306. Dead Man Walking

Song - Suzanne (Herman van Veen)

Movie: Dead Man Walking (Tin Robbins, 1995)

Sister Helean Prejean (Susan Sarandon) has received a letter from Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) an inmate asking for legal sipport. After years on death row, Matthew is to be executed in a week for killing two teenagers. He maintains that he didn't pull the trigger, but archive footage from the trial paints a different picture, and his current behavior doesn't point to a remorseful innocent either. When his appeal is rejected, Sister Helen is assigned to be his spiritual adviser for his final days, a job she is not exactly cut out for. The film directly connects her faith to her opposition to the death penalty and her belief that even the worst people deserve dignlty, but it also connects her vocation to her naivety. Her conversations with the grieving families are an early example of the film's thorny greatness. Robbins lets Sarandon mostly listen as the parents dig out their deepest feelings to discuss their kids' final days, their love for them and the hurt the killings have caused them. It becomes impossible to blame them for desiring Matthew death, a desire that may well have been strengthened by Helen own actions and sensibilites. She has never known romantic love or thought much about the feelings associated with its causes and consequences. At times, it seems as if she finds it easier to sympathise with Matthew's fear of death than with the victims' families' anger about their children being taken away from them. Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for her role and is really great. The film is as much a righteous condemnation of the death penalty as it is a portrayal of Helen discovering what it means in practice to act according to her beliefs It's wonderful to watch Sarandon be surprised and startled by the responses to her, and think about how to settle herself in a context where she is slighlty more out of depth than she expected. 

I also enjoyed Robert Prosky, portraying Matthew's lawyer as a Southern raconteur whose jovial demeanor softens his (and the film's) moral indignation. He is the most obvious mouthpiece for Robbins' opposition to the death penalty, but his argumentative asides always play more like eccentric character touches. Still, it can't be denied that the film does ocassaionally veer into the kind of didacticism you can expect from a politically minded actor-turned-director, but any such objections will be long forgotten once we reach Matthew's final day, and especially his confession to Helen that he did murder one of the teens and raped the other, finally heeding her lessons that redemption (whatever form that may take) is only possible if he confesses and takes responsibility for the truth and his sins. Sean Penn is good here, but the scene belongs to Sarandon, portraying the Sister's religious trance as her own version of experiencing sexual/romantic pleasure. Robbins' stylistic choices follow suit and the scene is essentially played as an exuberantly triumphant moment that has finally earned Matthew the love and dignity he was either way receiving from Sister Helen. 

What follows is an even more provocative sequence, crosscutting between the execution process and the murders commited by Matthew many years before. At one point the film cuts right from Sarandon's redshot eyes watching Penn get injected to the fearful eyes of his victim awaiting the fatal gun shot. It's a chilling match cut that utlimately goes beyond placing the state on the same level as cold-blooded killers. The latter at least have no delusions about what they are doing, their inhumane conduct and unconcealed, vicious cruelty entirely fits their actions. The state on the other hand creates a sanitised ceremony where correct perfectly scheduled formalities (the final goodbyes with the family, the final dinner, the final words, the guard screaming out "Dead man walking", the careful, orderly preparation of the tools used for exectuon) whitewash what's going on, while extending the agony of the person about to be murdered. You may question whether spiritual redemption is enough to turn a racist rapist into a profile in courage; death row will do the job anyway. 

305. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Song - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)

Movie: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Michael Schultz, 1978)

I've never had strong opinions about Bob Dylan, but do find DIamonds & Rust to be one of the great love songs. By extension, I absolutely loved A Complete Unknown, which is more interested in capturing how it feels to be artistically and romantically moved, than in being a straightforward biopic. In the process, director James Mangold gets two of the best performances in recent times out of Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton (playing respectively Joan Baez and Pete Seeger). They are beaming with love and admiration in their many closeups, always informed by the notion that it is incredibly good to feel that way about art and about other people. As a result, the film evokes both a really passionate romanticism and a fuzzy comforting warmth. One of the highlights is Dylan's 1965 performance of The Times They Are A-Changin' at the Newport Folk Festival, a wonderfully compelling depiction of the connection between an artist and his fans, with Mangold ramping up the sound of both the performance and the delirious excitement of the audience everytime Dylan calls out a different group for failing to understand and keep up with the changing mores of the youth. The next year Dylan returns to the Newport Folk Festival, decides to "go electric" and is aggressively booed and jeered off the stage by an audience that would prefer that everything stays the same. No scene will ever explain better the existence of Michael Schultz' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This movie's villains are unspecified developers driving around in a van equipped with a futuristic screen that allows them to spy on the world outside. The screen is surrounded by techy buttons, often operated by clumsy robots making whirring sounds. Once these strange creatures pass the streets of Heartland, USA, its farmers' market is transformed into an arcade hall where modern youths hang around rebelliously, mom-and-pop stores get into the hands of big busienss, families are torn apart, and the town gets swamped by uncollected waste. "Restoring decency" is only possible if the homegrown country bumpkins making up Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band return from big time Hollywood for a benefit concert. It's a remarkably odd storyline for a Beatles jukebox musical, especially one centred around songs from their Sgt. Pepper album. The Beatles were instrumental in turning the kind of youth, urban culture this movie rails against into the mainstream, and Sgt. Pepper was a musical revolution that many of its fans saw as a signal of a broader societal revolution. It became an icon of the counterculture, psychedelia and the idea of looking forward. I've always liked the story about how in 1974 anthropologists found a skeleton that was key to a better understanding of how and when humans evolved from apes and named it Lucy after Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, intertwining scientific and cultural progress.

Sgt. Pepper imagines the possibility of enjoying the Beatles' music in a pre-Beatles world where the cultural changes the group brought don't exist. Sgt. Peppers' band (consisting of the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton) plays its songs in a farmhouse surrounded by pigs, goats and chickens or in the town's main square just outside the city hall, surrounded by churches, historic houses and a retirement home. Their audience consists of well-dressed, mostly white, people of all ages dancing with the joyous, yet respectful, understanding that they are following a communal tradition going back to the First World War, when the original Sgt. Pepper had a brass band that entertained the soldiers in Europe. All along, the old, kindly mayor (played by George Burns) commands respect as he narrates the scene and observes his citizens with great contentment. All is right and orderly in this town where "I get high with a little help from my friends" simply means that if you trust your fellow townfolk you can even fly a hot air balloon. 

It's quite understandable that the Beatles weren't too fond of this movie, but it does make you appreciate their music even more. Their songs work even in a context that is antithetical to their intentions and values. In some cases, they work even better. Get Back is notably sung by a black magician restoring the town to its former glory, completely taking away the song's potentially mean-spirited subtext. I've known about the other Beatles being dumbfounded and annoyed by Paul McCartney's insistence to record Maxwell's Silver Hammer, but had never actually heard the song. It really only works when sung by Steve Martin playing a deranged plastic surgeon cutting assembly line patients in his surrealistic office. It's not a surprise that surrealism is the main aesthetic of all antagonists, including Aerosmth who sing a brilliant cover of Come Together on a stage of giant coins stacked upon each other, signifying the greed of the modern world. The best performance comes from Earth Wind & Fire's Dianne Steinberg, performing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds as a billboard come alive against the Los Angeles night sky. I also rather liked Sandy Farina (and was surprised to find that this was her only movie) who, playing Peter Frampton's true love is tasked with selling the film's wistful nostalgia. She succeeeds, partly because her performances of Strawberry Fields Forever and Here Comes the Sun are quite affecting, partly because she is the only one of the main actors who knows how to handle a dialogue-free performance (with the exception of the Mayor, nobody has any lines that aren't sung), evoking sweetly mousy heroines from the silent film era. In the end, the Bee Gees get the short end of the stick. The film turns them into a square Beatles cover band that gets the least interesting scenes. 

304. The Wiz

Song - Fantasy (Earth, Wind & Fire)

Movie: The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978)

There is some good stuff here, but you can't have Michael Jackson and Diana Ross star in a two-hour-plus musical produced by Motown and end up with just two (Ease On Down The Road and A Brand New Day) memorable songs. Musical theater is far removed from the sound that made Motown one of the most important record labels in America, but I had expected that there would at least be some interesting experiments here that would try to combine the two styles. Instead, we mostly get fairly standard Broadway songs, often with terrible lyrics espousing 'inspirational' self help messages unsuccesfully pretending to be allusions to black emancipation struggles. The ending is preceded by the Good Witch Glinda (Lena Horne) telling Ross' Dorothy that 'if we know ourselves, we are always home, anywhere," setting up a final song where every single line is a hollow bromide about believing in yourself. As it keeps going on and on, it's almost impressive when it finds a way to turn the patronizing up another gear with the lyric "Go ahead, believe in all these things, not because I told you to." 

In the stage version Dorothy was played by relative newcomer Stephanie Mills, presumably a better fit than Diana Ross, who actively lobbied to be cast in the movie. At the time, Ross was 34, way too old to be Dorothy and already a certified legend who never feels right to portray a timid, naive wallflower. Her duets with Michael Jackson play like a completely embarassing waste of everyone's time, even if Jackson wasn't yet on her level. The Wiz did push him in the right direction - on set he bonded with Quincy Jones and the rest is history. That history doesn't work in the film's favour when watching two of the most confident, cool performers in the world act towards each other with wide-eyed sincerity and an explictly pronounced lack of poise, pretending to be 'hilariously' uncoordinated dancers. Moreover, our current knowledge of the bizarre disbalance between Michael Jackson's stage presence and his actual self makes the whole thing only more grating; his performance as the Scarecrow demands him to emphasise the same simple-minded childishness that made his personal life so thoroughly unpleasant to follow. 

Bringing to the foreground all the things that are completely offputting about Michael Jackson, while neutering everything that made him the most popular man in the world is not a recipe for a succesful musical. The Wiz does however work decently well as an urban fantasy. Lumet is interested in making places that symbolise urban rot come alive with Oz essentially being an unnerving version of New York. A lot of the aesthetic elements (e.g. brownstones, street waste, construction sites) that are usually used (often by Lumet himself, for example in the opening montage of Dog Day Afternoon) to signify New York and its bustle are here placed outside their usual context and given a fantastical, lightheartedly dystopian spin. We find the Tin Man in a defunct theme park among scraps of metal and rusting roller coasters, key songs are staged in abandoned concrete-filled playgrounds situated below street level, and the film's best scene takes place in an empty subway where our heroes are attacked by garbage cans (wherever they go, Dorothy and co. are surrounded by trash) and platform pillars disconnecting themselves from the ceiling. The film would have benefitted from more of that kind of absurdity; the life-sized humanoid microphone Dorothy talks to when trying to reach the Wiz is a great example of what could have been.

303. Never on Sunday

Song - Roxanne (The Police)

Movie: Never on Sunday - Pote tin Kyriaki (Jules Dassin, 1960)

Homer (Jules Dassin) walks into a Greek bar...and is utterly out of place. The boisterous locals sing, shout, drink and smash their glasses, while he skittishly scribbles in his little notebook. And when he orders a coffee, the waiter admonishes him; "real men drink ouzo." Real men also dance after drinking ouzo, to Homer's enthusiastic applause, a gesture the dancing drunk doesn't appreciate. His 'pertformance' isn't intended for an audience, he does it for his own delight, not because he seeks to satisfy the needs of a strange man "like some sort of circus animal." It's a clever little bit of screenwriting - Never on Sunday is about Homer's futile attempts to re-educate Ilya (Melina Mercouri), the most popular prostitute in Piraeus, into a better life. The film makes clear in many different ways that Homer's efforts are wrongheaded, highlighting that Ilya doesn't want or need to be saved,. It stops just short of explictly presenting prostitution as a potential form of feminist self-expression, but it doesn't take the most attentive viewer to see what the angry dancing drunk is a metaphor for.

