March 2009, Part II: 15 Mini Reviews
March 29, 2009
The last fifteen films I've seen.
Masculin Feminin ('66): This episodic take on youth, love, sex, politics and Paris in the mid '60's, with New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud as a young journalist trying to bed pop singer Chantal Goya, is one of Jean-Luc Godard's most scrutinized films, and if you understand it, one of his best. Ostensibly plot less, Godard uses Leaud as his own personal mouthpiece, setting up situations in which the dialogue between characters works more like impersonal interviews, subjects ranging on everything from politics and Vietnam to birth control and abortion, often shooting takes of excruciating length for realistic effect. Godard's film is difficult - the characters aren't appealing, the politics can be off putting, and as always, the film-making is deliberately without polish or convention – but it's also fascinating, for its take on individuality and youth, sex and culture; it's a New Wave essential, and possibly Godard's most zeitgeisty piece of '60's revolution pop.
The Flowers of St. Francis ('50): Roberto Rossellini's playful religious comedy, co-written by frequent collaborator Federico Fellini, features non-professional actors (actual monks) in the roles of St. Francis and his closest followers, told in vignettes shot in the countryside in neo-realist fashion, but with little to no political affiliation with that particular movement. Each segment (nine total) varies in degrees of realism and believability, with the longest segment, following Brother Ginepro on a sabbatical to a tyrant's war camp (the tyrant, played with exaggeration by famous actor Aldo Fabrizi, is a comedic concoction) the most amusing, and the briefest, St. Francis encountering a leper on a country path, the most moving, giving the film an episodic nature, not unlike the director's previous “Paisa”. In terms of religious fare, this is faithful and inspirational, but may be suitable for religious (and Rossellini/Fellini) study only.
Let the Right One In ('08): In a drab Swedish apartment complex, bullied 12-year-old Oskar meets lonely brown-eyed Eli and finds a kindred spirit; when Oskar finally realizes that Eli is an androgynous centuries-old vampire, the relationship remains remarkably unconventional in this instant classic mood piece from director Tomas Alfredson. Alfredson uses both of the protagonists' situations to reflect their growing need for companionship – Oskar as a boy who is ruthlessly bullied at school, and finds no support in his bored, separated parents, and Eli, relying desperately on an aging minion to kill locals for fresh blood – creating a cone of loneliness and frustration inescapable in this bleak, poor social universe. While adhering to most vampire genre “rules”, Alfredson's film (adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his popular book) is spare on the gore and heavy on the mood and characterizations, helped by two natural performances from the young leads (pale Kare Hedebrant and ethereal Lina Leandersson), and one brilliantly hectic climax in a high school pool, where the shock of dark red blood against shining white tile is amazing. Most vampire movies these days are a dime a dozen, but this one is unique, gorgeous, and disturbing, and I'm sure the proposed American remake will stink, as they always do.
Le Trou ('60): Jacques Becker's final film was this uber-manly prison escape epic, based remarkably on a true story, about a cell full of dudes who put enough trust in a new mate to bring him along on their painstakingly detailed plan. The plan, executed in precision detail by Becker, filming in the same prison, sometimes with the very men who inspired Jose Giovanni's story, to dig a hole through the concrete floor, weave through the prison underground catacombs, and tunnel into the sewer ducts and out through a street manhole, is ambitious by any escape standards, but with heavy surveillance, and a thin veil of trust that is constantly put to the test, it's exceptionally difficult. Becker uses sounds to fill the already tense situation with a chronic nerve – the repetitive banging of a tool on the concrete floor, the wail of the prison siren, the deadly rattle of a made key trying a crucial lock for the first time – while his cramped mise-en-scene never betrays the riskiness of the attempt. This is on the shortlist of the greatest prison films of all time, and a certain influence on everything from “Escape From Alcatraz” to “The Rock”.
