turns fateful when his attempts to stay clean lead him to a gang that inadvertently causes the amputation of his right arm, and when his beloved girlfriend is murdered by the same man who caused his accident) with a mixture of surrealism and stream-of-consciousness narration. This is a 15 and a half hour film that is anything but self explanatory; the more Biberkopf professes a wish to change his life, fate intervenes with one disaster after another, and it's a testament to the brilliance of Fassbinder, Lamprecht, and his immediate supporting players (Barbara Sukowa, Gottfried John, Hanna Schygulla), that for a film with such detailed characterizations, joy, and tragedy, the modernist spirit of the text, and the exhaustive heft of the film-making, always keeps us at the right distance, just outside of intimate, but devastated nonetheless.
The Wings of Eagles ('57): John Ford's final Navy film, a lovingly sappy comedy/drama about the life of airman Spig Wead (John Wayne), whose promising career as the Navy's top flier, in the infancy of the air program, is upended when an accident leaves him partially paralyzed. Following months of rehabilitation, and an estrangement from his beloved wife (Maureen O'Hara, appearing for the last time opposite Wayne in a Ford film), Wead takes up writing, eventually becoming a playwright and screenwriter (for Ford's own “They Were Expendable”), and lobbies successfully for a part in WWII, despite his handicap. Ford has more of an interest in this film than in his previous two military themed films (“What Price Glory”, and “The Long Gray Line”), even casting Ward Bond in a cameo role as salty Oscar-winning director “John Dodge”, a Ford stand-in, but the tonal shifts, from light comedy in the beginning to saccharine nostalgia near the end is unfortunate, and though Wayne and O'Hara still have some spark left from “The Quiet Man”, their lack of actual screen time together is disappointing.
La Strada ('54): Fellini's Oscar-winning international breakthrough, about the road life of a traveling strongman and his abused, idealistic assistant, so divisive when it was first released due to what Italian critics thought was an abandonment of the director's neo-realist past, is today less of a political import in the history of Italian cinema than an aesthetic turning point for a director who never cared to hang his hat under one particular label. As Zampano, the animalistic strongman who travels from one country town to the next, spewing a hackneyed text while breaking a chain to a gawking audience, Anthony Quinn gives the best performance of his career (even dubbed into Italian on the preferred audio track), all brooding menace and ignorance, treating his bought for “wife” Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), who somehow grows an unreturned affection for the brute, like a dog to be trained; indeed, in one of the earliest, and saddest scenes in the film, he teaches her how to pronounce his name to an audience by whipping her with a switch. Fellini's growing love for performance, ritual, a circus atmosphere, and the expressibility of faces (Masina's sad clown makeup and Chaplin-esque resolve gives the film its heart) is at its most lovingly accessible here, at a point in his career where the familiar trappings of neo-realism were giving way to surrealism, poetic discourse, and an emphasis on human interaction rather than the effects of society and poverty on living conditions. Zampano and Gelsomina work for tips, but their economic situation isn't Fellini's focus point, he cares more for the relationship, the way in which each successive stop on their journey from one coast of Italy to another strengthens or divides the pair, and ultimately, how magic, love, and happiness struggle for survival in a barren, increasingly pessimistic post-war existence.
Iron Man ('08): In a year of standout comic book heroes on film, Robert Downey Jr.'s cynical billionaire Tony Stark, and his brilliantly sleek man-made Iron Man suit, may be the best of all, thanks in part to a mixture of darkness that isn't quite as suffocating as “The Dark Knight”, and a comedic giddiness that's less hipster ironic than “Hellboy” - a winning combination for the start of a tent pole franchise looking for a core audience. Following Guillermo del Toro's hands-on DVD presentation of “Hellboy II”, director John Favrau guides us through nearly three hours of behind the scenes documentary footage, highlighting the importance of not falling into the usual comic book “first film” trappings, presenting the origin of Iron Man with energy and only minimal necessary exposition, balancing whatever improbability there is with Stark's escape from a Taliban mountain prison with explosive action and Downey's inimitable charm. The lack of a commentary track is only slightly disappointing, there's enough in the documentaries to get a full understanding of the film-making process, and a terrific 45-minute bonus on the graphic comic history of the character suggests just how ripe for re-examination this promising character/franchise is for the immediate future.