Never on Sunday is a less succesfull Pygmalion-inspired story than Educating Rita or My Fair Lady. Both of those movies end up complicating their basic premise, questioning the idea that a working class girl will neccessarily be better off embodying the qualites/characteristics of elite society. And they do so by revealing that their supposedly sophisticated mentor is to some extent a phony. However, that only works because they put in the effort to sell a genuine belief that their heroines could potentially really be better off if they are taken under the wings of these somewhat eccentric/flawed professors. In Never on Sunday, Dassin wastes no time in making clear that Homer is a bumbling fool and that Ilya is pretty much the most resourceful citizen in all of Piraeus. The rest of the film keeps reinforcing these points, and as a result the story and characters don't really have anywhere to go. It may theoretically be pretty ironic that in trying to save Ilya (who remains an independent contractor throughout, choosing her clients herself depending on who she likes more, regardless of earnings) it's Homer who ends up being on the payroll of the town's main pimp, but it is entirely in line with what we know about Homer or Ilya. There is no real one-upmanship here, and the film, in particular Dassin's performance, is also too broad to really work as a sharp satire or parody. 

Still, the film is not without its charms and is at times quite funny. Jules Dassin is clearly a good director who has a lot of fun with shooting group dynamics around Ilya. Whenever there is a difficult situation in town he stuffs the frame with exasperated, slighlty overweight men wating for Ilya to find just the right thing to do or say. She usually does except when she has to interpret a Greek tragedy. She finds happy endings in the stories of Medea and Oedipus, driving Homer to insanity. Although the film presents these misinterpretations as comically naive, it also lets Ilya explain how she gets to them, pointing out to Homer the story elements that make her view these tragedies in her own way. It's a nice contrast to Homer's purely encyclopedic knowledge - he knows Medea is a tragedy, but has never made up his own thoughts on it. It's interesting too that this discussion takes place in an amphiteater on top of the town's acropolis, the one remnant of the classic Greek culture that Homer came to find. He is at his place here, but so are many of the Greeks from the bar and the seashore. The folks we have seen get drunk on ouzo and walk around in half-ripped dirty undershirts are now well-dressed for a theater performance of Medea they watch with great attention. They need no Homer to educate them.   

302. Romeo + Juliet

Song - Romeo and Juliet (Dire Straits)

Movie: Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996)

"I always look annoyed. When you look annoyed all the time, people think that you are busy."

I may cite Seinfeld too much, but it's only fitting when writing about another great innovator of English language. In truth, that George line has had a similar effect on me as Shakespeare's works on the average British theatre actor. In all walks of life, I am skeptical of ostentatious displays of blood, sweat and tears, of desperate attempts to showcase the effort behind the work, It's one of the many reasons why I've never liked the Lord of the Rings, or Marvel's Avengers project, why I will always prefer Messi over Cristiano Ronaldo, why I wouldn't ever wanna get involved with Sillicon Valley startup culture and why I am allergic to politicians cosplaying as Max Weber. Its total rejection of these attitudes is also what makes Seinfled so great. The show happily presents as a lightweight lark 'about nothing' and highlights the ease and fun of its own making, letting entire scenes stand where all main actors are visibly on the brink of breaking character, with Seinfeld himself barely even feigning an effort to act. 

Romeo + Juliet does Shakespeare a great disservice whenever it pulls out all the stops to show how hip and up to date he still is, most notably in the absolutely ridiculous opening scene where Luhrmann films a gun fight at a gas station as if he is trying to combine the most over the top elements of Spike Lee, Michael Bay and Quentin Tarantino in one go. The camera moves in a frenzy between various groups of flashily dressed urban youths as they insult each other while doing wheelies in way too expensive super cars. Title cards in explosive fonts introducing the players are accompanied by freeze frames and self-consciously cool music. Expressive, fetishistic zoom-ins to guns being brandished are followed by slow-motion shots of a lit match being dramatically thrown on the ground, evoking a cowboy getting ready for the big battle in a western. The whole scene plays as if Luhrmann is an insecure tryhard theater major who has to prove to his mentor that Sheakspeare can still be relevant in the 1990's, repeating the same argument in increasingly convoluted ways. He is ultimately saved by the man himself. No mattter how bloated and obnoxious the scene gets, somehow Shakespeare's original dialogue always seems to fit.