Rushmore ('98): If you like your movies sweet, stylish, packed with jump cuts, and scored with a mix of harmonium and British Invasion pop, than Wes Anderson's second film would be right up your ally; frankly, I like it all, and this is the closest to perfection he's got. Jason Schwartzman plays Max Fischer, an overambitious sophomore at Rushmore Academy, where his tremendous schedule of after-school activities (fencing club, bee keepers club, French club, kite flying society) has left his grades, and scholarship, on the verge of expulsion; when he simultaneous takes a shine to a cynical ex-grad (Bill Murray), and a beautiful kindergarten teacher (Olivia Williams), things just get more complicated. Anderson's film is a kind of anti-fairytale, perfectly aesthetic with its songs and long takes and jump cuts and wide-screen cinematography, but the characters aren't idealized heroes; Max is a bit of a jerk, Murray's Blume is an alcoholic millionaire on the verge of a breakdown, and though Williams is the glue that holds both of the men together as they fall apart, she can only extend so much pity on her immature boys. I hear, like Godard, that you either tolerate Wes Anderson's style or you throw it away, which is a bit harsh, you can like the performances here (which are uniformly excellent) and find the film-making precious, but I think it's a complete package, charming and challenging just the same, and if you've never heard “Ooh La La” by The Faces, you'll have a hard time getting it out of your head afterwards.
A Man Escaped ('56): With a simple setup – a POW in a Nazi prison plots a seemingly impossible escape – Robert Bresson fashions a riveting portrait of human endurance in the face of almost certain failure. Using non-professional actors and a style that favors off-screen sounds, precise framing, and step-by-step analysis of the fly-by-night escape plan (which involves a spoon, cracking through a wooden door, and fashioning hooks from bed frame wire and sheets to scale the prison walls), Bresson doesn't so much isolate his hero Fontaine (Francois Leterrier) from human contact - he has a close-knit group of Resistants who funnel him food and writing material, keep an eye out for guards - as much as he did with Claude Laydu's priest in “Diary of a Country Priest”, but in his cell, bloody and desperate, chipping away at the wooden door frame, or meticulously threading torn cloth around wire for his hooks, Fontaine is certainly a man who knows his immediate freedom is in his and his hands only. This great film deserves a special edition on DVD, and now that New Yorker films has gone under, let's hope that Criterion jumps on the rights and gets it into production soon.
Dodes'ka-den ('70): After five years of frustration, in which he couldn't find funding for “Runaway Train” and was fired from “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, Akira Kurosawa returned to film-making with this wildly episodic adaptation of stories by Yamamoto, one of his favorite writers, and adapted to color photography and a static full screen ratio that he would favor for the remainder of his career. The results are mixed, partly because what survives is only 140 minutes of an original 240 minute cut (similar to the fate of “The Idiot” 20 years earlier), cutting together disparate stories of folks in a shantytown with no particular focus on any one main character, a shocking transgression from the director's usual cinema of heroes. The best parts – a retarded teenage boy who “rides” around the shantytown on an invisible trolley, two drunken best friends who swap wives and become confused by the lack of familiarity with the color coordinated opposites, a worker with a facial tick who defends his mean wife to coworkers – are compassionate in the face of waste and poverty (like “The Lower Depths”), but often the stories fall to tragedy and melodrama, like the focus on a homeless man and his son, who suffer food poisoning after begging for scraps. Kurosawa's painter's eye easily lends itself to imaginary color backdrops, which give the film an almost dreamlike quality, but I've always wondered what that original four-hour cut looked like, and if the dispersed characters were just a bit more fleshed out than what we were left with.
Pinocchio ('40): Disney has done another bang up job reissuing one of their most beloved classics as a Platinum Edition DVD, including, amongst a beautiful new print, over an hour of documentary analysis on the legendary production, coming on the heels of the how-do-we-top-this? 'Snow White', a terrific commentary track headlined by Leonard Maltin, and for art buffs, hundreds of priceless drawings, sketches, and paintings from the Glory Days of hand-drawn animation. Even though the film didn't recoup its enormous costs during the war, it was hailed instantly as a work of artistic triumph and storytelling delight, touching on basic human emotions (love, fright, need, courage) in simple, relatable characters that would come to represent stock Disney character molds, while pushing their film-making craft to almost unattainable perfection. That's all evident in the film's most magical scene, where the Blue Fairy catches Pinocchio in a lie, his wooden nose growing into a branch with leaves and a bird's nest; as one lie after another causes the nose to grow and grow - the rhythmic beats of which are seen and heard in the special effects and sounds of the fairy's magical glitter on each successive spurt – we witness, literally, the transformation of an innocent nave into a being of cunning and adventure, which in this unusually dark Disney world of hooligans and monster whale attacks, is a lesson for young children to fear, not replicate. The bonus features of the DVD fully complement the film's status as arguably the greatest animated film of all time, and as always, Disney comes out looking classy in what is sure to be another successful relaunch of an essential masterwork of the studio's greatest era.
