Saturday, December 18, 2021
188. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
187. Roadgames
Sunday, November 28, 2021
186. The Big Chill
Friday, November 26, 2021
185. Collateral
Saturday, November 20, 2021
184. The Grapes of Wrath
Song - Don't Give Up (Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush)
Movie: The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)
I didn't know about this history! I am familiar with Dorothea Lange's famous photograph 'Migrant Mother', but somehow never registered that this was an American migrant (Native American even, which complicates things even further), thinking that it was an image that symbolised the great side of America, one that opens its arms to immigrants from around the world and is proud of its image as the melting pot. Similarly, I had been familiar with the romanticised vision of Route 66, as a symbol of American freedom and progress, and all the great promises of its culture and society. I was always aware that this vision was an outsized myth, but it still felt special to drive on it. I never knew that it first gained prominence as a site of misery, death and discrimination, where interstate border controls were set up to stop 'migrants' from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri get to California in search of a better life after being displaced by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. And that these migrants, American citizens, were treated as foreigners in their 'own' country, having to wait behind closely guarded barbed wire to enter 'the promised land' hoping that that the state police wasn't in the mood to beat them up.
Many images in The Grapes of Wrath might as well come straight from contemporary news reports about the situation at the Polish-Belarussian border. And those two countries at least don't pretend to be the United States of anything. But this film should not make Europe feel better about itself, if only because 'we' haven't yet managed to make such a clear-eyed film about the current refugee crisis. Contemporary European (narrative) films about this topic tend to either be glorified Ted Talks or 'difficult' art films who in their attempts to convey the complexity of the problem often become needlessy abstruse and lose sight of the humanity of the refugees, representing them as helpless, almost deified victims of unspecified forces. In doing so, these films mostly decenter the refugees and put their focus either on the artistic integrity of the filmmakers or on the Europeans and on how their feelings towards the refugees are either right or wrong. This is not a highly moral approach, hasn't proven to have any political effect, and is also dull. There is really no good reason why anyone should see something like Those Who Feel The Fire Burning, one of those films programmers really like to include in 'Movies that Matter' screenings.
The Grapes of Wrath doesn't fully avoid 'TedTalk' tendencies. Most of Jane Darwell's dialogue as 'Ma Joad' seems to mostly address the audience rather than her family. This also leads to a clash in acting styles between her and Henry Fonda, portraying Tom Joad, that only really works in their final scene together. Aside from this, it's a really wonderful film tthat introduces Tom as an ex-convict, suggests that his conviction wasn't entirely fair, and doesn't go out of its way to convince us of this. When Tom is welcomed back by his family they are all excitedly believing that he busted out of jail; poor Tom has to tell everyone he meets that he was actually released on parole. Aside from this being one of the funniest scenes in the film, it also establishes that the Joads are not some sad-eyed sadsack angelic figures, but complex human beings who don't always do the right thing and don't always agree with the way things are done in society. It forces you to accept that polite Californians may not find the 'Oakies' likable, without this being the 'Oakies' problem.
This depction of the Joads, especially in comparision to modern European refugee films, may not be entirely surprising. American (popular) culture has always been (and still is) better at integrating and depicting 'foreigners'/Others in its stories than European culture. More surprising from an American perspective is the Grapes of Wrath's depiction of poverty, its causes and its solutuions. It shows shanty towns in the middle of California, presenting them from the point of view (sometimes literally) of the poor people living in it. Poor people in American films that sympathise with their plight are often depicted as hard workers or people who have suffered to create better lives for themselves who had no luck/no opportunity/bad health/any other misfortune that could happen to anyone. These films may believe that 'we' should help them through some sort of collective action that could make society better, but utlimately still mostly frame poverty as something that befalls individuals. The exception is when the poor people are non-white, in which case their poverty is often put in the context of the progressive struggle against racism, providing hope that with America becoming less racist there will be more opportunities for non-white people and less poverty.