I hadn't seen Romeo + Juliet since I was a teen, when I absolutely loved it, and I can see why. When it leaves the side characters off the stage and purely focuses on Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Juliet (Claire Danes) it is really good, in particular for teenagers. Luhrmann's direction heightens and validates every emotion of its lovers. DiCaprio is introduced broodingly sitting on the beach as a Radiohead song plays on the soundtrack and it feels as if all of the world should feel like he does. And when DiCaprio and Danes woo each other, their passionate intensity almost really does convince that their love for each other is the only thing that can possibly matter. The two have an incredible (effortless!) chemistry from the very first shot; without the benefit of hindsight it would be very hard to believe that Danes didn't go on to have the same superstar career as DiCaprio. 

301. Pele: Birth of a Legend

Song - We Are The Champions (Queen)

Movie: Pele: Birth of a Legend (Jeff Zimbalist & Michael Zimbalist, 2016)

Birth of a Legend presents Pele's life between 1950 (when as a kid in the favelas he experienced the heartbreak of Brazll losing the World Cup final on home soil to Urugualy) and 1958 (when he led Brazil to its first ever World Cup victory). It does so by combining dutiful Hollywoodised 'accuracy' with artistic flourishes that happily distort reality, showing in the process that historic fiction is much more insightful when it does the latter than when it does the former. Everyone remotely interested in the World Cup will have seen archival footage of Pele's header in the 1958 final against Sweden. There is little added value in recreating it here, especially when the digital effects behind the recreation are so obvious. If you are going to show a fake football game you might as well go all the way and warp time and space to highlight how Pele's genius is a direct expression of his experiences as a poor, black Brazilian. 

The central confilct is between Pele and Jose Altafini, the white star of Brazil who believes that the national team should model itself after Italy. When Altafini gets injured in the final stages of the 1958 tournament, he is replaced by Pele who shows that the 'joga bonito', with its origins in capoeira, the forbidden dance of Brazilian slaves, is the way to go for Brazil, on and off the pitch. No, Pele didn't regularly stop mid-action 'to think about his entire life" before playing on, but a conceit being common doesn't necessarily make it unsophisticated. These in-game flashbacks, present a tension between the African and European elements in Brazil's culture that's much more unsettled and complex than the tidily resolved friction between Pele and Altafini, or the Disneyfied change of heart by coach Vicente Feola. In the locker room before the final he gives a speech to his players imploring them to forget about his 'European' tactics and to just play with 'Brazilian ginga'. There is a difference between arguing that Brazilians need freedom to express themselves on the field and arguing that Brazilians get confused when they have to think about overlapping fullbacks, but sometiems you just gotta comfort those who need to believe that even the most accomplished non-Westerners are in fact noble savages.  It's an idea that the film had been actively resisting until then, and to make it more disappointing it's set up by its best moment

The day before the final, the Brazilians are having diner in a posh hotel in Stockholm. Their trainings have gone badly, they have been insulted as 'subnormal' by the Swedish coach, and are now expected to perform 'European' civility. The mood is sour until Pele sees the lighthouse in the hotel garden and decides to a adapt a game they played in the favelas. "To the lighthouse, no bounce" means the whole team should work together to get to the designed spot passing the ball to each other without it ever touching the ground. Their movement is filmed with an intoxicating energy that's contrasted by the sterile environment of the hotel, and it plays like a contemporary Nike commercial, placing the Brazilians far ahead of their time. It's the one time in the film, Brazil is presented as the center of the world and of 'modernity'. The scene is as outrageous an invention as Pele's on-field memories of his youth, but in many ways is a better expression of the historical context than most of the scenes that purport to stick to the facts. Part of the problem is that the film suffers from presentism and sees the World Cup as a far bigger, and more legacy-defining event than it was at the time. You wouldn't know if from the commentary here, but before 1958 the World Cup had only been held 5 times, and had only three different winners: West Germany, Italy and Uruguay. I can't tell you a single player from any of those teams, and the oldest World Cup goal I've seen is Pele's header in the 1958 final. Technological developments played a role certainly in turning the World Cup into what it is (it's a nice touch that for the 1950 final everyone in Pele's village is gathered around a radio. By 1958 they are watching it on a small television), but in alignment with Pele. The film's gravest mistake is that it presents this as an underdog story of a man made a legend by the World Cup, without ever fully realising that Pele was the first to make the World Cup legendary.  