Women of the Night ('48): When war widow Fusako (Kinuyo Tanaka) loses her baby to tuberculosis, and an affair with her drug smuggling boss goes awry, she turns to street walking and prostitution in this realistic social commentary from Kenji Mizoguchi, as much a reflection of Italian Neo-Realism as Kurosawa's same year “Drunken Angel”. Fusako's plight is contrasted with that of her sister, Natsuko (Nanae Takasugi), who has an affair with the same boss, but instead of following her sister into prostitution, she winds up in a home for women, pregnant with an illegitimate baby, but as is often the case with Mizoguchi at his most politically damning, both women are made to suffer at the hands of corrupt men and a corrupt society still badly wounded from the war. It's a powerful drama, unflinching in its depiction of the competitive world of the street walker, filled with violence and spite, and Mizoguchi's style, all long takes and (mostly) street exteriors, is realistic and effective.
The Story of Qiu Ju ('92): Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in '92, Zhang Yimou's much admired realistic drama follows peasant farmer Gong Li on a seemingly unending quest for justice, after her husband is rendered inept and shamed by a county official after a fight. In a quiet manner that at times begs to get repetitive, but remains fascinating in its documentary look at rural and urban modern China, Zhang follows Gong and her sister-in-law (Liuchun Yang) from one level of government to the next, looking for a ruling that is fair; as Chili farmers with a lucrative business, the peasants aren't looking for compensation, but rather, unique for films about legal battles, a simple apology, which the offending party is unflinchingly stubborn to hand out. Unlike the previous “Red Sorghum” and “Raise the Red Lantern”, Yimou never has to use Gong's natural beauty as a plot point (stuffed into peasant winter clothes and seven months pregnant, she's anything but the glamorous bride of 'Lantern'), but lets her stubborn determination drive the story to its ironic, some might say satirical conclusion, and filming on the streets with hidden cameras, the director catches the bustle and crowded economic competitiveness of modern China for all it's worth.
Nights of Cabiria ('57): Fellini never had more compassion for a character than for Cabiria, played so effortlessly by his wife, Giulietta Masina, in this masterpiece from 1957, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and the last gasp of humanistic realism in Fellini's canon that soon, with the following “La Dolce Vita”, would turn cynical and bizarre. Not that that is missing from 'Cabiria' entirely; the sequence where Cabiria and her prostitute friends and pimps visit a shrine to the Madonna, flanked by peasants and religious Catholics, is made comical by the out-of-placeness of the street rabble and their revealing clothes, not to mention the price they have to pay to witness the statue, but just the same, when Cabiria is hypnotized by a magician and reveals her inner loneliness and longing for true love, bathed in spotlight against a crowd of gawking men, it's the most honest ten minutes of Fellini's entire career. With 'Cabiria' you could argue that Fellini was saying good-bye to the first decade of his career, from Neo-Realism to Surrealism, with not only a shrine to his wife, but to a transgressive attitude toward characterization and screen realism that would be more aggressively bizarre in the following decade; both styles have their followers, I like both, but “Nights of Cabiria” is special.
Fistful of Dollars ('64): Sergio Leone's first Italian western, a re-make, as it were, of Kurosawa's “Yojimbo”, brought international prominence to himself and his star, American TV player Clint Eastwood, and with fierce action, a masterful soundtrack filled with whips, flutes, and piano by Ennio Morricone, and a revolutionary cynical anti-hero, the rest was history. The plot, and some of the wide-screen compositions and action, are direct takes on “Yojimbo”, about a lone gunman (Eastwood) who wanders into a ghost town, ruled by dueling gangs, and plays them against each other for personal gain, but this is one of the rare instances in film history where a mere rip-off of a great movie, infused with a visionary director's own cultural sensibility and ironic discourse on a nominal, dying American genre, came close to, if not equaling, the original. The 2004 special edition DVD does a Criterion worthy job of putting the film in its proper historical place, with commentary and over an hour's worth of interviews.