The Grapes of Wrath on the other hand depicts mass poverty among mostly white people and explicitly makes clear that this poverty is the consequence of conscious choices made by the American government and that these choices specifically target these particular people. There is absolutely nothing the Joads or any other family in similar circumstances could have done to escape their poverty. It is morover a consequence of decisions fully in line with the norms, values and ideals of their country. I know that by 1940 John Ford was not yet the fullblown American icon he was about to become, but I was still amazed that the guy who turned John Wayne into the embodiment of America's greatness made this film. In the way it criticizes ideas fundamental to the existence of America, The Grapes of Wrath resembles an Oliver Stone film. Interestlingly, Ford uses for this some of the same imagery that helped him mythologise America in his westerns. Here too he likes to frame characters against the backdrop of wide majestic landscapes. America is full of spaces stretching to eternity and yet people have to migrate far and wide, because most of these spaces have become the property of the banks. Once Ford also starts glorfying the unions, disparaging the easy answers religion offers, and promoting workers' democracy it becomes increasingly hard to believe that this became a popular canonical American film.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
183. The Holy Mountain
Song - The Fool on the Hill (The Beatles)
Movie: The Holy Mountain - La montaña sagrada (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)
The favorite topics of Dutch authors are sex and religion, with a dash of World War 2 trauma. The most notorious example of this is probably Gerard Reve, who in one of the most famous passages in Dutch literature, describes a man having sex with God, who has taken on the form of a donkey. Based on The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky may well be the best suited director to adapt Reve. He gets halfway there when depicting a potential God-like figure imagining having sex with a cow. It turns out it's not particularly erotic.
The Holy Mountain presents itself as a great visionary work, whose obsession with Tarot cards, New Age mysticism and spiritual envirionmentalism potentially contains the key to all the mysteries of the universe. Its main protagonist is a Jesus-like figure who in his search for immoratlity meets a man known as the Alchemist, played by Jodorowsky himself. The Alchemist teaches the Jesus-figure how to turn his shit into gold in a sequence that depicts this process as a holy ritual of great spiritual importance. This is not even one the five most ridiculous sequences in the film. How about using real toads and lizards, fully dressed in traditional clothes, to depict the colonisation of the Aztecs by the Spaniards? The 'colonising' animals are brought to the 'battlefield' by a man wearing Nazi symbols, while a German war song is playing on the soundtrack. This mishmash of history continues in the next scnee where we see people dressed like Roman aristocrats sell Christian crosses, while American photojournalists harass Mexican women in the midst of what looks like a junta uprising. In another scene the Jesus-like figure takes on a Buddha pose.
I think that a lot of this is hot air, but Jodorowsky goes to such great lengths to convince you of some greater meaning that he produces some truly astonishing and unique images and juxtapositions. The film at times plays as a colorful surrealist version of Mel Brooks' History of the World and I liked it way more than the deeply annoying El Topo. John Lennon had a different opinion of that film, and is one of the main reasons The Holy Mountain got made. It's co-produced by Allen Klein, the former manager of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and this influence is clearly visible here. Aside from the progressive rock riffs on the soundtrack, and the psychedelic guitar weapons, the film has a proudly anti-authoritarian point of view that comes through even when Jodorowsky embraces his most obfuscating tendencies. Sometimes that leads to on-the-nose satire such as the sequence showing how an unidentified country is producing anti-Peruvian toys and comics to brainwash children into war with Peru. But it sometimes also leads to great dark comedy that hits its targets with stunning precision. The president's financial advisor's story is worth showing to anyone mindlessly venerating the Nate Silvers of the world, but the film's absolute highlight is the architect's presentation, a pitch-perfect parody of puffed up Silicon Valley product reveals.
