March 2009: 15 Mini Reviews
March 11, 2009
The last fifteen films I've seen.
Waltz with Bashir ('08): Like 2007's “Persepolis”, this unique and personal film by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman uses a stylized animation process to tell a story of growing up amidst war and chaos. Framing the narrative as a search for lost memories, Folman interviews his past friends and colleagues from their time in the Army during the 1982 Lebanon War, hoping to find what his involvement was in the massacre of Palestinian peasants in the Sabra and Shatila refuge camps. Considering the film is about lost memories, the animation gives the appropriate effect of a waking nightmare, and indeed, when Folman begins to piece the puzzle together, and finally gives us a bit of documentary footage, untouched, without any animation or commentary, the picture is overwhelmingly mournful.
Diary of a Country Priest ('51): Young Claude Laydu, making his film debut, is the quintessential Bressonian hero, as Georges Bernanos' Priest of Ambricourt, who finds himself alienated, lonely, and dying of cancer in his first parish, in Bresson's deceivingly simple take on life, death, and faith. As stomach cancer ravages the young priest from the inside, on the outside the pain and frustration of dealing with sheltered and secretive country citizens (from a spiteful young schoolgirl, to an adulterous Count, his spiritually reclusive wife, and their lonely teenage daughter) is etched agonizingly the priest's baby face. Bresson's famous mise-en-scene painstakingly suggests the priest's social failure by constantly separating him from his flock, shooting through windows and doorways, always a block of space in between, and if we don't notice the visual symbolism at first glance, there's more than enough weight in the numerous diary entries peppered throughout the narrative, giving us the inner thoughts of a man of God who, despite a painful, almost certain death, and ridicule at the hands of country rubes, remains unwaveringly spiritual.
Gomorra ('08): This unflinchingly violent depiction of underground crime in Naples and surrounding areas is unlike any mafia movie you've ever seen. Matteo Garrone's adaptation of Roberto Saviano's controversial account of the day to day workings of the Camorra, a tightly knit group of gangsters who deal in theft, drugs, and murder, connected to businesses as far ranging as waste management to high fashion cloth production, interweaves five stories, painting a portrait of an efficient, violent social network from the ground up. There is no Don sitting behind a mahogany desk stroking a cat, or an insane sociopath with his head in a mound of cocaine in this ultra-realistic film, only kids in poor tenement housing who have nobody to look up to but the criminal in the next flat, and though the basic rules of the mafia persist, namely, loyalty and an impossible lifelong grip on even the lowest of servants, there is little honor in this group of murderers, and Garrone, a smart director with an economical neo-realistic camera style, doesn't glorify any of it.
L'Age d'or ('30): Depending on how you view it even today, Luis Bunuel's first feature length film is either a profound meditation on the absurdity of religion, ritual, and social standards, or a total prank that even his friend, and co-collaborator Salvador Dali refused to acknowledge as anything else. It's probably both, I've seen it so many times that every new viewing brings me to a different conclusion about its ultimate worth in the history of the cinema, but one thing I never fail to grasp is that Bunuel, using images and editing for alternating shock and symbolic value, is a master provocateur, and any film that starts with a scorpion, ends with Jesus leaving the scene of a de Sadian orgy, and in between runs the gamut of religious and social anarchy for a tight 60 minutes of often incomprehensible mayhem, is worth the discussion.
Still Life ('06): Director Jia Zhangke favors long, slow tracking shots and a beautiful backdrop of a destroyed and decaying landscape to symbolize the never ending journey of two people looking for their abandoned spouses amidst the devastation. The location is the Three Gorges, a picturesque landscape where a massive Dam project has obliterated ancient cities and displaced millions of people due to flooding; amidst this economical and sociological state-made disaster, Jia has his protagonists – a country miner (Han Sanming), and a nurse (Zhao Tao) looking for their wife and husband, respectively – wander the landscape in a deliberate pace straight out of Antonioni and Hsien, picking up clues, but finding little solution. Jia's film is hardly melodramatic, if anything, its stately pace lulls the viewer into a kind of catatonic peace, anxious to see these characters complete their intended goals, but content just the same with a political agenda that calls out a multi-billion dollar construction project, a controversial stance for a young filmmaker in a Communist country, that has destroyed more lives than it has helped.
Dong ('06): Presented, along with an interview with Jia Zhangke, as the only extra on the “Still Life” DVD, this 65 minute documentary was intended as a companion piece with the feature, even using some of the same shots to further depict the destruction caused by the Three Gorges project. But where “Still Life” has a deliberate political message, “Dong” is more artistic and free, following an artist as he finds inspiration in the laborers tearing down the doomed buildings, and then travels to Thailand to paint a series of portraits of young women, possibly prostitutes, in ethereal poses. What we get is a portrait of a workmanlike artist finding similarities in the difficult jobs of two wildly different cliques.
Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder ('09): All indications seem to suggest that this is going to be the last new “Futurama” material we ever get, in which case die-hard fans like myself are in immediate mourning, but we've been through that before, with the cancellation of the series, and have come back strong, so with fingers crossed, Fox will realize that there's still an audience for the show, which makes good money on DVD, and will green-light more for the future. But if this is the end, the writers have wrapped up the series in agreeable fashion, like they did with the TV finale, “The Devil's Hands Are Idle Play Things”, by providing a happy ending for the much maligned romance between Fry and Leela, and peppering the film with enough insider material to keep the most ardent fanboy busy for three or four viewings.
Il Bidone ('55): Fellini's film about the lives of con-men is often overlooked by its more famous Oscar-winning bookends, “La Strada” and “Nights of Cabiria”, but with a similar visual and aesthetic style, and an emphasis on human struggle in the face of poverty and decadence, it fits appropriately in with this period in his maturation. Much like he did with Anthony Quinn as Zampano in “La Strada”, Fellini casts American actor Broderick Crawford to play Augusto, the head of a band of three or four desperate con artists who, in the brilliant opening passage, don religious robes and elaborately con a peasant woman out of her life savings, but a score like that, or any score, is hard to come by, and Augusto and his friends find daily life, providing for estranged family, ridiculed by decadent former friends who have moved on from the game, emotionally and physically taxing. Aging himself, Fellini is sympathetic to Augusto, and though there are good performances here from Richard Basehart, Giulietta Masina, and “I Vitelloni's” Franco Fabrizi, Crawford is the standout (even dubbed in Italian), sensitively portraying a man who knows a life of callous trickery has left him with nothing, resigned to his fate, but with a dignity that is both touching, and in the increasingly surreal landscape of Fellini's cinema, unexpectedly natural.
The Blue Angel ('30): Returning to Germany after a successful, Oscar-winning run in Hollywood, the great Emil Jannings stars in Josef von Sternberg's early talkie about a professor who ruins his life chasing a chorus girl, but if the film is remembered at all today, it's for the star-making performance of Marlene Dietrich, sexy and suggestive as Lola Lola. Personally, I've always thought Jannings was the better of the two, especially in the more expressionistic latter half, when the poor disgraced teacher has to take to wearing clown makeup to support his crumbling existence with the singer, but Jannings always seemed to play that character (“The Last Laugh” most famously), so it's no wonder that Dietrich, singing “Falling in Love Again” for the first time, would enjoy fame almost overnight, and enchant Sternberg's films, the best of her long career, for the next six years.
Ugetsu ('53): In late 16th century Japan, amidst the chaos of civil war, two couples find their lives devastated through greed and ambition, in this classic masterwork from Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the first films, along with “Rashomon” and “Gate of Hell” to signal to the world the brilliance of Japanese cinema. Part ghost story, part romantic tragedy, part contemporary social commentary, Mizoguchi's adaptation of two short stories by Ueda Akinari - in which one husband abandons his wife and son on a mission to sell his pottery, only to be enchanted by a beautiful Princess, and his friend and partner abandons his wife to pursue an unrealistic dream of becoming a master samurai – suggests that personal and capitalistic ambition often come at a cost to love and family. This kind of unhidden social commentary was common in Mizoguchi's cinema from the mid-30's to his death in 1956, but mostly we think of Mizoguchi as a master tactician who uses his camera (always moving, rarely cutting), to symbolize the waves of life, and though they often end in tragedy or hardship, it's a beautiful and haunting form of social judgment, and this film, along with the following “Sansho the Bailiff”, was the director's crowning achievement.
Movie Crazy ('32): One of the few Harold Lloyd talkies that almost replicates the charm and physical comedy genius of his silents, following idealistic movie fan Harold as he goes west to become a star, a tall order for a goofy klutz from the bible belt. But as soon as our hero arrives in town he falls in love with a starlet (Constance Cummings), runs afoul of a studio boss (Spencer Charters), and films a hilariously bad 27-take audition, making satirical use of the new sound technology that all but destroyed Lloyd's brand of silent screen comedy. The best scenes – a ball in which Harold mistakes his coat for a magician's, and a climactic fight scene on a studio boat set – are tweaks on more famous scenes from “The Freshman” and “The Kid Brother”, but even if he's repeating material from past classics, Lloyd is a dedicated professional, and most of the film-making satire is surprisingly effective in the infancy of the sound era.
