Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)
F.W. Murnau
and Robert Flaherty's famed collaboration brings us a view of Bora Bora
over seventy years ago, apparently a vision of unspoiled nature and cultures
still in touch with their indigenous beliefs and cultural heritage. And
back then, beautiful girls were still betrothed to their gods, and were
required to remain virgins their whole lives: "in her honor rests
the honor of us all." Alas, Reri instead falls in love with the equally
photogenic Matahi, and they run off together knowing that "to break
this tabu means death." Their tragic tale still holds up after all
this time, though questions of cultural fidelity creep in from the margins:
though we can assume the rituals and costumes we see photographed derive
from the locals to some degree, one wonders how much the filmmakers imposed
their vision upon the natives and had them play out a wholly Western script.
The camerawork's astounding (some of it underwater, no small feat back
then), and even with only a few intertitles the tale is communicated brilliantly
- Tabu proves that back in the silent era, film was certainly a
universal language. It's the ethnographic authenticity that remains a
mystery, as does one's curiosity as to how much of that Polynesian idyll
is left nowadays.
Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988)
That everyone
involved in the creation of this film managed to keep a straight face
is remarkable, for Tales From the Gimli Hospital is as hilarious
as it is thoroughly creepy. Weaving a surreal tale of an Icelandic immigrant
community by Lake Winnepeg facing the ravages of a vague epidemic, Guy
Maddin postulates what films might be like today if we'd never discovered
color or truly explored sound. (The result is more than a little Tim Burton,
with a dash of Dario Argento.) What proves most compelling is the density
of Maddin's hermetic fictional universe, each scene suggesting a rich
communal history we're not remotely privy to, as though this Tale was
but one component of an extensive Scandanavian saga. There is terror,
to be sure, but also a nonchalance to most of the hallucinatory events,
alluding to an internal logic we observers may be better off not trying
to decipher. Cronenberg, Egoyan, Maddin: why are Canadian filmmakers so
good at creeping us out?
After the
revelations of The Flower
of My Secret, Live Flesh, and All About My Mother,
all of which reconfirmed Pedro Almodóvar's
love for both moviemaking and his characters, he seems to've dialed back
both his sincerity and his quirkiness with this rather rote production
that, despite all its Oscar® accolades, fails to rank among his best.
Talk's story revolves around two putative couples whose female
halves are both comatose and hospitalized, and whose male counterparts
pine and wait for them to recover. But while Lydia's lady bullfighter
and Maro's distraught journalist seem merely typical in their romantic
travails, Alicia's unconscious ballet dancer is tended to by the creepy
and mildly psychopathic male nurse Benigno, whose devotion for his charge
shows all the signs of taking a wrong turn. The tale proves guilty of
both an overall trajectory lacking in catharsis and a wholly predictable
destiny for Benigno, and predictability is never something we'd expect
from this director. Though Almodóvar sprinkles the affair with
trademark eccentric singularities (not least an outlandish silent film
called The Shrinking Lover in which the diminutive lead dives head-first
into his lover's vagina, a sight as Oedipal as it gets) as well as brief
cameos from the Mother cast, Talk ends up less than remarkable
except for one aspect: it succeeds in making modern dance interesting
to the layperson. With an appearance by Geraldine Chaplin, who apparently
speaks fluent Spanish.
Abbas Kiarostami
tries something really different and has his central character drive around
parts of Iran encountering several cross-sections of society - oh no wait,
he does that all the time. The concept was still original enough to the
folks at Cannes, who awarded Cherry the Palme d'Or, but that's
probably largely because peering into Iranian cinema was still so novel.
Cherry's acclaim opened the floodgates for worldwide interest in
the filmic output from that Islamic state, but this isn't necessarily
the best of the bunch. It's difficult to ascertain Kiarostami's intentions
as he follows a suicidal man around the outskirts of a city soliciting
those he meets along the road to bury his body the morning after he shoots
himself - it's not even clear why he wants to end it all - but none of
that may be the point. (Certainly his pulling back at the end to reveal
the film crew recording it all does nothing to simplify things - it's
almost as if he wants to undermine the seriousness of the whole enterprise
by saying "hey look it's just a movie!") As usual, there's an
abundance of colorful landscape shots, but it's hard to believe someone
wouldn't need money enough to go along with his scheme (he meets with
plenty of refusals), unless construction workers in Iran make as much
as they do here, which I doubt. It's a pleasant enough undertaking, but
oddly insignificant.