Friday, November 5, 2021
182. Black Orpheus
Song - Samba Pa Ti (Carlos Santana)
Movie: Black Orpheus - Orfeu Negro (Marcel Camus, 1959)
Up until the final stretch of the film, there is barely a scene in which we don't hear tambourines and other percussion instruments play bossa nova/samba sounds. The music is relentless, especially in scenes where it is not centered, but just a background hum. It feels almost impossible to shut it off either when Orfeu is playing a beautiful song on the guitar or when a loud plane is passing by. And even when three or four different sounds in a scene intermingle, the Brazilian Carnival music, coming from somewhere offscreen, is inescapable. At a certain point this approach starts to grate; the repetitiveness becomes too much, distracting from everything else that is going on. At the same time, I can't remember seeing another film use music in quite this way and while I didn't partuclarly like it, I was at least fascinated by Camus' single-minded commitment.
The plot is much less inventive. Orfeu is about to get married to Mira, without being over the moon about it. When Euridice comes to his village to visit her niece, it's love at first sight, making Mira jealous. Meanwhile, there is also a masked figure (played by two-time Olympic triple jump champion Adhemar Ferreira Da Silva) who wants to kill Eurydice for unspecified reasons. This is all set against the backdrop of the Rio Carnival and the villagers' preparations for it, which is what gives the film its reason for being. It is highly committed to showing off the clothes, the music and the dances, but if you are looking for dramatic/narrative complexity, this is not where you will find it.
Camus has been criticized (by Barack Obama, among others!) for presenting the Brazilian villagers through a white European lens and imagining them as simple folks solely interested in partying. That's not wrong, but Camus' really does immerse himself in the Rio Carnival culture and he makes a genuine effort to authentically present its rituals, habits and stylings. He also stages the familiar ending to the story of Orpheus in a way that feels truthful and organic to the society he depicts, re-imagining and adapting it as a Brazilian story, rather than 'westernising' the Brazilians to make them fit in the myth. I also liked that the film makes a clear distinction between the traditional way of life of the villagers and the advancing modernity of Rio de Janeiro (the film makes it a point to highlight the skyscrapers) without presenting them antagonistically. Neither is a threat to the other.
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
181. 1984
Thursday, October 28, 2021
180. Paris Blues
Sunday, October 24, 2021
179. Jimmy's Hall
Thursday, October 21, 2021
178. Little Voice
Song - Thank You for the Music (ABBA)
Movie: Little Voice (Mark Herman, 1998)
A Garland impersonator will never be a great artist, even in ideal circumstances, but bringing together an impoverished working-class town in commonly shared joy has value. So have shoddy bars, shady cars and kitschy overlit piers (Little Voice is set in Scarborough and I wondered at points if it had been influenced by The Fall's video clip for Hit the North, filmed in Blackpool, also a seaside town, but on the other side of England. Addendum here: I don't know much about The Fall and that is the only video of theirs I've seen). An early scene in which Mari Hoff (Brenda Blethyn) tells about her one night stand with local run-down talent scout Ray Say (Michael Caine in one of his more fun roles, playing "one of them lovable twat sort of types"), is a litmus test. If its full embrace of lowbrow style doesn't put a smile on your face, you are in trouble, as the film will build its story on the sights and sounds that someone like Mari would enjoy. And what it builds up to is much stranger and eerier than it apperas at first sight.
You hear a lot these days about "elevated horror". It refers to horror films that are, or present themselves as, more "sophisticated" than the average slashers giving the poor unthinking audiences shocks, gore and nudity. These elevated horrors can supposedly be identified by their classier look, their more serious tone, or their concern with more mature themes. Now, I liked Midsommar quite a lot, but it's always worth being sceptical of art (and things in general!) that goes to great lengths to signify and sell its sophistication. The fact that 'elevated horror' has become such a popular marketing term does at least prove that more people should be familiar with the story about the Emperor's new clothes. One of the many remarkable things about Little Voice is that it goes to great lengths to present itself as less sophisticated than it is. This is a horror film in the guise of a typical 90's feel good British kitchen sink comedy drama about a reclusive girl, "Little Voice", (Jane Horrocks) whose special talent for singing finally brings her happiness. Hell, it even stars Ewan McGregor as the clean cut wholesome young man who falls in love with her!