The 39 Steps ('35): Hitchcock's first universal hit, about an innocent man who inadvertently stumbles onto a secret ring of spies, remains today one of the five best films of his career, and the one where almost all of the traits we know to be “Hitchcockian” come into play. Most importantly is the plight of the Wrong Man, played here with a masterful blend of comedy and dread by handsome Robert Donat, the poor sap who takes in a show one night and winds up with a dead woman in his lap, implicated in her murder, and thrown into a conspiracy of international intrigue that takes him from London, to Scotland, and back to London in one of the most circular of all Hitchcock on-the-run plots. Other Hitchcockian trademarks abound, like the MacGuffin (the secret of the 39 Steps), and the blond female protagonist (Madeleine Carroll, the perfect romantic foil for Donat), who, after spending half the movie scoffing at the hero's story, finally comes around while handcuffed to the fugitive in a romantic Scottish bed-and-breakfast. Hitchcock would use this scenario again, on a larger scale with a bigger budget, over two decades later for “North by Northwest”, when he was arguably the most famous and important director in the world, but there's no denying the roots come from this mid-30's British classic.
In This Our Life ('42): John Huston got this plum assignment after his debut, “The Maltese Falcon”, became one of Warner's biggest hits the previous year, and though the two hardly have any thematic qualities in common (crime drama vs. women's melodrama), Huston's direction is just as meticulous. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Ellen Glasgow, the southern melodrama stars Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland as the bad and good sisters, respectively, of a fading southern family; when Bette steals her sister's husband, the family is devastated, but before long the marriage is ruined and the spoiled monster is home again destroying lives, including the promising career of a local black boy working for the family. For 1942, the film is admirable for its sensitive treatment of the color issue in the south (and America by and large), but really this is more about the sexual and temperamental differences of Davis and de Havilland, both at the top of their game, and within Huston's carefully controlled studio mise-en-scene and Ernest Haller's beautiful shadows and lighting, they're a force to behold.
Watchmen ('09): The immediate joy of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel “Watchmen” is how beautifully the images translate in cinematic terms, each successive panel a masterfully edited and framed companion to the last, telling a sprawling, multi-planed story with a post-modern visual aggressiveness, both ironic and sincere, subverting fifty years of comic book myth and storytelling in one gloriously anarchic, blood-filled treatise. Always revered as an important literary touchstone, but one that, despite its cinematic qualities, was thought to be impossible to adapt to live action film without looking cheap or silly, and for over two decades it was, but with advanced computer technology finally caught up to the book's special effects, most notably, the atomic blue superman, Dr. Manhattan, the film adaptation has finally been accomplished, and for shear audacity and validity to its source material, it works. But what doesn't work, unfortunately, is that initial shock and awe of watching the still images blend themselves into a flowing mise-en-scene, and as much as director Zach Snyder (“300”) tries to replicate that kind of motion-in-space with tedious shots of slow-mo action, it just looks old hat on screen. Of course there is more to adapting the book than just replicating the panel-for-panel motion of the characters and action, and Snyder doesn't do a bad job in cramming Moore's immense narrative, which uses flashbacks, journal entries, newspaper clippings, classified documents, and comic book threads, into a coherent, albeit long (160 minutes) examination of heroism, social anarchy, and the responsibility of complete and total power. And the look of the production is certainly worth the reported $200 million it took to complete, especially the flawless execution of Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the book's most engaging and fantastical creation, but somehow the actors drown in the production values, coming off less as individuals crafting a persona than as mimics reading text buried in costume, make-up, and green-screen backdrops. Snyder's film is ambitious and admirable, and in obvious reverence to its hallowed source material, but there's a reason Moore disowns visual adaptations of his graphic masterpieces, and the overly stylized brutality and clunky pacing of this film is a good example of it.
Christmas in July ('40): On just his second film Preston Sturges's inimitable style was beginning to form more fully, a mixture of rapid-fire screwball banter, romantic comedy, and almost surreal circumstances in which ordinary Joe's find themselves in extraordinary situations. It would come to great fruition in the following “The Lady Eve”, and successive “Miracle of Morgan's Creek” and “Sullivan's Travels”, but here, with Dick Powell as an office worker who is duped into thinking he's won a 25,000 dollar advertising contest, and goes on a tremendous spending spree with a phony check, is a perfectly accessible comedy of dreams coming between the Great Depression and WWII. Powell and love interest Ellen Drew are charming and believable as the lower class office drones who dream of better things, but stealing the show, as usual in a Sturges comedy, is the secondary players, notably Raymond Walburn and Ernest Truex as flustered bosses, and Sturges regular William Demarest as an irritable clerk in charge of the ad contest. At 68 minutes this is a light concoction from one of the best filmmakers of the '40's, a harbinger of better things to come.
By Adam Suraf