June 2008: 15 Mini Reviews
June 17, 2008
The last fifteen films I’ve seen.
The Prisoner of Shark Island (’36): John Ford’s fascination with the south and Lincoln reaches a climax with this prestige picture about Dr. Samuel Mudd, a Maryland doctor who inadvertently treated John Wilkes Booth on the night of the assassination, resulting in a bogus treason charge and life in prison. Warner Baxter is sympathetic and heroic as the wronged doctor, who plans a daring and futile escape from the titular (and historically fake) prison, Ford regular John Carradine is terrifically menacing as the chief security officer, and Ernest Whitman has a surprisingly meaty role as Mudd’s faithful ex-slave partner-in-crime, though to be honest, the film’s portrayal of immediate post-war African-Americans is often offensive and simplistic, like many films of this era. Despite the clichés, melodrama, historical inaccuracies, and too easy ending, this was made during Ford’s best years (’35-’46), when his craftsmanship (so sleek, with Bert Glennon’s precision lighting) was in perfect tune with his sympathies as a master nostalgic storyteller.
I’m Not There (’07): The DVD of Todd Haynes’ brilliant and baffling Bob Dylan film, famous for its use of six different actors playing six different personalities in the Dylan biography, is notable for Haynes’ well researched commentary track, which not only explains the many different filmic references throughout the film (Godard and Fellini being most recognizable), but serves as a tour guide through a narrative so complex and intricate it’s often overwhelming on initial impact. Haynes is insightful in describing the many Dylan works referenced for the project (“No Direction Home”, “Don’t Look Back”, “Eat the Document”, “Invisible Republic”, to name a few), and genuinely moving while reminiscing about his time with Heath Ledger, the track obviously recorded in the immediate wake of Ledger’s sudden death, a note that makes Ledger’s turn as a selfish actor going through a devastating divorce all the more poignant and unforgettable. My first recommendation for this film was for Dylan purists only, but having seen it a couple times now, it plays more universal, less bio-pic than pop cultural hedge maze, and with Haynes’ ace commentary track helping us through the narrative intricacies, it can achieve a proper place in the weighty life project that is understanding Bob Dylan.
Repo Man (’84): Alex Cox’s blend of punk rock, sci-fi comedy, and post-modern sensibility usually ranks in the top five of American cult classics, and despite a low budget and an unruly plot, it’s a deserving status. Of that plot, about a punk kid (Emilio Estevez) who takes up with a lot of grizzly repo men (Harry Dean Stanton, Tracey Walter, and Sy Richardson) and somehow gets involved in a conspiracy involving four dead aliens and an atomic Cadillac, Cox doesn’t so much abandon convention as obliterate its exoskeleton, taking our hero from a Circle Jerks street mosh to a flight atop L.A. in a green time machine, with ironic, darkly comic dialogue to get us through. If there’s a hint of amateurishness it’s only in the acting, especially Estevez, who was young and relatively inexperienced at the time, for with the help of cinematographer Robby Mueller (Wim Wenders’ master cameraman), Cox turns his L.A. scene into a post-modern punk rock ground zero, leading the way to a similar style in 1986’s superior, downbeat “Sid and Nancy”.
Le Cercle Rouge (’70): It’s debatable among Jean-Pierre Melville buffs if this heist masterwork is his best film, considering the weight of “Le Samourai” and “Army of Shadows”, but it does feature one of the best heist scenes in film history, a nearly 30-minute jewelry store heist that is so accurate, fits so perfectly into the film’s primary characterizations, that the mechanics of it all become less about money and more about pure perfection. Criterion’s great two-disc DVD features numerous on-set interviews with Melville and mega-stars Yves Montand and Alain Delon, while a French documentary shows us a day in the life of Melville at his studio office and country home. I shudder to think of the proposed Johnny To remake currently in the works, starring Liam Neeson and Orland Bloom; we barely escaped Neil Jordan’s “Bob le Flambeur” remake “The Good Thief”, thanks to a superb Nick Nolte, why not let Melville and his super cool existential procedural continue to speak for itself?
Batman Begins (’05): I was rather harsh on this reinvention of the Batman saga when it came out in the summer of ’05 (http://www.dunkirkma.net/inreview/archives/batman_begins.html), primarily because of my fondness for Tim Burton’s 1989 original, and the fact that Bruce Wayne’s conversion to Batman is all too convenient (his Batmobile just happens to be under a sheet in the bowls of Wayne industry, along with his ready-made armor and weapons), but with multiple viewings the plot inconsistencies (no less than four villains, none of them compelling) and boring secondary characters (Katie Holmes, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer) take a backseat to Christopher Nolan’s moody Gotham sets and Christian Bale’s tortured, assured performance. Frankly, I only revisited this film to prime myself for “The Dark Knight” later this summer, a film that I think will benefit from less background exposition and a focus on just one villain (Heath Ledger’s much buzzed about Joker), and though I still can’t recommend it alongside contemporary comic book films like “Spider-Man 2” and “Iron Man”, I can concede that it’s not as dismissible as I once thought.
