July 2008: 15 Mini Reviews
July 13, 2008
The last fifteen films I’ve seen.
The Last Laugh (’24): Emil Jannings stars for director F.W. Murnau in this quintessential example of German Expressionism, playing a good-natured hotel doorman whose life, and social stature, become devastated when the boss demotes him to bathroom attendant after a poor performance on a rainy night. Jannings suggests the doorman’s suicidal state of mind with little more than facial expressions and a hunched posture, while Murnau’s mise-en-scene crushes the deflated man against a backdrop of towering sets and snickering gossipers, telling the parable with only one or two necessary title cards, making what is, essentially, from a visual and performance standpoint, pure cinema. With the success of this masterpiece, Murnau, Jannings, and famed cinematographer Karl Freund (whose landmark long takes and seemingly lightweight camera revolutionized the art of cinematography) found the golden ticket to careers in Hollywood, but nothing that followed, except maybe “Sunrise”, can quite compare to the visual inventiveness of Murnau and Freund’s frame, or the overwhelming power of Jannings’ psychologically devastating performance.
Gold Diggers of 1933 (’33): Despite a clichéd lets-put-on-a-show-in-the-middle-of-the-depression storyline, and a stiff central romance between congenial lovebirds Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, Mervyn LeRoy’s comedy musical is full of life, thanks almost entirely to five set pieces by Busby Berkeley that all but render the plot useless. Here we have Ginger Rogers leading “We’re in the Money” flanked by gigantic gold coins and a row of chorus girls in skimpy gold flecked outfits, more than ironically ushering in a plot about the financial woes of Broadway during the Depression, while in the “Shadow Waltz” a stunning display of dancers float around an enormous stage with neon violins, whose beautiful skeletal glowing make the downbeat, rain drenched soldiers of “Remember My Forgotten Man” that much more effectively depressing. LeRoy’s skills come in directing the comedy of the non-musical sequences, and he gets fine performances from Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee in the non Powell/Keeler romantic subplots, but this movie would be an afterthought if it weren’t for Berkeley’s impressive numbers, added, interestingly enough, only after the tremendous success of “42nd Street” earlier that year.
The Public Enemy (’31): William Wellman’s famous gangster saga is one of the best of the early sound genre pictures, not just because it virtually introduced the talents of a young James Cagney, after a few bit parts in forgettable Warner’s fare, with his cynical smirk and rapid fire tough guy delivery, but because it’s one of the earliest films to finally understand how to use sound and camera movement simultaneously, freeing the camera from its microphone imposed shackles. A year later Howard Hawks would expand on similar themes, the rise and bitter fall of a two-bit hood during prohibition, with “Scarface”, which along with “Little Caesar” earlier represents the essential trinity of early gangster pictures, films about social ills that, despite tacked on prologues and grisly finales, totally lionized the likes of Al Capone into genuine American myth.
The Thin Blue Line (’88): Errol Morris’s legendary post-modern documentary, about the maligned investigation of a Texas cop’s murder, breaks the rules of documentary filmmaking while reinventing them just the same, as highly stylized reenactments of the murder, interspersed with a bizarre concoction of “witness” accounts and in-prison testimonials from the two lead suspects, suggest a Texas justice system ignorant of facts and quick to slam the gavel on anyone that fits the bill. That person was Randall Adams, a drifter wrongfully accused of murder by association with young criminal David Harris; Morris gets their stories from their perspectives and the sometimes contradictory perspectives of drive-by witnesses, lawyers, investigators, and law experts, coming to a conclusion, without so much as stating it, that for years the wrong man has sat on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. The film ends proper with Harris all but admitting to the crime, while in jail on other charges, and in a landmark ruling, what Morris reports eventually led to Adams’ release; a black eye for the Texas justice system, but a shining example of the influential nature of Errol Morris and his unique storytelling abilities.