Whatever
the ostensible themes of Pier Paolo Pasolini's work, it most always comes
down to sex - and whatever interpretations of Teorema you might
come up with, it's bound not to jive with anyone else's. When Terence
Stamp briefly pays visit to an upper-class Italian family (he's long been
a family friend, apparently), he finds time to sleep with each and every
one of them - and when he must abruptly take his leave, everyone seems
to've instantly become emotionally dependent on him. Bereft all, each
freaks out in individual ways - their peasant servant moves back home
and exhibits saintlike abilities, the painter son is freed artistically,
the daughter goes catatonic, the mother becomes a slut, and the dad divests
himself of his business interests and (perhaps metaphorically) wanders
naked in the desert. It's an indisputably odd storyline, but one that
keeps you watching, and the cinematography holds up its end more than
passably. There's no real payoff, and the subtitles are often laughable,
but if you can handle more obscure fare, Teorema's deadpan presentation
is a hoot and a half.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
As America
neared its bicentennial, it seems filmmakers felt the need to point out
the peculiar brands of madness and evil the nation could proudly claim
its own, ensconced within its vast expanses. Were your car to break down
somewhere in the countryside, or were you in need of directions, the locals
may be just as inclined to dismember and devour you as to help you out.
Just two years after Deliverance firmly stigmatized Appalachia
as a bastion of inbreeding and insular lawlessness, Tobe Hooper explored
the varieties of violent personality types that might also be hiding in
the West. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes a strong case for proclaiming
that state preeminent among freaks, for what kind of place could continue
to staff its many slaughterhouses (warning: metaphor alert) with willing
executioners? A group of five carefree youths seek out a grandparent's
now-abandoned rural home, predictably run low on gas, and visit the neighbors
across the field to solicit assistance. These neighbors' idea of help,
however, involves applying a chainsaw to your person or propping you up
on a meathook - alive - to hang out for awhile. It may have been intentional
that we fail to care too much for the young victims, who are painted two-dimensionally
at best, but that shifts our interest instead to the family of cannibalistic
hillbillies and how to explain their depravity and interior decorating
choices. (The last survivor is given an opportunity to dine with them
before they decide to chop her up, granting us a National-Geographic-from-Hell
moment to feed our curiosity.) The tension is thick from start to finish
and the ending is not remotely what you expect, all of which earns the
film its deserved status as a horror classic - not least for its commitment
to diversity, as it includes a wheelchair-bound man among the casualities.
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
Fernando
Rey plays lecherous once again under the direction of Luis Buñuel,
but this time he gets more than he bargained for - in this instance, two
actresses playing the same woman. Rey so desperately wants to deflower
this girl half his age with no strings attached, but she/they sure aren't
making things easy for him: at one point she insists on chastity before
marriage, while other times she's perfectly seductive. Buñuel lost
one actress (the sweet Carole Bouquet) halfway through filming, but he
capitalized on this twist of fate and completed the movie with the fiery
Angela Molina, the split casting meant to represent woman's capricious
nature. Bit by bit Rey gives in to this paramour's demands, marrying her
and installing her in a sizable house, but it's possible that the fairer
sex's intentions are as dishonorable as the male's. Also featuring the
occasional terrorist having the run of things in various city centers
- proving once again how little things do change.
Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)
1922 Manhattan,
and ingenues Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore set themselves to donning
the latest "terrif" fashions and scoring themselves rich husbands.
What they didn't count on was a landlady who abducts her tenants and sells
them off to white slavery! The clever intertitles and James Fox crawling
up the side of a building like Harold Lloyd are witty homages to cinema's
silent era, but the Asian baddies are probably an anachronism we could
do without; good thing director George Roy Hill maintains a crazy comedic
energy to keep the whole enterprise "winning" throughout. Moore
comes across pretty weak compared to her co-stars, and Andrews is a good
sport in a clearly lesser entry on her resumé, but Carol Channing's
turn as the embodiment of moneyed Jazz Age exuberance is a sight (and
voice) to behold. Millie clearly couldn't exist without all the
movies that came before it to reference, and the ending is patently ridiculous,
but this musical certainly isn't the worst of its lot.
We've all
seen split screens before, but how about a split2 screen? Having
to take in four simultaneous frames might be threatening to some, since
we're not as guided as we might like to be, but this means we're also
free to choose what and who to follow. Surely all the reality TV shows
have prepared us both for digital video and for multiple perspectives,
but what director Mike Figgis has accomplished with Timecode is
more than just a gimmick. The achievement recorded by this film cannot
be overstated: as an end title explains, it consists of "four continuous
[and simultaneous] takes [for 97 minutes!] improvised around a predetermined
structure." (The title suggests how Figgis must have technically
coordinated everyone's performances.) The mind boggles to imagine how
Figgis, his camerapersons, and all his actors pulled this off. As soon
as we settle in, we discover that the four frames' borders are not absolute:
all the action centers around an L.A. film studio with its share of dysfunctional
executives, and characters often cross into other frames, giving us two
points of view for the same scene. Separate frames are sometimes joined
by a cell phone, and Figgis even engineers a sequence where one frame's
character eavesdrops electronically on another frame's activities, and
sound from a third frame bleeds into the first two. Figgis' ultimate unifying
tool is, not implausibly, a series of four earthquakes which, by disrupting
all four settings at once, demonstrates best the proximity and synchronicity
of everyone's actions. The story is somewhat incidental to its presentation,
but Figgis even manages to throw in an appropriate manifesto for the film
itself among the dialogue: "digital video has arrived," expounds
a woman in a pitch session, "demanding new sensations." It's
a demanding film, to be sure, but it may also be the future. Don't miss
it.
Why this
movie? Blame it on an idle preadolescent summer in the early 80's, a new
cable subscription to Showtime, and a complete absence of taste, but somehow
I ended up seeing this film close to thirty times in the space of a couple
months, and I recently became curious to see what the draw was way back
then. Clearly attempting to ride on the wave of Egypt-mania following
the discovery of King Tut's tomb, Timewalker places a second coffin
in the same chamber, one containing an alien visitor whose inadvertently
deadly touch apparently prompted the ancient Egyptians to mummify the
extraterrestrial prematurely. A team of California academics transports
their discovery to their campus and soon finds themselves besieged by
the newly-awakened 3000-year-old. The film boasts glowing Dungeons &
Dragons dice (or so they appeared to the young me), a nasty fungus, a
barely-adequate budget, some clunky behemoths that passed in the early
80's for personal computers, and a climax involving, of course, a girl
in a shower. What's not to love? It could easily have been much worse,
and there are just enough plot twists (and an admirably vague ending)
to keep you from giving up entirely. We should be glad it wasn't Rambo
or Chuck Norris I passed my days with instead.
This famed
"rock opera" by the Who tells the story of a young British boy
born on V-Day whose father, an RAF pilot initially declared killed in
action, returns to find his wife quickly remarried and whose replacement
impulsively kills him. Little Tommy witnesses the murder and subsequently
becomes deaf, dumb, and blind from the trauma, a state that wracks his
mother with unbearable guilt. Such are the psychological dynamics for
what becomes a visually outlandish essay on consumerism and celebrity,
a cynical and surreal musical barrage where every word is sung and no
expense is spared. Director Ken Russell lavishly mounts his production
with a Church of Marilyn Monroe where communion is pills and booze, Tina
Turner maniacally dancing and transmogrifying into a hypodermic needle-lined
Iron Maiden, Ann-Margret dancing in a flood of baked beans and singing
her lines even while applying lipstick or eating candy, and Jack Nicholson
as a psychiatrist, surprisingly demonstrating he can carry a tune as well.
The story is ultimately nonsensical, however, and it's only after we've
been constantly trying to catch up with the plot we realize what it all
means is not remotely clear. The sound and fury does not fail to engage
us, to be sure, but Tommy has no actual ideas to communicate, and
the lavish affair ends up signifying nothing.
The first
collaboration between Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers isn't the most enchanting
of the bunch, believe it or not - but that only means it gets better from
here. It's only a few years after sound pictures hit the scene, so the
audio isn't the best either - but we still catch plenty of zipping dialogue,
like "She slapped you for nothing?" "Would you have sold
tickets?" The dance numbers are too few and too cobbled together
on the editing table, and Rogers' unchallenging choreography hardly exhibits
the Eleanor Powell-esque virtuosity we've come to expect from her later
films. The musical numbers also fail to arise organically from the story
- Astaire simply confess to the occasional bout of tarantism.) Despite
all the signs this fledgling cinematic commodity's still finding its legs,
there's still tremendous entertainment to be found among the supporting
case (from Helen Broderick's utterly unflappable spouse to Eric Blore's
poofter butler) and a blatantly artificial Venice where the locals all
speak English with each other and tourists swim in the canals without
fear.
Steve Buscemi,
who also wrote and directed this first feature, plays Tommy, an unemployed
Long Island mechanic who lives above the Trees Lounge bar, his primary
social venue. After an uncle has a fatal heart attack while driving his
ice cream truck (and goes out of control through the neighborhood at approximately
five miles an hour), Tommy inherits a new career path, and an assistant
in the form of Chloe Sevigny, his ex-girlfriend's 17-year-old niece, with
whom he entertains a dangerous flirtation. Few will deny that Buscemi
is always perpetually interesting to watch, with sad eyes, red lips, pale
skin, and a voice born for the camera, and Sevigny is no less engaging
- if they reproduced together, their offspring would have eyes the size
of ostrich eggs. Their presence, and that of an extensive rogue's gallery
throughout, effectively renders irrelevant the fact that nothing much
happens. More accurately, Steve Buscemi is happening, and that's enough
for many of us.
Ernst Lubitsch,
an infinitely clever script, and ecstatically art deco sets - you could
do a whole lot worse than this swanky diversion where two con artists
posing as members of the moneyed class (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins)
cross paths in Venice and immediately fall in love with each other's talents.