Seven Samurai (’54): Everybody knows the plot to Akira Kurosawa’s landmark “eastern western”, it’s been remade and retold numerous times, most notably by John Sturges in 1960 as “The Magnificent Seven”, about a poor isolated farming community that hires wandering master-less ronin to protect them against bandits, but no matter how familiar or easily adaptable the story is, nothing can take away from the shear genius of Kurosawa’s masterfully edited, three-and-a-half hour original. Everything about this film is still as powerful and original as it was when Kurosawa almost bankrupted Toho in 1954 producing it, from the stoic, complex performances of Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune as the samurai leader, Kambei, and the clownish farmer’s son Kikuchyo, respectively, to Kurosawa’s landmark use of telephoto lens to capture the intensity of a large scale battle scene, in a drenching rain, in a brilliant mixture of long shots and close ups, highlighting the chaotic dangerousness of the samurai’s seemingly selfless heroism. It’s that heroism that Kurosawa and his writing partners so perfectly match with the hypocritical selfishness of the farmers, lending the film its famed caste consciousness, where even though the samurai belong to a noble hierarchy, the feudal years have left them poor, starving, and willing to put their lives at risk for three squares and a bed of hay. For a movie of three-and-a-half hours, Kurosawa’s storytelling is economical and fast paced, but never slight, putting it alongside “Gone with the Wind” and “Lawrence of Arabia” as the greatest of all epics.
Control (’07): Photographer turned director Anton Corbijn brings a lush photographic style to this sorta biography of singer Ian Curtis (Sam Riley), who shucked a career as the prospering lead singer of Joy Division, and a troubled marriage to his teenage sweetheart (Samantha Morton), for inner demons and eventual suicide. In comparison with Michael Winterbottom’s “24-Hour Party People”, which covered similar musical ground (Manchester in the early ‘80’s), the black-and-white images are soothing opposed to Winterbottom’s frantic verite style, though for spirit, this film is something of a downer.
The Fire Within (’63): Louis Malle directs this adaptation of La Rochelle’s account of the suicide of a friend, himself at a crossroads, having just turned 30 and his biggest hit (“The Lovers”) five years past, almost as if our wandering hero (Maurice Ronet in the performance of his career) is the auteur, looking for an existential out following earlier commercial success. As Ronet visits friends from an earlier life, knowing full well his gun awaits him back home, we get a sense of Paris in the early ‘60’s, still on tilt and nervous from the Algerian War, but chic and stylish just the same, a contrast that psychologically suggests the uneven balance of the character’s dire motivations to connect with the past, and obliterate a potential future.
The Orphanage (’07): Spanish horror-fantasy about a woman who opens a home for special needs children, in the orphanage she grew up in, only to find the place seemingly haunted by the ghosts of her dead old housemates. That, and her beloved adopted son goes missing on their first weekend in the creepy mansion. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, this effective film from first time feature director Juan Antonio Bayona is smart to stick with del Toro’s dark visual style, blending fantasy and realism, while the story, like in the superior “Pan’s Labyrinth”, stresses personal tragedy over horror and the unexplainable, ending in a similar heartbreaking fantasia.
Sunrise (’27): After seeing F.W. Murnau’s German masterpiece “The Last Laugh”, William Fox invited the director to Hollywood to essentially shoot a German expressionist film for American audiences; what he got is generally accepted as the greatest film of the decade, and arguably one of the ten best films of all time, though at the time the massive sets and sparse box office helped derail Murnau’s dreams of total Hollywood freedom. Leading man George O’Brien cheats on country wife Janet Gaynor with city flapper Margaret Livingston, but when time comes to drown his wife and make off with the vamp, our hero hears bells and falls in love again with the demure beauty, taking her on a tour of the massive studio built city that’s less New York and more Lang’s Metropolis. The story is a parable, poetic and simplistically moving, and the performances fit the bill (Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress), but what’s most memorable about the film is the cinematography (shared by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss), the optical illusions, and how the camera seems to float through the country bog, lightweight and unflappable, like a ghost on the wind.
The Visitor (’08): Well-respected character actor Richard Jenkins bumps up to leading man status with a wonderful turn as a lonely professor who inadvertently befriends two immigrants, living in his spare New York apartment illegally, in the best film of the first half of 2008. Written and directed by Tom McCarthy, following up 2003’s equally great outcast dramedy “The Station Agent”, the film takes a standard formula – the unexpected friendship of highly different people – and builds a solid drama that touches on culture differences, and the often unfair treatment of foreigners in post 9/11 New York, taking aim primarily at immigration laws and detention centers. Jenkins has got most of the press (critics always love to trumpet character actors), and he’s well deserving, turning a bland and bored professor into a creature willing to accept new experiences, but the three foreign actors opposite Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass (notable from “The Syrian Bride” and “Paradise Now”), bring a sympathetic realism to a story that could have been bogged down in post middle age malaise and political self importance.
