October 2008: 15 Mini Reviews
October 5, 2008
The last fifteen films I've seen.
The Big Heat ('53): Fritz Lang's violent revenge noir isn't as expressionistic as his earlier genre entries of the '40's, but what it lacks in experimental visual flair it makes up for in a specific kind of post post-war physical aggressiveness, highlighted by a detective so hellbent on avenging the wrongful death of his wife that he fails to realize everything, and everyone he touches turns to dust. Glenn Ford is Dave Bannion, a dedicated detective with a mission to end police corruption and the ties that bind big brass to the mob; when a bomb intended for him kills his perfect housewife instead, Bannion reaches out to all kinds of element (including Gloria Graham as a disfigured moll) in an endless pursuit of vigilante revenge. What we get is a good guy, probably a war hero who has put his demons to bed beneath a suburban existence of perfect solemnity, who loses touch with his better sense in an attempt to make sense of his loss, putting everybody he contacts (mostly women) in danger. Everybody remembers the scene where hired thug Lee Marvin pitches a pot of coffee in Graham's face, and her equally brutal retribution; it's memorable for shock value, of course, but for the ferocious realism it brings to what is ultimately a set-bound crime melodrama, showing that in an artificial world where '50's idealism is so easily shattered with the turn of a key, the peace and safety of domesticity has no place in Fritz Lang's dark, dark city.
Antonio Gaudi ('84): Criterion presents Hiroshi Teshigahara's lovely wordless visual tour of Gaudi's most famous Barcelona landmarks and gives art fans what Teshigahara doesn't with the bonus features, namely, a history of the architect and his importance to religious art in a terrific BBC doc that may be better than the feature presentation. Both films linger with stunning camera work on some of Gaudi's unique masterpieces – Park Guell, Casa Mila, Colonia Guell Church, and the still unfinished behemoth Sagrada Familia – but where Teshigahara only has his gifted visual eye and the accompanying Takemitsu music, the BBC doc has a witty tour guide in art critic Robert Hughes, who isn't beyond questioning the over-the-top religious symbolism in some of Gaudi's more outlandish designs, most notably the Casa Battlo and it's Saint George and the Dragon theme. Art lovers and novices alike can appreciate the beauty in Teshigahara's appreciation of this most unique of artists, and thanks to Criterion's bountiful two-disc edition, which also pays tribute to Hiroshi's famous father, Sofu, Japan's leading sculptor in his day, it's the closest you'll get to an introductory architecture history class without actually enrolling.
Yojimbo ('61): Toshiro Mifune looms large in the frame, as big as a mountain, as Masaru Sato's booming soundtrack announces the star entrance of one of Japan's greatest film icons, the wandering ronin Sanjuro, who for two of Akira Kurosawa's most entertaining jidai-geki will outwit and outmaneuver his opponents with a fox's eye for improvisation and survival. Here, in perhaps the biggest hit of Kurosawa and Mifune's glorious collaborations, Mifune's Sanjuro walks into a dusty ghost town Main Street, finds a town divided by two rival Yakuza factions who have aligned themselves respectively with a silk merchant and sake dealer, crippled the economic structure of the town, and littered the street with dead bodies, and finds a way to use his powers as a master warrior bidding for a bodyguard job to play off each gang's hatred for the other. Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa fill the wide-screen frame with perfect symmetry as Sanjuro watches each gang, coming in from frame left and right, with giddy delight from a watchtower to see what his handy work has wrought, two scared and inexperienced gangs fighting for territory and capitalist control in a post Edo economy filled with corruption, but when Sanjuro isn't in total control of the situation, we're more apt to see the action through slats and boards, windows and frames within frames, the director as washed up figurehead. The film is a comedy, but a savage one at that, where the western stylistics of a dusty ghost town in economic free fall, and the wily hucksterism of a hungry ex-warrior, as well as his gun-totting rival (Tatsuya Nakadai) suggest with great ironic symbolism, the problematic politics of Japan's economic post-war “miracle”, as modeled, of course, on western modernization.
Girl on the Bridge ('99): Daniel Auteuil won a Best Actor Cesar award for his performance as a down-on-his-luck novelty act knife thrower in Patrice Leconte's acclaimed surrealistic romance, who meets an equally downtrodden and suicidal Vanessa Paradis on a bridge and recruits her for his act, to which their lives and luck take a sudden turn for the better. Leconte suggests a kind of psychic and spiritual connection between the two – they hear each others thoughts when miles apart – but a romantic bond is never sealed, despite a loneliness in Auteuil's eyes that both yearns for, and contempts, the girl's sexual promiscuity, and when they ultimately separate, it's back to the gutter for both. Leconte's black and white visuals are hallucinatory and the Turkish dance music he uses in the background makes the action all the more surreal, especially in the many sexually charged knife throwing sequences, but Auteuil and Paradis never overplay their roles for anything more than what they are; broken wanderers looking for the right connection, and it's that touch of realism that adds needed balance to Leconte's sometimes peculiar and distracting, though never less than impressive, mise-en-scene.