(While behind their glitzy villa in the canal a garbage collector plies
his trade - can you say "metaphor?") They rake in the dough
fooling others but remain indisputably devoted, until Marshall gets second
thoughts with their newest target, the outlandishly rich and sympathetic
(and unmarried) perfume designer Mme Colet (Kay Francis). Marshall lands
a job as Colet's personal assistant (pretending to be among the well-bred
but destitute "nouveau poor" following the stock market crash)
but their relationship threatens to cross professional boundaries - while
the more focused Hopkins angles for her pearls. The ending gets slightly
messy as everyone's suddenly too sophisticated to give in to base anger
over all the deception, but nobody writes lines like those in Paradise
anymore - it's like a fantastic alternate universe where everyone is always
perfectly witty. (Watch this and be amazed at how the suave Marshall manages
with a false leg - his sacrifice in the Great War.)
Did it occur
to anyone else that The Truman Show would have made an even better
TV serial? Perhaps that's too easy an insight, since that's exactly what
it is, within the confines of the movie - but I found myself wishing Truman,
born and raised within a fabricated sitcom universe specifically for the
entertainment of the rest of the world, hadn't figured out his predicament
so quickly, that we could have seen him suspect even more gradually that
many things in his world are a little too choreographed to be purely natural.
The flashbacks throughout the film reveal that he had long held doubts
about the spontaneity of his surroundings, but when he finally plots his
escape the effect could have been even greater had we longer to witness
his detective work. What I'm suggesting would be the next logical step
in the reality-TV craze: fake-reality TV. Real reality, in the form of
"The Real World," "Survivor," and "Big Brother,"
clearly needs serious editing and creative interference to stay interesting,
so why not just script it all from square one? If history proves me right,
it only shows how prescient The Truman Show really was, coming
years before "Big Brother" et al, and that the movie's concept
was too great to be confined within a single feature film. And the movie
itself? Definitely worth a look, and not only for Jim Carrey's latest
attempt at dramatic credibility; this is director Peter Weir's baby, and
that the Oscars didn't take notice of his brilliant creation is shameful.
A powerful
argument for building character during adolescence - because you'll have
to deal with bullies no matter how old you are. Tunes of Glory
shows us once again that boys will be boys, especially when lumped together
in military barracks; when Alec Guinness, as the aging commanding officer
of a Scottish regiment, is replaced by another administrator with decidedly
different views (John Mills), cliques are formed, sides are chosen, orders
are flaunted, and both colonels engage in a de facto popularity contest
which does little for the cohesion of the battalion. Guinness is a boozing,
insolent, swaggering, petty, unregenerate browbeater, casually cruel even
with those who love him most, and it's staggering to see a career soldier
all too eager to sabotage a smooth transition of command and feel so threatened
by the inevitable. The rivalry turns out badly for everyone, as does the
film itself, which goes desperately overlong and wears out any warmth
we might feel for the participants. Perhaps that's the point of Tunes
of Glory, but I can think of a few more entertaining ways to get it
across.
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)
With Twilight
Guy Maddin finally baffled many of his fans; those accustomed to his hallucinatory
narratives would find it difficult this time to ascertain the rules of
the game. He's clearly working with a bigger budget here, as the full-color
visuals depart from his usual black and white palette, and there's more
detail at the edges of the frame. (His last feature in multiple hues,
Careful, was more colorized than
in color.) But what Frank Gorshin, Shelley Duvall, Alice Krige, and an
overdubbed Nigel Whitney are doing with themselves remains maddeningly
vague, and our usual tactic of just enjoying the scenery when the plot
defies understanding fails us this time - it's all impressively vivid,
but to uncertain ends. Whitney's returning to his homeland of Mandragora
where his sister Duvall raises ostriches, and where she constantly squabbles
with their father (Gorshin); Whitney vacillates between the charms of
Krige and another mysterious lovely, a status of Venus plays a surprisingly
significant role, and the ending is as violent as it is inscrutable. Maddin's
found a cute lead actor in Whitney, and it's admirable that he's willing
to try new things, but whereas in the past he'd been clearly in charge
of the lunacy unleashed within each frame, Twilight may prove too
great a challenge for even the most seasoned avant-garde enthusiast. Thank
goodness his subsequent creations, The
Heart of the World and Dracula, Pages From a Virgin's Diary
returned to less alienating formats.
Writer/producer/director
M. Night Shyamalan had everything going against him with this, his follow-up
to The Sixth Sense; trying to live up to expectation could have
been paralyzing, like when Alannis Morrisette had to deliver the goods
after "Jagged Little Pill" thrust her into pop-music superstardom.
But instead Shyamalan takes one hell of a risk, by trying to present a
superhero story in utterly realistic terms. Bruce Willis spends the majority
of the film gradually discovering he might have abilities beyond those
of mortal men, the portion of a superhuman’s development most films
gloss over so they can get to the costumed pyrotechnics as expediently
as possible. Unbreakable exchanges fisticuffs for angst and succeeds
in escaping the limitations of its genre (and the presuppositions of most
audiences). The big twist we all expect at the end as Shyamalan’s
trademark is hardly as earth-shattering as in Sense, but it’s
not implausible; conversely, the fact that the kid in this film resembles
Haley Joel Osment too closely is probably a habit he might want to break
as quickly as possible.