Hancock (’08): Will Smith is strong as usual in a strange super-hero film that betrays its promise of dark comedy for an unpleasant mixture of ironic tragedy, leaving the remains of an entertaining first half spoiled by the uneven disappointment of a too heavy second. Smith plays the reluctant titular hero, a regular drunken Joe who just happens to be indestructible, though when he does fly into action, his stumbling heroics cause more damage than they do good, leaving him alienated from a Los Angeles that tires of his so-called heroic duties. That’s a good premise, and the first half hour, as Smith flies through the air, half asleep with a bottle in his hand, is filled with funny moments, and when Jason Bateman shows up to supply the troubled hero with a plan to dry out and create a better public image, the two actors naturally ply their comedic chops against each other. But then the film has to resolve itself (Who is Hancock? Why is he indestructible? Are there more of his kind?), and instead of sticking with the dark comedy, the script dives into an implausible mix of romantic tragedy and religious myth (involving Charlize Theron and the suggestion of God’s angels), abruptly ending at a scant 90 minutes with little explanation after a series of unsatisfying CGI laden fight scenes. The fault lies in the much toyed with script and director Peter Berg’s execution (I can certainly do without the highly annoying shaky camera school of filmmaking as well), it’s an unfortunate detour from what is a good premise, and given how good Smith is in the lead role, handled differently, it’s not beyond speculation that this character could anchor better films in the future.
WALL*E (’08): Blending everything from “E.T.” and “City Lights” to “Short Circuit”, “2001” and “An Inconvenient Truth”, Pixar and director Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo”) create a movie both original and familiar in its Sci-Fi homage structure. Our hero for this latest box office and critical gem, from the greatest minds in animation, is a rusty little trash compactor named WALL*E, who roams around a deserted Earth picking up garbage, centuries after the last humans abandoned the polluted planet for a life of sloth and easy consumption aboard a hovering spaceship. WALL*E’s life isn’t too spectacular, but he does get a joy out of the knickknacks he finds and collects in the trash piles, especially an old videotape of the Hollywood musical “Hello, Dolly!”, but when a slick environmental robot named EVE comes to the planet to scan for potential plant life, our man falls in love, and in that, believe it or not, a movie that starts out like a Spielbergian mix of “I Am Legend” and “E.T.”, with no dialogue and an incredibly heavy message about pollution and consumerist waste, becomes the most charming romantic comedy in years. The film has its thrills, especially when the robots leave Earth for the hovering spacecraft, transporting a tiny bud that may be the key to sustaining life, but the heart (tremendous as always for a family friendly Pixar film) lies in the impossibly cute pairing of these two completely different, wordless characters, proving that even the smallest amount of dialogue (as in “The Last Laugh”), handled with visual splendor and pitch perfect timing, can bring about a wellspring of storytelling possibilities. The year is only halfway through, but we’ll be hard pressed to find another film with such visual genius and emotional depth; another masterpiece from a studio batting perfect in the category.
This Sporting Life (’63): Lindsay Anderson’s contribution to the British New Wave is often considered the death knell of the movement, thanks largely to an audience and critical base growing weary of the Angry Young Man story arch, but time has proven that despite being one of the last, and least successful, it is arguably the very best, certainly on par with “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and “Taste of Honey” for its raw emotions and complicated narrative structure. Playing a brutish rugby professional who recalls a tortured relationship with his widowed landlady, Richard Harris gives one of the quintessential British performances of the decade, all anger and spite, struggling to fit into a society that deems him necessary in mud only, while by day his toils in the coal mines go unrewarded and by night a love life unfulfilled. Anderson didn’t make another feature film of this magnitude for five years, the surreal schoolhouse attack “If…”, and though “If…” has an ethos all its own, you can say Anderson spent himself wholly on Harris and the complicated flashback heavy David Storey script, blending a kind of poetic realism with a bitter cynicism, the commercial failure of which turned him on England, and English society in total.
Three Short Films By Lindsay Anderson (’48 - ’92): Criterion’s stuffed DVD special edition of “This Sporting Life” includes a commentary track by an Anderson scholar as well as writer David Storey, a BBC documentary on the often misunderstood career of the great theater and film director, and three short documentary films made before and after Anderson’s most populated run of features (’63-’73). Included are “Meet the Pioneers” (’48), Anderson’s first assignment, about the workmanlike accuracy of producing conveyer belts for coal mines; “Wakefield Express” (’52), following a journalist gathering information for the weekend edition of the titular paper; and “Is That All There Is?” (’92), a self-reflexive examination of a life in theater and film, made with the kind of pointed political slant that marred his most ambitious efforts (“Britannia Hospital”, “O Lucky Man!”). These are welcome bits to any examination of the work of Lindsay Anderson, especially “Wakefield Express”, which follows the painstaking procedure of producing an independent paper with an almost neo-realist accuracy, but compared with the DVD’s main attraction - the film’s new print and the scholarly and informative commentary track - the three short documentaries are for Anderson completists only.
Act of Violence (’48): In a sunny Los Angeles suburb of post WWII America, Van Heflin is living a nice life with wife Janet Leigh, until the day old army buddy Robert Ryan shows up to execute him, for supposed war crimes kept secret and never officially punished, in a Film Noir from Fred Zinnemann that’s all about the tormented psyche, and repressed secrets, of retired soldiers in the immediate post war era. Typical of Film Noir of this era, especially at MGM, just beginning to toy with the genre, Zinnemann’s film is heavy on symbolic shadows (thanks to legendary cameraman Robert Surtees), with an appropriately violent ending that wraps up the tight plot with urgency and accuracy, and in Heflin and Ryan, actors both gruff and subtle, we feel the pain of the returning soldier, who was expected to leave it all over there, to face a normalcy back home that was, and still is, almost impossible to grasp.
Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs (’08): Sci-Fi comedy isn’t the most burgeoning of genres, but late June saw a two-punch goldmine with the release of “WALL*E” and this straight-to-DVD 90 minute film from Matt Groening and the “Futurama” gang, the second of four post-cancellation films us diehard fans crave so eagerly. Without the careful satirical jabs at television execs and joyous “we’re back” nature of “Bender’s Big Score”, this film plays more like an extended episode of the original series, part monster movie part romantic satire, as a giant squid planet from a distant universe woos Fry and Earth’s population with its busy tentacles, though jealous Bender and his League of Robots might have something to say about it. My prevailing opinion is that “Futurama” was always more cult than the generally universal appeal of “The Simpsons”, maybe that’s why Fox had such a hard time selling it (or finding a spot for it), but these DVD’s are perfect for the core fan base, ripe with countless in jokes and references to the original episodes we know word for word, and though a silly story like this is hard to stretch to 90 minutes (four full episodes), it’s just so good to have new material, even stretched out “Futurama” is better than no “Futurama”, and I am in fan-boy heaven.
Mystery Street (‘50): Strange murder mystery that emphasizes the relatively new science of forensics (plastered everywhere on modern television), rather than old fashioned detective work, with Ricardo Montalban trying to figure out the mystery behind a found beach skeleton. Today’s audience will find the application of forensics rather stale, but in 1950 it was a fresh approach, especially in a morbid sequence where the skull of the corpse is matched with the headshots of local D-girls. Of note here, besides Montalban, the Boston locales, and the early use of forensics, is cinematographer John Alton’s noir shadows, and Elsa Lanchester in a standout supporting turn as the murdered girl’s blackmailing ex landlady.