Sanjuro ('62): Unlike earlier in his career when the studio forced him to make a sequel to a box office success (“Sanshiro Sugata, Part II”) that he had little interest in, Akira Kurosawa was more than happy to revisit his hero from “Yojimbo” for this entertaining, lighter samurai fare, with Toshiro Mifune's Sanjuro helping nine inexperienced young samurai tackle corruption in their Tokugawa era clan. There are similarities between the two films, including the use of Tatsuya Nakadai as Mifune's chief antagonist, this time as a respectable samurai who sides with the corrupt politicians, and Kurosawa's film-making style, though less audacious, still hinges on the perfect placement of characters within a wide-screen composition, but the tone of this movie is very different from its predecessor, utilizing a more satirical approach to politics and violence as opposed to “Yojimbo's” anarchic western swept apocalypse, culminating in Mifune and Nakadai's famous showdown, a climax that features one of the grandest, and hilariously violent, blood geysers in film history.
La Ronde ('50): Director Max Ophuls is best known for four films made in France following a war imposed exile to Hollywood, films that examine the decadence and sexual politics of turn-of-the-century Paris with a mixture of candid frankness and dreamy artificiality, thanks to a moving camera that seems to float through space on the wings of cherubs. “La Ronde”, an endlessly fascinating comedy about the interconnecting affairs of ten or so characters, each one connected by one lover from a previous segment, was the first of these four career defining films for Ophuls, and given the meticulous structure of the very first shot – five unbroken minutes of visual perfection, as Anton Walbrook as narrator/host glides us into the narrative from a roundelay, through a foggy street set, dappled with anachronistic Mitchell cameras and arc lights, back to early 1900's Paris – you can tell from the get go Ophuls was at home and in his element without the interference of American producers. The camera never seems to stop moving, with tracking shots as gorgeous as the cast of stars it's filming (including Simone Signoret, Danielle Darrieux, Daniel Gelin, Simone Simon, and Isa Miranda), and with light touches of bawdy humor (Walbrook literally snips out a censored sex scene in a bit of hilarious Ophulsian self reflexivity), and sweeping Oscar Straus music, this is one fabulously entertaining film from France's Forgotten Fifties - post Golden Age, pre New Wave.
Fort Apache ('48): The first, and probably best of John Ford's “Cavalry Trilogy”, heroic westerns set beneath the puffy clouds and sprawling rock fingers of Monument Valley, this loosely disguised version of Custer's Last Stand pits Ford's best leading men, Henry Fonda and John Wayne, as antagonists marooned at the dead end Fort Apache post. Fonda is Owen Thursday, the newly appointed Lieutenant of the post, who comes to town with teenage daughter Shirley Temple in tow; they've lived a fatter life on the east coast, but Thursday's reputation as a hard-headed taskmaster has landed him in the desert, where Wayne's Kirby York suggests a peaceful solution to dealing with the Apache and their leader, Cochise. Of course, following Custer's track, Thursday harrumph's any peace talk and leads his men to slaughter, but not before Ford paints us a complete picture of the men and women of the post, including young love between Temple and John Agar, the comic relief antics of Ford regulars Ward Bond, Jack Pennick, Victor McLaglen, and George O'Brien, the home style sweetness of Anna Lee and Irene Rich, and the exciting theatrics of two or three top notch Indian chases. For Ford, whose films sometimes straddle the uneasy line between stereotyping and racism when dealing with either African-Americans or Indians, “Fort Apache” is rare in that it's Fonda's white Lt. Thursday that's the villain, where Wayne, who respects Cochise and his right to his own land, plays the level head of justice, making the finale, in which Wayne lies to reporters and suggests the “glorious” heroism of his former Lieutenant, a precursor to the much deeper racial issues at hand in “The Searchers” eight years later.
Haunted Spooks ('20): Typically funny and goof ball late two-reeler from Harold Lloyd and Hal Roach, one of Lloyd's last shorts, filmed at a time of personal chaos, having just nearly died from a “prop” bomb explosion in a horrendous promotion stunt gone wrong, costing the actor two fingers and nearly his right eye, but none of the charm and energy that makes the films so memorable. Here Harold is a broken-hearted boy who choses suicide when the girl of his dreams marries somebody else, but following one hilarious botched attempt after another, Mildred Davis comes along with a proposition of her own; instant marriage and a comfortable home, if her conniving uncle doesn't scare them out first with bedsheets and tales of ghosts. Like all great Lloyd films, the sweet relationship between the boy and the girl is the heart of the story, and though the haunted house finale is a cliché riddled letdown, the failed suicide attempts, and the gloriously designed title cards ridiculing the boy and enhancing the failure, is textbook Lloyd, the lovable dork who always gets the girl, despite what disaster - self inflected, sabotage, or act of nature - may befall.