300. The Flying Dutchman

Song - Ren Lenny Ren (Acda en De Munnik)

Movie: The Flying Dutchman - De vliegende Hollander (Jos Stelling, 1995)

The Flying Dutchman begins with a title card explicitly situating it at the end of the Eighty Years War when the Low Countries were rebelling against the Spanish monarchy. It's somewhat confusing then to see in the opening scenes a Flemish rural village being attacked by French speaking nobility. The Francophones keep appearing at random moments in the film, leaving little clarity to their role in it, until it's suddenly revealed that these are actually Spanish troops. It's one of the many moments that help clarify why what should have been a blockbuster - at the time this was the most expensive Dutch film production in history - turned out to be a complete (commercial and artistic) flop. Stelling's storytelling is so incoherent that even if he would have established the Spaniards as Spanish from the very beginning, we'd still have little idea of how they relate to anything or anyone in the film. It doesn't help that the main protagonist 'Hollander', who is supposed to be around 21 years old, is played by Rene Groothof, 46 at the time of shooting. I have never been a stickler for accurate casting (or accents), but it's so egregious here you'd almost doubt your basic understanding that Groothof is supposed to be the representation of Dutch youthful naivete and innocent idealism.

Of course many national epics have been founded upon the adventures of young everymen imagined as the embodiment of their nation. The Dutch have some (good!) stories like that, but they are not as globally renowned as their counterparts from surrounding nations, which seems to have given the film an inferiority complex; you get the sense too often that Stelling doesn't really believe that Dutch cinema has as much room for patroitic myths as other cinema cultures and that it needs those cultures to justify itself. As a result the Spaniards speak French (a language that is much more associated with artistic world cinema than Spanish) and the young 'Hollander' is guided by a harlequin, played by legendary Italian comic actor Nino Manfredi, as if he has come straight from a commedia dell' arte. Later on, we get plenty of shots of large groups of people trekking through the countryside to reach the sea, shot as if they are American pioneers going west. And Stelling definitely cannot get away with his ice scenes being more influenced by Doctor Zhivago than by Dutch painters. 

I was recently at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam where I saw the film Fabula, which shows that a mish-mash of international styles can work fantastically well and also have a distinctly Dutch character. Fabula is a modern fairy-tale/gangster comedy about the exploits of sadsack Limburg criminals thwarted by the hystories, myths and legends hidden in the Limburgian soil and landscape. I'd never expected to see a film that can be described as Snatch meets A Canterbury Tale, but director Michiel Ten Horn's work also helps highlight that these two films may have a bit more in common than may appear at first sight. What makes it relevant however in the context of The Flying Dutchman is that it is interested in exploring how national/regional identity is shaped by the surrounding landscapes, in ways that go beyond dull close ups of its characters with their heads and feet in miuddy waters. The Flying Dutchman's opening few minutes should give you an immediate sense of how much its reach exceeds its grasp. The first frames show a giant stone head being pulled uphill. It's again a scene with an obvious reference to classic storytelling (The Trojan Horse) that lacks the confidence to let Dutch culture just stand on itself, but at least the stone head is a peculiar presence. Stelling realises it, but it soon becomes obvious that he has no real idea of what to do with it, leading to a whole lot of contrived shots that find different ways of framing the bizarre object. These shots can't help but be unusual and interesting, but fizzle out once Stelling has run out of ways and excuses for getting them. Like everything else in the film, the giant head is forgotten almost immediately after it's been shot.