The first
wave in the twenty-first-century Charlotte Rampling revival, an actress
who seems to have laid low long enough for all her controversial film
roles in previous decades to evolve into a certain cachet and mystique.
Rampling’s lost none of her boldness and defiant sexuality even at
age fifty-one, and no matter how maddeningly inconsequential Sand
ends up, just watching her keeps you in your seat. Director François
Ozon refuses to solve the mystery of her missing husband (who went swimming
at the beach and never returned), and instead spotlights Rampling’s
casual fluctuations between denial and moving forward. It’s a good
thing Rampling’s always been bilingual, for it’s unlikely Hollywood
(a dream factory that equates dreams with youth) would confront the realities
of aging quite to effectively, or let a 51-year-old woman have a sex scene
that wasn’t meant to elicit laughs. Sand adds up to just about
nothing, à la Antonioni, but if it means more Rampling, I’ll
take it.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964)
Two words:
nouveau, and riche. Debbie Reynolds sinks her teeth into
the broadest of roles, from the humblest of Irish-immigrant pioneer tomboy
beginnings to the most misguided attempts at feminine apparel in the frontier
towns to a treasury of dazzling gowns only the most refined can pull off.
Younger viewers whose only acquaintance with the character is via Kathy
Bates' turn in Titanic will marvel
at the various strokes of financial luck (truth is stranger than fiction,
remember) that set her and husband Harve Presnell (what passes for male
romantic leads back in the day when the ability to sing and dance was
at a premium) up in Denver high society but which renders all too evident
their disconnect between money and polish. It's not so much Molly finding
wealth as wealth finding her even after her legendary torching of their
substantial savings in the oven; and though it's unlikely her father would've
just let her set out on her own instead of trying to marry her off at
a young age, this biographical sketch unequivocally illustrates the American
upper crust's resistance to the Brown's aristocratic overtures. That's
what sends Molly abroad to get herself some culture and how she ends up
on the unluckiest of return trips. Director Charles Walters betrays his
intentions toward ultra-lite entertainment by making the Titanic sequence
unexpectedly brief for a movie whose title kind of depends on the event,
but maybe that's a metaphor for Molly's own resilience. Money may talk
more than ever these days, but in Molly's case it's creditable that her
substantial assets inspired her to improve herself, or we would've had
an early case of the Beverly Hillbillies on our hands.
Never categorically
dismiss silent cinema as archaic and stale until you've seen Carl Theodor
Dreyer's 1931 hallucinatory journey through a Europe replete with nocturnal
predators. Vampyr has tricks up its sleeve that will creep you
out three-quarters of a century later, and not once allows the spell to
break by means of any amateurishness you might expect of such an early
production. Subtitles and intertitles suggest that our daydreaming protagonist
Allan Gray, a young man travelling throughout the continent seeking out
occult mysteries, often fails to distinguish between the real and the
unreal, and the phenomena he witnesses in the German countryside are worthy
of Bunuel's finest moments. At first the effects are easily explained
by double-exposure, or playing scenes in reverse, or simple day-for-night
shooting, but they are executed so seamlessly as to be perfectly mesmerizing.
This is not a director experimenting with new filmic ideas; this is a
man in complete command of his craft, and Dreyer is so adept at creating
tension that even the sight of an old farmer walking with a scythe reeks
of dread. That most everyone ignores our hero strongly indicates Gray
is dreaming up the wonders he beholds, but the images his subconscious
concocts - most notably, himself in a coffin - are as disturbing as any
real vampires would be. And you thought only filmmakers of the past few
decades had a monopoly on terror? Wait until you see the sweet grandmother
unearthed from her grave, and her undead husband's fate in a granary.
A struggling
Italian theater troupe returns to Paris to perform Pirandello. When not
thespifying before the masses, one actor seeks a lost manuscript, another
an ex-lover. Romantic hijinks ensue, and while it’s all very charming,
I suspect I’d’ve appreciated it all more had I understood what
the Pirandello play was about, as director Jacques Rivette regularly cuts
to the theatrical production, possibly as a comment on everyone’s
off-stage adventures. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this
film, and I’m a sucker for anything set in Paris, but Va Savoir
(“Who Knows?”) fails to deliver anything more substantial that
what you get in the average sitcom. The intertwining tales dovetail nicely
and happily at the end, but just seeing who ends up with whom, however
comedically, is less than one would’ve hoped for from this master
filmmaker – though he’s still going strong in his mid-seventies.