Snow Angels ('08): In a small snowy town, David Gordon Green examines love and all its messy entanglements through a series of characters each trying to cope with new life situations. Talented young actor Michael Angarano has feelings for flirtatious new student Olivia Thirlby, but the recent break-up of his parents has his mind preoccupied, as does his friend and co-worker Kate Beckinsale, whose mess of an ex-husband (Sam Rockwell) is constantly trying to shoehorn his way back into her life. Those are the three main stages of relationships Green focuses on - young, tentative high school love, separation after a long marriage of lies and buried emotions, and post-divorce awkwardness and hatred – he also throws in another co-worker (Amy Sedaris) who leaves her husband after the revelation of infidelity, but it's those core relationships, and what happens when the young child caught in the middle goes missing, that serves Green most dramatically. This is a difficult film, not a lot of hope to be squeezed from these characters, even the sweetness of the teenagers is cut some by the template set by their elders (is this what we have to look forward to?), but Green is a talented director, shaping Stewart O'Nan's novel into a carefully observed study of human interaction and the toll of falling in and out of love, and in Angarano and Thirlby's story, we have the closest representation of high school realism and the pangs of a serious first crush since the first season of “Friday Night Lights”.
Never Weaken ('21): Popular Harold Lloyd two-reeler in which Lloyd tries to impress Mildred Davis by rounding up street urchins for her boss's podiatry business; when he succeeds, but mistakes a hug between brother and sister as a proposal of marriage, Harold unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide, winding up instead blindfolded on the beams of an unfinished skyscraper. The thrill comedy on the skyscraper is exciting and seamless, and would be put to even greater use two years later in the feature “Safety Last!”, but I've always preferred the first half of this 20 minute gem, in which our hero rounds up a load of hobos and transients by performing pratfalls with a professional acrobat and soaping the street with dish-washing flakes, while ducking a highly suspicious copper on his tail. By now Lloyd was so confident in his material and execution that his films would double and triple in length within a year, beginning a meteoric rise to wealth and fame that rivals the most glamorous of Hollywood's formative decades.
Border Incident ('49): Ricardo Montalban is the Mexican Fed and George Murphy is the American Fed who go undercover to sting a Tex-Mex illegal border ring, in which bad guy farmer Howard Da Silva pays slave wages to immigrants for months of work and then has his henchmen murder the farmers on their way back to Mexico to get his money back. This Anthony Mann drama is notable, like “The Furies” a few years later, as being a bridge film between his two most important genres, the film noir and the western, with brilliantly moody day-for-night outdoors photography by master cameraman John Alton, and also for the way in which violence, from torture to cold blooded murder, strikes our heroes in graphic, unexpected spurts.
Oldboy ('04): Min-sik Choi and Ji-tae Yu are mesmerizing in director Chan-Wook Park's bloody cult masterpiece, as two men at the center of a brutal revenge plot that spans decades and destroys, physically or mentally, everyone involved. Choi is Dae-su, a drunken boob who is kidnapped on the day of his daughter's seventh birthday; held for fifteen years in a one room apartment/cell, he's fed well and kept informed with a TV, but when he's released and given a plot by Yu to uncover the decades long mystery behind the kidnapping, a blind vengeance plays out in stunningly violent, emotionally devastating fashion. Park's direction is heavily stylized, from the brilliant video-game like hallway long take as Dae-su sets his revenge in motion by beating on a pack of goons with a hammer, to a lyrical snow-capped finale that leaves a dedicated viewer reeling with the possibilities of multiple interpretations; it's a virtuoso cinematic performance from one of South Korea's most talented directors. It's easy to linger on the shock value of some of the scenes – the hammer returns in a tooth-pulling torture scene, Dae-su's one-take devouring of a live octopus, a scene involving a tongue and a pair of scissors – but that would downplay the emotional impact of the duel revenge plots, as Dae-su tries to unwrap the mystery of his imprisonment, a high school back story of gossip and shattered love is revealed to bring the film's numerous plot threads, and its treatment of violence, sex, voyeurism and revenge, to a shattering full circle.
Le Plaisir ('52): Max Ophuls and screenwriter Jacques Natanson adapt three stories by Guy de Maupassant, about the joys, frustrations, and fleeting glories of a life of pleasure, and like “La Ronde” before and the following “The Earrings of Madame De...”, the sweeping camera work and spectacular set designs perfectly complement the amorous subject matter. In “Le Masque” an old man dons a plastic mask that makes him look youthful to dance around in a Parisian dance hall; “Le Maison Tellier”, the longest of the three films at nearly 60 minutes, follows a brothel of prostitutes to the countryside for a first communion, where Jean Gabin is enchanted by Danielle Darrieux; and in “Le Modele”, artist Daniel Gelin has a tempestuous love affair with his live model, Simone Simon, who threatens suicide if he marries somebody else. Each story has its own charms and peculiarities, but of the many amazing tracking shots, the opening flourish of “Le Maison Tellier”, as the camera sweeps up and around the brothel following Darrieux as she closes up shop, is one of the greatest single take crane shots of all time. Criterion's new DVD treatment doesn't feature a commentary track, but nearly 75 minutes of archival interviews and critical analysis of the screenplay and themes is plenty.
Red Beard ('65): In more ways than one this three-hour drama from Akira Kurosawa marks an end to many staples in the director's cinema, towards a more pessimistic, rigid cinema, away from the heroes of the past, away from the student-master dichotomy that so typified the previous two decades, away from Toshiro Mifune as Kurosawa's screen surrogate, and away, unfortunately, from wide-screen black and white photography, to which he'd mastered in total beginning with “The Hidden Fortress” in '58. Blending two of his regular inspirations, Shugoro Yamamoto and Dostoevsky, Kurosawa focuses on medicine and illness, like “The Quiet Duel”, “Drunken Angel”, and “Ikiru” before, with Mifune as the head of a government funded clinic for the poor, whose new intern, the brash Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) feels like he's trapped in a prison of poverty and death, until Red Beard (Mifune's nickname) learns him the ropes of caring, healing, and existentialist humanism. Kurosawa breaks the film up into lengthy vignettes – the painful death of an old man and the story of his abandoned daughter, a saintly carpenter tells of his beloved wife and the tragedy of the 1923 earthquake, the rescue and recovery of a sheltered young girl sold into slavery, and her friendship with a poor young thief – stories that make up the emotional backbone of the film, while the growth of Yasumoto from young rebel to respectable and humble doctor acts as the conventional frame. For those who have never seen this very long, difficult, but important film in the evolution of Kurosawa's style, my suggestion is to watch the film one day, formulate some thoughts and sit on them, and then watch it again the following day with the commentary track by Stephen Prince; nobody this side of Donald Richie knows Kurosawa and his style better than Prince, who points out the key plot references to Dostoevsky's “The Insulted and the Injured”, and suggests the ways in which Kurosawa passes from controlled cinematic experimentation to a more formal Japanese style he'd use for the rest of his career, especially with the last minute addition of Chishu Ryu in the final sequence, instantly recognizable as Ozu's favorite actor. Nobody would ever confuse Kurosawa for Ozu, and even the appearance by Ryu is nothing more than a nod from one master to another, five years after his death, but the scene he's in, a very formal wedding arrangement, is one of Kurosawa's simplest visual moments of the period, a transition to an introspective style to come, and a style which, regrettably, will never be as successful as the dynamic visual splendor of his 50's and 60's masterpieces.
Samurai Champloo ('04): In Tokugawa era Japan, a 15-year-old waitress named Fuu saves the lives of two antagonistic warriors – Mugen, a cynical and brash killing machine, and Jin, an introspective samurai master – and in return for the favor, accompany her on a trek across the country to find her long lost father, a “samurai who smells of sunflowers”, in this one-of-a-kind 26-episode anime from Shinichiro Watanabe. As they walk the countryside from Edo to Nagasaki, the trio struggle for food and shelter, fighting everything from hired assassins and ninja warrior priests, to sects of treasure digging zombies and baseball obsessed American fleet commanders, while slowly their past life stories bleed into the narrative, forming rich and emotional characterizations while each adventure in each new episode provides new characters and battles. All of the singular stories are memorable, some funny, like the baseball episode, which turns into a game of cheating and massacre by fastball, and some emotionally devastating, like Mugen's two-episode back-story growing up on a hellish prison island, or the sympathetic, tragic deformed ogre in the beautiful second episode, while our trio of heroes, who struggle to stay together as their differing personalities clash at every intersection, hold each narrative together with their seemingly never-ending journey to Nagasaki. With stunning animation and a wonderful knowledge of Edo era Japan, Shinichiro's sprawling masterwork takes us on an exciting and existential journey of self discovery and survival that only hints at modern connections through various anachronistic instances, like a hip-hop soundtrack or a yakuza gangster in wrap-around shades, but stays of its historical era while easily switching genres and styles from one brilliant episode to the next.
By Adam Suraf