Berlin Alexanderplatz ('31): Presented on the bonus disc of Fassbinder's epic “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, this 1931 black and white version, directed by the prolific Phil Jutzi and co-written by Alfred Doblin, who had to agree to serious condensing and streamlining in packing his large novel into 90 minutes, is a curio for comparison purposes only, for the primitive sound technology, stiff direction, and brutally compact narrative doesn't hold up. But for comparisons sake, it is interesting to see Jutzi shooting on the actual Alexanderplatz of the time, where Fassbinder could only recreate the look half a century later on sound stages, and how Doblin shoehorns Biberkopf's numerous post-prison sexual relationships into one or two characters, highlighting the criminal element instead, and finally emphasizing a more optimistic outlook that's nowhere to be found in the Fassbinder film. It was the right move for Criterion to present this alternate take on the book in their definitive DVD set, but it is what it is, an afterthought compendium to a visionary and challenging masterwork - book or later film.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ('62): “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This most famous line from John Ford's last great film is one of the director's most poignant, and deeply cynical, elegies to a bygone way of life, in a film that in many ways is entirely about the modernization, culturalization, and death, of the Old West. James Stewart and John Wayne, playing twenty years below what their increasingly rugged faces betray, star as a Eastern lawyer who comes to the west with thoughts of bringing civil law, and the reluctant horse trader who knows a thing or two about how that is going to go over on an uncivilized town; when Wayne's potential bride (Vera Miles) shows an interest in the underdog Stewart after he's jumped by all time villain Lee Marvin, the stage is set for a series of showdowns that will culminate with law and progress winning out, in the most ironic way, over guns and lawlessness. Ford and frequent screenwriter James Warner Bellah suggest that with the passing of time, and a progression towards modernization, the quaintness of a foundering lifestyle is destined to be erased (even though the film's central storyline, about the struggle of homesteaders vs. corrupt cattle barons, is championing the right to settle and better one's lot); it's a powerful and sad eulogy for a director who earned his fame in the genre he's essentially burying, opening his film with Wayne's Tom Doniphon already in his coffin, forgotten by a society that, in an effort to change with the times, reveres its elected leaders, rather than its actual heroes.
The Scarlet Empress ('34): Joseph von Sternberg does everything in his considerable powers to suggest the overwhelming hypnotic beauty of Marlene Dietrich, starring here as Russia's Catherine II, with ostentatious costumes, baroque lighting, gigantic Gothic sets, and hilarious sexual innuendo that could only come from Hollywood's most obsessively stylish dictator. The plot is pure historical melodrama; young Sophia (Dietrich) is chosen out of poverty to become the bride of Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe), but when she reaches her castle, she finds the Duke a childlike simpleton, and her rise to power will eventually include seducing an entire regiment of Army men to back her power grab. What matters isn't the way in which Sternberg scoffs at historical accuracy to satisfy movie conventions (after all, John Ford's later “Mary of Scotland” fails because it's too serious), but his treatment of Dietrich, starring for the sixth time for her greatest director, is lovingly seductive, given the face of a devilish angel, all innocence and cunning, in ravishing soft light and intimate close-ups.
Bottle Rocket ('96): Wes Anderson's first film has all the makings of the great films to come – the idiosyncratic storytelling, the emphasis on friendship, the perfectly placed pop songs on the soundtrack – with an ironic sweetness and naiveté emblematic of 27-year-old kids coming of age in a spotty independent film market. Co-written with college friend Owen Wilson, who stars with brother Luke and friend Robert Musgrave as a trio of inept slackers trying to find their place in the scheme of things with small time robberies and grander designs, the film is less about the makings the criminal element than about the choices we make as young adults that don't always go as plans, despite the best laid storyboards. Luke is the film's center, coming out of a stay in a mental health hospital to help his friend Dignan (Owen) with a heist, finding happiness in love with a Portuguese maid (Lumi Cavazos), trying to earn redemption for past nothingness, but Owen and his impossibly ambitious plans for amateur criminal stardom steals the show, and Anderson knows it, giving Dignan the film's bittersweet final fade-out. Criterion's 2-disc Special Edition has almost everything you need to know about how the eventual cult film was made, from 13-minute short that found fame at Sundance, to a year and a half of rewrites, and almost certain death at the hands of poor test screenings and lackluster box office; luckily for us that wasn't the case, and Anderson and the Wilson brothers would soon go on to “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums”.