I Love You, Man ('09): I wonder if Larry Levin, co-writer of this consistently funny comedy, ever dreamed that when he was writing “Seinfeld's” classic Keith Hernandez ep, “The Boyfriend”, 17 years later he'd be mining the same territory for the big screen, and of all things, it would be called a “Bro-mance”, and the film would be the apotheosis of such a concept. Indeed, if Jerry had a man crush on his new famous baseball player buddy out of shear awe, and maybe slight homo-erotic curiosity, the relationship between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel here, borne out of a mixture of need and likability, is a (almost) full on love affair. Rudd plays a guy so in need of male friendship that he has no one to ask to be his best man at his upcoming wedding; after a series of bad “man dates”, he meets Segel, a dude's dude, er, a slacker investor with a cool pad on Venice Beach and a unique personality, and they bond over fish tacos and Rush CD's. Not really understanding the male-male friendship dynamic, Rudd's behavior, sloppily handing out nick-names, failing badly at sex talk, is both painfully embarrassing and charmingly endearing, which is what makes the film so sweet when the two click, despite social differences, and begin to threaten the engagement with bizarre behavior alienating the fiancée (Rashida Jones). Co-writer and director John Hamburg's film isn't too original, the dialogue and pop references spring directly from any number of recent Judd Apatow films (Hamburg, a descendant of “Undeclared”, is well versed in the genre), as does the cast, but when the actors all click on such a high level, with material that comes out best improvised, than the formula is almost unnoticeable because the content is so distractingly funny. And even though he gives virtually the same performance every time you see him, Paul Rudd is turning into one reliably charming leading man, and this is his best work yet.
Umberto D. ('52): State pensioner Umberto (Carlo Battisti) can't live on his meager monthly stipend; his bossy landlady is demanding back rent, his throat is scratchy, his sweet nurse is pregnant by any of two national guardsmen, and his beloved mutt has to eat scraps from a food shelter. Amongst all this devastation, sadness, and post-war economic criticism, Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini fashion their most enduring portrait of survival, and though it's a struggle that will bring Umberto and his dog to ruin and back (possibly), with thoughts of suicide and a future of homelessness, it's a triumph of human spirit. But De Sica never betrays the possibility, in the best Neo-Realist tradition, that Umberto is destined to fail because his social system has let him down, put him out to pasture as it were, as the film's most startling metaphor - a frantic trip to a dog pound – suggests in not so subtle detail, and further expanding on the themes he and Zavattini helped to invent with “Bicycle Thieves” and “Shoeshine”, a potential “happy” ending, Umberto and his dog walking off into the sunset, after forsaking suicide, as children run towards the camera in joyous glee, is fraught with implications of further poverty and nowhere to go. It's a conflicting message that left critics, and Italian audiences, scratching their heads, but time has been kind to this greatest of all Italian films, and the balance between tear-jerking sentiment and harsh national criticism blends with a very pleasing aftertaste.
Gran Casino ('47): Luis Buñuel directed this song-filled melodrama, his first film in Mexico after years toiling as a subtitler for Warner Brothers, and though he'd always shrug it off as just a way back into directing, no great auteurist masterpiece or anything, it's not without some charms. Those come primarily from the songs, six in total, sung by Mexican star Jorge Negrete, and cast-off Argentinian actress Libertad Lamarque, peppered throughout the narrative (about an upstart oil magnate who runs into a greedy casino owner and an oil conglomerate) with fine production values and only a passing ironic discourse from its leftist, bored would be master director. That “would be” comes three years later, when after two studio assignments, his producer finally gave him the freedom for “Los Olvidados” (the greatest Mexican film of all time), and never again would he have to labor through such nominal material as this. But be it nominal, it's certainly a curio for Bunuel completists (which is a difficult duty, given the relative unavailability of some of these early Mexican works), and hardly as boring as the director would later make it out to be.
By Adam Suraf