As far as I know neither the film nor the play it was based on had been either received or presented as horror. But I think it's impossible to look at Horrocks' performance, at the way the film uses lights and shadow and somewhat strange camera angles to make her bedroom seem more isolated and foreboding, the relationship with her dead father, the manic irrrationality of certain scenes, the climax and the way it is foreshadowed, and not come to the conclusion that it is at the very least horror-adjacent. The centerpice scene in the film is a 7-minute tour de force in which Horrocks' LV delights an audience performing classics by Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. She is presented as someone who is great at imitating these singers, but what happens goes far beyond imitation. She sings as if she is posssessed by them, and is only able to perform when she sees the ghost of her dead father. It's he who she mainly adresses with her flirty moves and songs. The film is very much aware of the connotations it brings up, while leaving the exact relationship between LV and her father ambiguous. That also makes her relationship with her trashy, domineering mom Mari more nuanced than it appears.
Once her father's ghost dissapears, LV collapses on stage, completely unable to move. From that moment on the film completely abandons any sense of naturalism, yet this is not far from the usual condition LV is in. When she doesn't sing, she is a frighteningly withdrawn woman who barely eats, talks or moves, and these acts seem completely alien to her. It's a hugely impressive performance by Jane Horrocks, who, as the film notes at the end, sung all the songs herself. I am not greatly familiar with the voices and songs of Monroe, Garland and Bassey (the three favourite singers of her dad), but Horrocks clearly distinguishes between them. Whenever she is embodying one of them, there is no trace of the other, or of herself. This doesn't only happen when she is singing; when she's upset she starts reciting dialogue from her three favorites, and again does so at a moment's notice, seamlessly transitioning from one identity to another (I don't know if this is all Horrocks, or if she is playbacking real dialogue). Towards the end of the film she turns this 'talent' to her advantage, scaring away Ray who, hoping he finally found his pot of gold with LV puts all his manipulating skills at display to take advantage of her. Her mom and mr. Boo (Jim Broadbent) have similar ideas, until a cleansing menacing fire puts all their plans to rest and we finally hear LV's real voice and name.
LV's character development, what the happy ending is about, and how that happy ending comes are further arguments for seeing this film as horror. But the film doesn't insist on it, and most of the scenes that don't involve Horrocks would be familiar to anyone who's ever seen mainstream 90's British feel good romantic comedy drama. But it zags in this regard too. Firstly, by adding an occasional dash of magical realism when Billy (Ewan McGregor) is on screen. Secondly, the people it depicts are closer to Brad Pitt's buddies in Snatch than to Hugh Grant's buddies in Notting Hill, but they are treated with the respect of the latter. Mr. Boo and Ray Say are selfish, nasty producers of lowbrow entertainment with 'Take Fat' as one of their key acts. The film punishes them for their selfish nastiness, but doesn't condescend to the entertainment or to the audience that enjoys it. Much more than that, it presents itself as that kind of entertainment and employs its pleasures and aesthettics in its own style and storytelling. Would relegated horror be the opposite of elevated horror? I dunno, but based on this film and Brassed Off (also about the relationship between working class communities and their entertainment), Mark Herman may be one of the most underrated and thoughtful filmmakers of the 90's.
Sunday, October 17, 2021
177. Terms of Endearment
Song - Geen Kind Meer (Karin Bloemen)
Movie: Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983)
All I knew about this film was that Debra Winger dies. The famous scene where Emma Horton says her last words to her children gets to you even out of context. In context it is even more powerful, in part because even when it goes 'full weepie', the film never loses its inclination towards entertainment. By the time her mother Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) makes a big scene in the hospital, because her daughter isn't getting her painkillers on time, you should have accepted that subtlety is not the film's main intent. Brooks is as interested in telling an emotional story (succesfully!) as he is in presenting an acting and writing showcase in which every scene aims to elicit a roaring response from the audience. It fully embraces its melodramatic manipulative elements and is not coy about it. You may be on board with or not (I was, for the most part. Hard to find an excuse for the detour to New York), but the film is extremely honest about what it is. Which is also reflected in the way it sees Garret Breedlove (Jack Nicholson), an ex-astronaut seducing younger women and eventually Aurora, and Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels), Emma's husband. Both are no paragons of responsibility and decency, though one is fully open about his flaws, while the other desperately tries to keep up appearances as a good father, husband and professor. Of course the film loves Garret, while holding Flap in the deepest contempt.