The Last Hurrah ('58): John Ford's adaptation of Edwin O'Connor's political novel, based loosely on the corrupt ex-Boston mayor James Curley, is made sentimental with the likable Spencer Tracy as Frank Skeffington, a four times elected mayor running his final campaign with the blood of his fiercest enemies stewed to a boil. Ford likes Frank Nugent's dialogue and lets the scenes run uninterrupted for what seems like ages; that certainly benefits pros like Tracy, John Carradine as his most rabid enemy, and Jeffrey Hunter as a less than idealistic writer following the campaign, but without much of Ford's usual visual flair, and flat black and white studio bound compositions, it's hardly his most exciting film.
Touchez pas au grisbi ('54): Classic Jacques Becker gangster saga, bridging the gap between “Pepe le Moko” and “Bob le Flambeur”, with a never better Jean Gabin as an aging old time thief whose final score is supposed to set him up for retirement, but Lino Ventura's brash dope dealer has something to say about that. Becker takes pains in detailing the lifestyle of the slightly-less-than-petty Parisian hood, from the nightclubs, back room dealings, private eateries, underground storage garages, and private hideaways (where gangsters, yes, brush their teeth and sleep in neatly folded pajamas), where friendship, which Melville would champion to levels of greater tragedy, is put to the test by scheming double-crosses and mistrust. As Gabin continues to bail out his long time partner, a patsy played with poignancy by Rene Dary, his dreams of an easy retirement are foiled by Ventura and his deception, and from a pulp Serie noire novel by Albert Simonin all about the language and the aura of the gangster, Becker makes a film primarily about unspoken love between best friends, which at its core, is certainly stronger than eight stolen bricks of gold.
A Matter of Life and Death ('46): The first of three successive Technicolor masterpieces photographed by Jack Cardiff for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this famous early post-war gem, making its debut on DVD, features stunning sets and a beautiful use of color and black and white photography to tell a tale of love and collaboration in a time of regrowth. On a mission during the final days of the war, RAF pilot David Niven radios to base that he's going down, telling American volunteer Kim Hunter to tell his mother he loves her; when the pilot washes ashore on a sunny beach, after missing his afterlife Collector (Marius Goring) in the fog, he instantly finds the girl and falls hopelessly in love, prompting a debate in Heaven as to whether the couple deserves a proper chance due to the mess up. Utilizing as many cinematic tools at hand, most notably, the glorious use of mixing monochromatic film stock for the Heaven sequences with stunning Technicolor stock for the Earth scenes (says Goring in the film's funniest bit of self-reflexivity, “one is starved for Technicolor up there”), Powell creates a vision that is at once epic – the famous “stairway to heaven”, as the film's American title notes, is nothing short of a modern design miracle for Alfred Junge – and intimate, the power of Niven and Hunter's immediate love coming through in something as small as a teardrop on a rose, or as large as to stop time itself. What at first plays as an intentional attempt to smooth out the differences between American and British sentiments after the war (Niven's trial boils down to American Raymond Massey vs. Brit doctor Roger Livesey in a 25-minute cultural standoff with fate and destiny at stake) essentially becomes a philosophical study of the right to live, and whether a person responsible for the happiness of another has more rights over a kid shot down over Germany with ties to no one. With “Black Narcissus” and “The Red Shoes” to come, and “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and “I Know Where I'm Going!” already in the past, this one of a kind film from Britain's best film-makers would appear to be just another glorious step on an endless ladder of great works, but it's more than just one of a bunch, it's the best film of Powell's career, and possibly the greatest English film of all time.