Here's the
flipside of Detroit Rock City, where the kids have to burn their
records, go to no concerts, are imprisoned in their home, and no one lives
all that happily ever after. (As the title indicates, not that many people
live at all.) The wistful male narrator recounts the tale of growing up
in the seventies in (pre-ghetto) Detroit across the street from the Lisbon
family and their five beautiful blonde teenage daughters. You'd think
having James Woods and Kathleen Turner for parents would kick ass, but
in this case they're about as conservative as you can get, as distrustful
of the outside world as Frances McDormand in Almost
Famous but not remotely as permissive, effectively banning their
daughters from doing more than going to school and coming straight home.
This sort of atmosphere first takes its toll on the youngest daughter,
who throws herself onto a spiked fence, but the rest seem well-adjusted
enough. The film's limited point of view, however, is that of their adolescent
male admirers on the same block, effectively outside looking in, and whose
objectivity is inevitably compromised for being entranced by the Lisbon
girls' collective femininity more than as individuals. (One of them frankly
admits, "We knew everything about them - and that we couldn't fathom
them at all.") In between fearing for the girls' sanity, we get an
entertaining tale of 1970's adolescence, complete with a Homecoming dance
and trying to save condemned trees from the infamous Dutch Elm Disease
blight of that era. Director Sofia Coppola, showing she can do a hell
of a lot more than just act badly, presents it all with such an assured
light touch we almost believe things might work out, but the boys are
instead left with nothing but memories of their late neighbors, who "have
scarred us forever - leaving us happier with dreams than with our wives."
Leave it to men to make it all about themselves, but The Virgin Suicides
is still an effective paean to the power of girls in their youth.
Jean-Luc
Godard explores the travails of the postwar single gal in this “film
in 12 scenes” that’s dedicated to his longtime weakness, the
Hollywood ‘B’ movie. It’s an idealized world of prostitution
that somehow maintains an aura of romance, with the dreamy-eyed Anna Karina
indulging in intellectual conversations about the value of speech with
random strangers, cavorting with johns who love serious cinema and popular
music, and (here’s where the ‘B’ part comes in ) avoiding
gangsters trying to horn in wherever money’s being made. Godard’s
brilliant alternating of music and dialogue and his crafting each of the
twelve scenes with their own unique structure will grab back your attention
when it starts to fade during the dialectic sequences that sound straight
out of some philosophy textbook, and though it all ends badly, that’s
only because the ‘B’ flicks, in all their cheapness, could afford
to take more chances. We can only be thankful the demiurges of the French
New Wave weren’t instead addicted to, say, passion plays or Shakespeare.
A vacationing
family travelling in winter to their New England cottage crosses paths
with the potentially psychopathic Otis after hitting the deer in the road
he was hunting. Writer/director Larry Fessenden keeps his camera and editing
table very busy as "Malcolm in the Middle"'s Erik Per Sullivan
subsequently lets his imagination get carried away, and he fears the Wendigo
(an "angry spirit") will be coming for his dad to avenge the
deer. (Or is it the über-hick Otis, which would give them something
to really worry about?) In some ways this is a darker variation of Escanaba
in da Moonlight, with snowscapes and Native American lore and
fancy time-lapse photography, as Fessenden tries very hard to make ordinary
things look creepy. (His specialty is gnarled old trees, which probably
don't need much enhancement.) Per Sullivan acquits himself well in what
is far from a tourist brochure for the American Northeast, but little
plot holes (since when does a Manhattan family not have a cell phone,
or roadside assistance?) and a heavy-handed, though authentically primitive,
ending reduce Wendigo from a stellar thriller to a passable diversion.
That the
two principals fall in love instantly and regardless of the cost defies
belief, but once you know that the film's based on "Romeo and Juliet"
everything starts to make better sense. Then there's the dancing toughs,
singing about how disenfranchised they are while performing world-class
moves and giving in to their baser instincts as the orchestra swells.
Such is the world of the musical, and West Side Story somehow succeeds
in blending the rough and the refined in a masterpiece that exemplifies
why the genre originated in this equally high- and low-class country.
Stephen Sondheim's lyrics offer a cunning portrayal of racism while Jerome
Robbins' and Robert Wise's deft camerwork maximizes the possibilities
of Robbins' stunning choreography. You'll know the songs (by Leonard Bernstein),
you'll wince at the technicolor, you'll understand how it scored truckloads
of Oscars®, and you'll file this one under guilty pleasures with more
pleasure than guilt. It's sad that the art form couldn't endure yet today;
sadder still that the prejudice illustrated in West Side Story
still does.
What's the Matter With Helen? (1971)
Debbie Reynolds,
Shelley Winters, and Agnes Moorehead bear witness to the studios' utter
exhaustion of ideas in a grand guignol manqué whose sole achievement
is stringing you along to the end in the hopes its murder mysteries might
be effectively resolved. Instead Helen lets its wholly plausible
red herrings get carried away, discarding them all for the most nonsensical
of conclusions that exposes this United Artists production as pointless
and irresponsible. Reynolds is pretty enough as the Depression-era dance-school
owner who's fled to California with overly-religious pal Winters after
their infamous sons receive life sentences for murdering a child. The
less-glamorous Winters meanwhile seems to regularly experience potentially-homicidal
episodes of her own, and you wonder if she didn't have something to do
with the murders back home, but when folks start dropping dead at the
studio Reynolds looks just as suspicious. (Moorehead guests as the radio
evangelist Sister Alma to whom Winters turns for spiritual comfort.) Reynolds
is still an exceptional hoofer as she approaches forty, alternately playing
All-American and vaguely slutty, but neither her talents nor Winters'
Oscars® (for other films, natch) can salvage this anachronistic dreck
that refuses to settle for even a reasonable resolution. What's the matter,
indeed.
One of the
darker comedies in recent memory, with two divergent tales whose connection
seems slight at best. First we've got a young wristwatch vendor on the
streets of Taipei whose mother's convinced their dead father's spirit
has returned to inhabit their pet goldfish. When an attractive girl en
route to a vacation in Paris peruses his wares but finds nothing she likes
he gives her his own watch instead, and she goes off to a very miserable
time on the other side of the world. Tsai Ming-Liang's oddball script
ends up being greater than the sum of its random parts, and employs a
striking fluorescent lighting scheme throughout that enhances the weirdness
of his characters' circumstances. The watch vendor grows mildly obsessed
with the girl he saw but once, and adjusts every timepiece he finds to
match Paris time in a strange attempt to establish a connection with her.
(It's not even clear how he might find her if she were back in Taiwan.)
Tsai perfectly captures with his perpetually stationary camera how alienating
it can be alone in a foreign country, as the girl's sense of isolation
starts getting to her; her loneliness matches that of her admirer's mother,
whose superstitions may or may not be meant to look ridiculous to native
audiences as well. Either way, Time is another strong entry from
an emergent Taiwanese film industry that focuses frequently on the difficulties
of contemporary urban living - if you replaced these characters with Hollywood's
central casting, you'd think this was always a wholly American tale.
Where Is The Friend's Home? (1987)
The opening
credits state this film was funded by the Iranian National Institute for
the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults; if only all
countries had such faith in their motion pictures. I sought out this 1987
film after seeing director Abbas Kiarostami's later work, …Et
La Vie Continue
(…And Life Goes On), which reveals that the principal
actors from this film, all children, died after the 1990 earthquake razed
their village. This certainly adds a special poignancy to Where Is
The Friend's Home?, but on its own terms the film's meditativeness
earned international raves. Here we follow an eight-year-old boy (the
late Ahmed Ahmed Poor, blessed with the most expressive of faces) as he
treks to the neighboring village after school to return a classmate his
school notebook which inadvertently ended up in his knapsack. (The teacher
vowed that morning to henceforth expel any student who forgets his notebook.)
Perhaps anywhere else such a task is no big deal, but in this remote Iranian
village there are no street names or numbers, and little Ahmed has to
ask strangers along the way (some nice, some not so nice) if they're acquainted
with his classmate. The quest continues even after nightfall, when a blowing
wind and a dog's bark can more than sufficiently spook a child, but in
the end his ingenuity saves the day. If this was the Institute's intention,
to show one of their youths using his head to serve as an example to others,
they got that and a bag of chips. Couldn't someone throw some money at
Kiarostami to take a shot at Barney?
Yves Montand
plays a dynamite fisherman in an island community off the Italian coast,
and by “dynamite” I’m referring to his method, not his
proficiency. It seems using explosives to stun fish is no longer allowed
by the authorities, but economic circumstances limit Montand’s alternatives,
and he risks his Adriatic community’s opprobrium by continuing his
incendiary ways. Director Gilles Pontecorvo pursues various familial and
civic subplots to keep us occupied, and hands us a fantastic underwater
sequence (when Montand tries to retrieve the explosives he hid below the
surface) and gorgeous locations (in “Ferranicolor”!!). It’s
a pretty gooey melodrama, and the subtitles take a few liberties with
the translation (“Fuggedabouttit”??), and the labor exploitation
theme is far from fresh, but in postwar Italy there was probably little
that mattered more. Also featuring the adorable kids that are a staple
of Italian cinema.
William
Wellman's tribute to the flyers of WWI throws together small-town American
pals Clara Bow, Charles Rogers, and Richard Arlen on the European front
(Clara's with the "Women's Motor Corps") and even gives us a
brief appearance by a young Gary Cooper (whose fatal aerial mishaps set
the tone for a nerve-wracking tour of duty for the others). This silent
winner of the first-ever Best Picture Oscar® tries to balance thrilling
war exploits with a heartwarming love story, but the romance gets short
shrift (Bow is criminally underused), showing that even back then it's
the guy stuff assumed to sell pictures. The aerial footage is impressive
even today, with planes crossing through the smoke plumes of crippled
opponents, zeppelins being dogged, and ordnance incandescing all around
- and the cameras still cleverly catch our heroes mouthing familiar curse
words the intertitles don't transcribe too accurately.
This film must've been a marvel in its own era, and even sports animated
champagne bubbles and flames convincingly sketched onto doomed biplanes
- it's easy to forgive Wellman of the slow parts (and its reluctance to
end in a timely manner) when the mistaken-identity tale pitting best friends
against each other miles in the sky makes so clear the perils these aviators
endured time and again.
With a Friend Like Harry (2001)
Or, in its
original French title, Harry - Who Only Wants The Best. The title
character (Dirty
Pretty Things' oily Sergi Lopez), his torso thickening with the onset
of middle age but his grin ever childlike, runs across an old schoolmate
and asks whatever became of his aspirations to publish science fiction.
The answer's all too common - a wife and kids happened, and with that
the typical pressures of a tight budget, a harried marriage, and regular
demands from the grandparents. "We're neither happy nor unhappy.
We're exhausted," the father confesses, and to this Harry counsels,
"I think every problem has a solution." For a sociopath such
as him however, this means offing all his burdensome relatives one by
one so he can finally get back to his writing. The dad - whose tendency
to settle for less is evidences by his crooked teeth (his dad's a dentist)
- is also too knackered to advise Harry otherwise, and his pliability
contrasts mightily with Harry's own obsession with decisive virility.
When the wife (who seems jealous of their shared history) and daughters
are next on Harry's list, he may just have to finally choose what matters
- considering he's since fooled around with Harry's Drew Barrymore-esque
girlfriend Plum, his loyalties are plenty jumbled. The only thing that's
certain - the old well next to their summer home is getting plenty full.
I always
wanted to use the word “curmudgeon” in a review, and thanks
to Michael Douglas’ anti-social portrayal of a New England academic
whose attempts to complete his next great novel (his first was a smash
many years ago, and he’d been blocked ever since) are thwarted by
no small number of real-life intrusions, the term at last has an appropriate
application. Curtis Hanson’s exemplary sophomore production brings
quite a few surprises: first, confirming Douglas as one of our enduring
actorly treasures; second, treating gay characters’ sexuality as
a non-issue (and no, I’m not referring to Douglas); third, a cast
overflowing with talent, including Frances McDormand (adulterous girlfriend
and chancellor), Tobey Maguire (depressed student), and Robert Downey,
Jr. (lascivious literary agent); and the biggest shock, that the film
was virtually ignored at the box office. It couldn’t be because Boys
presents central characters you never see in Hollywood movies anymore,
personalities no one would tout as role models – this is a film with
guts, and the most human (read: flawed) of characters, and though the
story does eventually become quite ordinary near the end, it’s still
great fun.
While confessing to a probable lack of objectivity thanks to an adolescence dissolute with comic books, this reviewer can at the least state with certainty that the film lives up to the hype. As with any superhero movie, it's the casting that will (or won't) save the day, and the mutant personae as embodied by McKellen, Stewart, Janssen et al gamely infuse the proceedings with the proper degree of seriousness as befits the first meetings of two different stages of human evolution. The large cast of goodies & baddies also succeeds in equitably sharing screen time with each other, no small feat, while chewing up the scenery with acrobatic relish. Kudos to the writer and director for accommodating all the necessary elements to both inaugurate a cinematic franchise already with thirty years of comic book history behind it and to satisfy the comics naïve simply looking for an adequate diversion. The real story, though, is Hugh Jackman, clearly destined for stardom - if he can personify so adeptly a Wolverine that is alternately feral and sensitive, but always sexy, his agent must be awfully busy these days.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1983)
I brought a David Bowie expert with me to this sold-out screening (good to see aging icons can still attract the youngsters, even if on celluoid) and he filled in the blanks for what would otherwise have been a fairly standard rock concert documentary. Did you know, for instance, that Bowie fires his band just before the last number? (And I thought the stunned looks on their faces was just fatigue.) Or that this July 1973 London conert, his last on the Ziggy tour, is widely regarded as inferior to their performance earlier that year in California? (It kind of shows - Bowie barely interacts with the far-from-overexuberant audience - it's possible he's simply burned out after a long tour.) And on top of it all, director D.A Pennebaker's footage was so compromised that it took him ten years to salvage the sounds and image - and there are still a few blurry moments. It's Herr Bowie's spectacular wardrobe, which bends genders with every costume change, that keeps the eye engaged, even if you have a distaste for mullets; revealing as much of his gaunt form as possible, his short skirts, Asian robes, and thigh-high boots make him look like Chrissie Hynde on a fashion bender. It's not the most electrifying rockumentary, but the music's without peer regardless, so there's something for everybody to love.
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