Daniels plays Flap Horton as a sort of blend of his characters in Dumb and Dumber and The Squid and The Whale. He is simultaneosly callously arrogant and shamelessly clueless. Those characteristics cancel each other out at first, allowing him to somehow come off as clumsily confident, making Emma fall for him. As things between him and his wife become more complicated, it becomes harder and harder for him to hide his true self and his cowardice. This all culminates in the best scene of the film, in which Flap and the dying Emma have to make some tough decisions about the living arrangements of their children. Flap is too prideful to admit that he can't care for them, too cowardly to admit that he doesn't really want to, and just smart enough to know that he shouldn't admit to either. Emma sees right through this and gently guides him into a decision where he can both say that that he wants to take care of the kids and let someone else actually take care of them. It's a perfectly written and acted scene, and one of the most blisterlingly humiliating moments I've seen in any film. In addition, emphasising Flap's, rather than Emma's', fear and vulnerability makes the next scene in which Emma has to say goodbye to her children, come off as less cheaply sentimental than it could have been.
It is rare for a Best Picture winner to reserve so much more sympahty and understanding for its women than for its men. It is less rare for a Best Picture winner to look with scepticism towards the future. This is not a film that has a high opinion of the new generation. It has a whole lot more sympathy for Aurora than it has for Emma, and it builds that sympathy by letting us observe the characters and coming to the conclusion that Aurora is not needlessly uptight, but wise and right about almost everything. This is perhaps best exemplified by a sequence in the middle in which we see Emma on her way to an abandoned house to have an affair with the (by his own admission) boring and slow sadsack farmer Sam. They drive in a dull car on a tight country road to their destinaion, but before they arrive there, the film cuts to Garrret and Aurora who after having had a lunch date are now wilding out, being drunk in a sports car on the beach. The film also presents Garret and Aurora as having better sex than Emma and her lovers, and sees Aurora as more worldy then Emma, who shrieks in horror when her mum offers up abortion as a viable option.
This slightly retrograde vision would have been more annyoing if Jack Nicholson being given full freedom to be a mischievous charmer wasn't one of the most fun things in modern film. Nicholson and MacLaine got an Oscar for their roles. They are wonderfully compelling, but you never feel like this role was much of a challenge for them. Debra Winger has a much more understated and challenging role. She basically spends the whole film being a wife, mother and daughter, and has to highlight how she is evolving in each of these roles as she becomes more mature. She doesn't get any grand gestures before she ends up on her deathbed and is very much helped by her distinct voice. She got an Oscar nomination for it, as did John Lithgow (who only appears in a couple of scenes as Sam). That somehow leaves Jeff Daniels as the only one from the main cast without an Oscar nomination. I think he gives the best performance and is the best written character in the film.
Saturday, October 16, 2021
176. A Star Is Born
Song - Woman in Love (Barbra Streisand)
Movie: A Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, 1976)
I very strongly, somewhat irrationally, disliked Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born, a film so depressed by its own existence that its hatred for the world was seemingly pouring out of every shot. It felt like a film created by Jackson Maine himself to justify his own vapid nihilism, filled with aggrandizingly portentous self-pity and self-seriousness. It didn't even care enough to play out most of its songs or to stage them in an interesting way. So I was very much looking forward to use the 1976 version as a cudgel to beat Cooper into oblivion, especially after seeing that it was written by Joan Didion and John Patrick Dunne. