May 2009: 15 Mini Reviews
May 4, 2009
The last fifteen films I've seen.
Seven Men from Now ('56): Randolph Scott in the first of a string of admired westerns for director Budd Boetticher, playing the lone wanderer, usually an ex-sheriff with a dead wife out for revenge, featuring beautiful desert compositions and a duel. The deceptively simple structure of this film, in which Scott's loner helps a civilized couple west, while he scouts out his wife's murderers as they flee with stolen gold, features all of the western archetypes, but Boetticher, Scott, and author Burt Kennedy don't play to conventions, especially the classic hero/villain rule (with Lee Marvin as a sympathetic heavy), which makes the closing duel anything but a heroic moment. There's no Fordian lament for the bygone ways of western expansion, just characters working on greed, revenge, lust, and a slim bit of hope, and in that respect, Boetticher could be considered the workingman's poet of the western.
Paris, Texas ('84): Wim Wenders' most famous film, with Harry Dean Stanton walking out of the western desert after five years of wandering, into a puzzle that reunites him with his estranged son and broken wife, and into a dream of serenity and peaceful domesticity that has no place in Wenders' and Sam Shepard's kind of post-modern alienation. Robby Mueller's stunning cinematography gives the first half of the film, in which we try to figure out the mystery of Stanton's Travis, a specifically dreamy neon glow, but as the story progresses, and it becomes a more emotional examination of anger, loss, and a shattered family, achingly long single takes let the actors spill monologues that provide satisfying closure.
Slumdog Millionaire ('08): The 8 Oscars Danny Boyle's film won will in time seem like over-kill, but I still can't deny, after three viewings, the kinetic energy of the film-making, which takes cliches about destiny, chance, fate, and love, jams them into a teeming melting pot of humanity (Mumbai), frames it with a cheesy game show, and peppers one atrocity after another (murder, implied rape, human trafficking, blinding), and still comes out shining like a million bucks, er, rupees. Boyle shares his DVD commentary track with star Dev Patel, and they give appropriate kudos where they are due, especially to A.R. Rahman and his alternately energetic, authentic, and beautiful score, to M.I.A.'s fantastic “Paper Planes”, which plays over the film's best montage, and to Anthony Mantle for the film's sometimes hallucinatory anti-Bollywood look, all of which, with great performances and editing, make for a memorable, unique experience.
Winchester '73 ('50): James Stewart effectively starts the second half of his career, in which his roles grew increasingly darker, with this Anthony Mann directed western, about a marksman who rides the country seeking the man who killed his father. The fabled title gun is won in a sharp-shooting contest at the beginning of the film, and throughout the narrative it changes hands several times, always just out of reach of Stewart, the rightful owner, but really the gun is just a MacGuffin, the film is more concerned with violence and revenge, a subject Mann handles well, coming off years as a top noir director.
The Great McGinty ('40): There is some of the sophisticated and crazy slapstick genius of later Preston Sturges comedies to be found in this, his first directorial effort, about a corrupt political machine that picks a bum off the street and transforms him into a mayoral candidate, but it's the satire that remains potent. Brian Donlevy, an unheralded Paramount contract player, stars as Dan McGinty, a tough hobo who helps line his pockets by participating in a rigged election; when the boss of the corrupt syndicate (Akim Tamiroff) brings McGinty into the fold, the time-line is set for a new puppet candidate. Sturges finds laughs in Donlevy and Tamiroff's macho rivalry, and soon-to-be regular Sturges player William Demarest as a politician, but he's certainly more concerned with political corruption, suggesting that with the right mixture of susceptibility and greased palms, anybody can make it in government, which, in a career that always leaned towards the dark side of comedy, is cynical by any standards.
Stolen Kisses ('68): Nine years after the devastating non-committal freeze frame that ended “The 400 Blows”, Francois Truffaut returns to his young protagonist, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), for this romantic slapstick comedy about the craziness of love and life in your early '20's. With only a slight backdrop of the political unrest in France in 1968 running a current through the film, Truffaut's Doinel is a military drop-out, dishonorably discharged from the Army and released to a future of petty jobs (hotel clerk, private investigator, shoe boy, TV repairman) and awkward romantic yearnings, in effect, the same boy we saw stealing a typewriter in 1959, only older, and more curious. And it's obvious that Truffaut feels for the character (and Leaud, who is used much differently here than in Godard's “Masculin Feminin” two years earlier, but that's more about the differences in the directors at this point in their careers than anything) a certain kinship, guiding the boy through humiliation and sexual experimentation with a tender gaze that only hints at the New Wave's penchant for ironic realism.
Twentieth Century ('34): Classic screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, about a ego-maniacal Broadway producer (John Barrymore) who makes a star out of, and falls in love with, country girl Carole Lombard, before Hollywood, and jealousy, breaks them apart. Lombard and Barrymore are at their best here, especially in the film's second half, which takes place aboard the titular express, as the producer tries to woo back his protege after a series of disastrous flops, and as is often the case in the best 30's comedies, the supporting players, from Walter Connolly as a put-upon assistant, to Etienne Girardot as a religious nut with scripture stickers, are hilarious.
Love: The Forever Changes Concert ('03): It's fitting that the last thing Arthur Lee was able to release as Love before his death in 2006 was this terrific live production of his most famous work, for if ever was there one man linked to so stupendous an album (Brian Wilson to “Pet Sounds”, Pete Townshend to “Tommy”, Roger Waters to “The Wall”) it's Lee to “Forever Changes”, which is sometimes graced amongst the top ten greatest albums of all time. Lee put this tour together after six years in prison, using a backup band he had formed before his stint, and a 8-piece horn and string section that brings songs like “Alone Again Or”, “Andmoreagain”, “Old Man”, and “Live and Let Live” to studio quality life before a receptive audience.