The Furies (’50): Criterion’s first foray into the western couldn’t be more appropriate in the genre’s history, for this transitional work from Anthony Mann bridged the gap from his early noir to his more famous genre staples with James Stewart, a film epic in scope, but tightly wound around one neurotic, larger than life frontier family. Walter Huston runs The Furies, an enormous cattle ranch that houses native squatters on the outer flats; one day when he burns the squatters out of their home at the insistence of his new fiancé, Easterner Judith Anderson, killing his daughter’s (Barbara Stanwyck) best friend (Gilbert Roland), a rift of Shakespearian proportions splits father and daughter down loyalty lines. Also, Stanwyck is hooked up with no good gambler Wendell Corey, the son of Huston’s long dead archenemy, and that doesn’t sit well with strong-headed papa. Of course this is all family melodrama, not necessarily groundbreaking stuff, but what’s important is the way Mann and cinematographer Victor Milner blend western conventions with the style of classic Film Noir, easily lending itself the reputation as the film that propelled Mann from “Side Street” and “T-Men” to “The Naked Spur” and “Winchester 73” with ease.
Hellboy (’04):
I found this adaptation of Mike Mignola’s Dark Horse Comics
series about a monster fighting hell spawn kind of busy and over
stimulated when I reviewed it back in 2004, knowing very little about the
graphic series or director Guillermo del Toro, but since then I’ve come
around, thanks in no small part to my adoration of del Toro’s “Pan’s
Labyrinth” and his stunning visual style and imagination.
There are still problems, like the film’s overuse of gross
hellhounds that pose Hellboy the most trouble, and Hellboy’s fishlike
sidekick, Abe Sapian, is only slightly less annoying than Jar-Jar Binks
(they’re played by the same actor, Doug Jones), but all that is slight
annoyance compared with del Toro’s style, Ron Perlman’s hipster
cynicism in the titular role, and the careful gothic art direction, which
suffuses modern settings with a kind of occult flavoring, perfect for the
film’s religious themes of good and evil.
The two-disc DVD has everything a fan could desire, including two
commentary tracks, a barrelful of storyboards and drawings, deleted
scenes, and a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on the film’s production,
an epic and informative crash course in fantasy filmmaking 101.
Stalag 17 (’53): Billy Wilder always found laughs in dark places, though none more jarring than a Nazi POW camp, where bitterly cynical William Holden fends off accusations of treason and collaboration from a barracks of imprisoned pilots quick to point the finger when an escape attempt goes awry. Oscar winner Holden is all business as his enterprising Sefton tries to unearth the real stoolie, leaving the comic relief to Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck (of the original 1951 Broadway play), as wisecracking buddies starved for attention and female companionship, giving the film its uneasy balance between prison drama and slapstick comedy. Coming off the almost rabid cynicism of “Ace in the Hole”, the comedy here is a breath of fresh air, and though it’s still hard to find belly laughs this close to the Holocaust, Wilder, who lost family in concentration camps, knows when to punch the comedy with enough drama, like the interrogation of Lieutenant Don Taylor, or Robinson Stone’s touching portrayal of a soldier shell shocked mute by the war’s horrors, as to be respectful to the survivors, and non survivors, of such hellish prison camps.
The Lower Depths (’57): Of the many literary adaptations of Kurosawa’s filmography, none is as perfectly controlled and theatrical as this undervalued masterpiece from 1957, a staging of Maxim Gorky’s Russian tragic-comedy transplanted from late 19th century Russia to mid-19th century Edo Japan. The ensemble cast includes big names like Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada, a few months after playing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in “Throne of Blood”, but the joy of the film isn’t in the singular performances, as good as they are, it’s in the way Kurosawa weaves a collective characterization of disillusionment and hope in a two-set slum, creating with both theatrical long takes and his standard telephoto editing techniques, a miasma of recognizable tropes and stereotypes. For its rigid structuralism and deliberate theatricality, impossibly talky and faithful to the play, Japanese audiences and critics found it less than crowd-pleasing, and indeed, Kurosawa’s next film, “The Hidden Fortress”, back to samurai comedy, was the biggest moneymaker of his career, but it’s obvious that these pet projects, along with “The Idiot” and “I Live in Fear”, films that didn’t break the box office, were personal favorites, and the craftsmanship involved is evident in every glorious frame.
by Adam Suraf