Coraline 3D ('09): 3D isn't what it once was, that is, a gimmick to get a struggling movie business back on track with characters jabbing scissors at you for a cheap thrill; now it's become a tool for ambitious animation directors, like Henry Selick, the stop-motion master behind this wonderfully creepy gem, to create images and places that come alive with depth and a tremendous use of space without sacrificing story or characterization. Adapted from a prize-winning work of prose fantasy by comic-book genius Neil Gaiman, the film tells of a lonely 10-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning) who, living in a rundown Gothic country mansion with her too busy parents, discovers a portal to another dimension in her room, a dimension that presents an alternate lifestyle where the food is good, her parents appreciate her, and the flowers in the garden are planted in her likeness. The catch, it's totally evil, as suggested by the buttons sewed into each character's eye sockets, and the more our Coraline ventures into this once dreamlike abyss, the more distanced and seemingly impossible it becomes for her to find her way back to her real parents. That of course is the film's best lesson for pre-adolescent children, and parents alike, that growing up is hard, but there's no easy escape to a world where it will be better, and if there were, it would probably be paved with bad intentions and misrepresented feelings. Amidst this terrific story and realistic characters is Selick's gorgeous stop-motion animation, which uses the 3D format to create a depth of field that is never less than imaginative and practical (Coraline's portal to her other-universe looks like a long, jagged, paper mache, purple hued laundry chute), filled with characters reminiscent of his great “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, but aimed less for horror and more as a child's fantasy gone terribly wrong.
A Sailor-Made Man ('21): Harold Lloyd's first feature film, essentially three gag filled one or two-reelers edited together, in which aloof millionaire Harold joins the Navy to please the stern father of a girl (Act 1), fights and befriends a bully on a carrier ship (Act 2), and saves the girl (Mildred Davis) from a grabby Sheik in an Arabian port (Act 3). Despite the obviousness of the patchwork nature of the plot, there's nothing wrong with the comedy, especially in the third act, where Harold storms the Sheik's palace in one hilariously staged long take, avoids capture by diving into a harem pool using a hookah as a breathing device, and saves the girl with only minimal danger. A big success, from here on out Lloyd would design his films as more coherent features, beginning next with “Grandma's Boy”, one of his most beloved films.
The Man with the Movie Camera ('29): Dziga Vertov and his Kino-Eye theory of film-making, using purely visual cinematic tricks to make a documentary film without the help of intertitles, is proved almost imperceptibly efficient with this legendary experiment in montage, following a cameraman (the director's brother, cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman) and editing him, and his footage, of city life to rapid-fire symbolic effect. One example of the way in which Vertov and his editor (wife Yelizaveta Svilova, seen as part of the film editing it together) use a forced montage approach to suggest an emotion: a woman wakes up (obviously staged), brushes her teeth and blinks into the mirror, while rapid fire cuts of a camera lens closing, with the opening and closing of blind shutters, finally lead into a shot of an eyeball superimposed over the camera lens, suggesting the ever present totalitarian voyeurism of the camera eye and its ability to capture found life (staged or not) at any time, anywhere. The whole film is filled with similar brilliant instances of symbolic montage (life and death are juxtaposed with a birth and funeral procession, happiness and bitterness with a marriage ceremony and a divorce signing), as Vertov's pseudo-documentary approach finds a bustling city, the city of the future, teeming with life, unaware that it's constantly under surveillance, malleable for anyone's political designs.
Murnau, Borzage & Fox ('08): Included in Fox's impressive Murnau/Borzage DVD box set, this 105 minute documentary traces the fates of the two directors with that of their much maligned mogul, William Fox, presenting three very different men intertwined by business, progression, and an almost obsessive need to be the best in a rapidly expanding artistic and capitalistic field. The Murnau and Fox stuff will be familiar to most film buffs with any knowledge of the early history of cinema, but Borzage, so famous and essential in the '20's, has never been allotted the critical appreciation he probably deserves, so the biographical information included in the documentary, especially on the making of “Seventh Heaven”, is quite invaluable.
By Adam Suraf