El Norte ('83): Gregory Nava's wrenching and beautiful epic about a displaced Mayan brother and sister illegally crossing the Mexican border to California remains important today, both as one of the first American independent films to cross over with a profitable campaign, and as an engrossing examination of the “shadow” immigrant culture that American production would be lost without, a topic that remains prescient two and a half decades later. With a skilled mix of Latin American magical realism and socio-political realism, Nava takes his heroes, Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutierre) and Enrique (David Villalpando), from war-torn Guatemala, where their pro-union mother and father are killed by local military, through Mexico and it's shanty-towns and human smuggling coyotes, over the border (in a harrowing sequence involving a swarm of rats and a never-ending sewer tunnel), and to L.A., where life as an illegal, underpaid immigrant is hardly the American Dream they were anticipating. Hauntingly beautiful in every way, from the bright colors of the traditional Mayan Indian dress, to the lyrical and symbolic editing structure, which relies on short dream sequences and symbols, Nava's film is one of a kind, and Criterion's much anticipated DVD, with a commentary track and hour long documentary, recounts the entire story of the impossibly difficult Mexican/California shoot, and it's almost as good as the film itself.
The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva ('72): Also included on Criterion's “El Norte” release is this highly accomplished student project from Nava, a half hour black and white gem that introduces themes of political unrest and persecution that would play ten years later in the first half of “El Norte”. Based on the final days of Garcia Lorca, with sparse, Bressonian voice-over, about a Mexican poet who has to flee his hometown due to politics.
Morocco ('30): After the success of “The Blue Angel”, Josef von Sternberg reunited with Marlene Dietrich in Hollywood for this uneven film about a cabaret singer with two suitors, Gary Cooper as a Foreign Legionnaire, and Adolphe Menjou as a rich benefactor. As always with the von Sternberg/Dietrich films, style overwhelms substance, but that isn't always a bad thing, and Marlene scored an Oscar nod, despite speaking her lines phonetically.
Mr. Hulot's Holiday ('53): One of the most famous and successful foreign imports of all time, Jacques Tati's second film, and the first appearance of his Hulot alter-ego, is a carefully constructed comedy of slapstick and observation. Mr. Hulot goes to the beach for summer holiday, arriving in a beat up jalopy and wreaking unintentional havoc by inviting a windstorm into the hotel lobby, the first in a series of disasters caused by Hulot that Tati, and his fellow vacationers, perform without the slightest knowledge of their origin. The comedy is deadpan, with no close-ups or obvious punch lines, physical with a nod to mime and silent film, and in its quaint post-card depiction of carefree life at the beach, it's Tati's breeziest film, with the much more elaborate “Mon Oncle” and “Playtime” in the future.
Goodbye Solo ('09): The third film from the highly talented Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani is a beautifully sculpted examination of human interaction and compassion, filmed, like “Man Push Cart” and “Chop Shop”, with Neo-Realist attention to performance, location, and human nature. In a depressing strip of Winston-Salem, cab driver Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) picks up William (Red West), a 70-ish old man with a life's worth of pain; he makes a deal with Solo to drive him two hours out of town to a windy cliff, no questions asked, but when Solo pegs the guy for suicide, he takes it upon himself to befriend the old man and change his mind. From this simple set-up Bahrani and his co-writer Bahareh Azami (the Zavattini to Bahrani's de Sica) fashion a friendship of struggle and need based both on economic situation and past failures, with the optimistic Solo finding William's angry exterior tough to crack, and that we are only slowly given any information about the characters, especially William, grows the fascination and mystery. There are some who think Bahrani might be the best independent filmmaker working in America today; with films as good as “Chop Shop” and “Goodbye Solo”, that's spot on.
Sin Nombre ('09): First time director Cary Fukunaga won Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival for this excellent thriller, shot in Mexico, about a young man escaping north from his brutal street gang after a betrayal puts his life in danger; when he meets teenager Sayra traveling with her father on a train loaded with immigrants, they forge a dangerous, short lived spiritual bond. Fukunaga's film is more of a chase thriller than a political treatise about gang violence and immigration, but there are traces of social consciousness in the way the immigrants risk their lives on top of a packed train at the slightest chance of making it to America, and in the deeply embedded examination of Mexican street gangs, all tattoos and loyalty oaths, an underground way of life is exposed.
The Young One ('60): Luis Bunuel and blacklisted screenwriter Hugo Butler's take on American racism and sexual taboos is one of the most unusual films of Bunuel's career, not only because of its heredity, shot in Mexico, in English, with a little known cast, but because race relations hardly fit into Bunuel's satirical surrealist world. But great directors can adapt to anything, and Bunuel carefully squeezes in his usual fetishes (feet, animals, food, religion) around the race stuff. Falsely accused of raping a white woman, jazz musician Bernie Hamilton escapes to a deserted island off the Atlantic coast where he's helped by young orphan Key Meersman; she lives with the island game warden, Zachary Scott, a hick with sexual ideas about the maturing young girl that doesn't include harboring a black fugitive. Like Bunuel's only other English film, “Robinson Crusoe”, the island setting is symbolically important, framing the innocent fugitive beneath or through thick traps of bushes and vines (Bunuel's favorite cameraman, Gabriel Figueroa, moves his camera through the thick like Miyagawa did in “Rashomon”), and though the portrayal of Scott's game warden is uneven, a monster for most of the film and sympathetic out of nowhere in the end, the controversial, frank look at race and underage sexual manipulation is noteworthy.