Throne of Blood (’57): Riding back from a decisive victory, master samurai Toshiro Mifune and Minoru Chiaki encounter a demon ghost in the middle of the Spider Castle forest, who prophesizes treason and death in the coming future, an apt prediction, in Akira Kurosawa’s loose and exciting adaptation of “Macbeth”. Of course the prophecy comes true, as it does in Shakespeare’s play, but Shakespeare could never have envisioned the way Kurosawa would take down his Macbeth, with a stunning and dangerous hail of arrows, from his own men, as the rival clan use shrubbery as a cloak to advance on a defenseless castle. The arrow filled finale is justly famous, not just because of the stunning imagery, but because that’s real fear in Mifune’s face; those were real arrows, and even though professional archers were shooting them, you can’t compensate for human error. Naturally it comes off flawless, thanks to Kurosawa’s textbook editing techniques; it’s a memorable ending to what many consider, myself included, the greatest Shakespearian update in film history.
They Live By Night (’47): Nicholas Ray’s directorial debut, a Film Noir adaptation of Edward Anderson’s “Thieves Like Us”, was shelved by new RKO chief Howard Hughes in 1947 because the artistic lovers-on-the-run formula didn’t fit in with his peculiar sensibility, but time has been kind to Nicholas Ray and his minor masterpiece, garnering much attention from the French critics who revolutionized cinema (and film analysis) a decade later, and has been a cult classic ever since. Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, both very young and fresh faced, play Bowie and Keechie, a pair of teenagers who hike it on the lamb when Bowie’s bank robbing gang (including menacing Howard Da Silva and Jay C. Flippen) draws the attention of state police. Ray’s sympathies lie with O’Donnell, the inevitable tragedy of the situation leaving her broken, swallowed in darkness by a brutalizing final close-up, but Granger is equally as effective in a role that pre-dates his two starring turns for Alfred Hitchcock, “Rope” and “Strangers on a Train”, the highlights of an otherwise under-whelming Hollywood career.
Side Street (’50): Packaged together with “They Live By Night” in a meaty Warner Brothers Film Noir box set, this urban Anthony Mann drama about a poor postman (Granger again) who steals a box of money and gets in way over his head, is notable today for its stunning New York street photography, as well as one of the first car chase sequences to fully utilize the mazelike qualities of lower Manhattan. Made for MGM when MGM was trying to distance itself from Louis B. Mayer’s reign of prestigious melodrama, Mann’s film (arguably his best pre-western picture) boasts a labyrinthine plot of thefts and double crosses, which for an 80 minute movie is quite dizzying, but it wraps up beautifully with a famous car chase that seems to suggest, with Mann and Oscar winning cameraman Joseph Ruttenberg’s extremely high and low alternating angles, a Hitchcockian Wrong Man trapped in an almost inescapable rat maze. This film bridges a gap, along with the just released on DVD “The Furies”, from Mann’s Poverty Row noir’s to his famous James Stewart westerns of the ‘50’s, and though it isn’t as well known as those later films, or even “T-Men” and “Raw Deal” before it, it remains a lynchpin in the director’s continuing mastery of the dark side of human frailty.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (’07): Anamaria Marinca is a revelation as a frustrated college student arranging an illegal abortion for her selfish best friend in director Cristian Mungiu’s much acclaimed Palme D’or winner, a central work in the burgeoning Neo-realist cinema of Romania. In the waning days of the communist regime (“Romania, 1987” says the simple inter title) two college friends desperately try to arrange a black market abortion nearing the crucial calendar cut-off (hence the title), but roadblocks, including the securing of a proper space, and a menacing and matter-of-fact abortion provider (Vlad Ivanov), prove the illegal task almost impossible. The tension of Mungiu’s brilliantly realized screenplay comes in the way he photographs Marinca, in excruciatingly long single takes, usually of long or medium shot, as the pressures of her duty as a friend to secure the abortion, clash hand in hand with both her personal safety and social responsibilities of a relationship with a frustrated boyfriend (Alexandru Potocean). The long takes help to enhance the mood, be it the awkwardness of a dinner party, or the painfully disturbing revelation of a bathroom floor bundle near the climax, while the seemingly natural lighting, drab interiors, and rigid bureaucracy, from buying smuggled cigarettes to securing a single motel room, suggest a country struggling to advance in an age of modernity.
by Adam Suraf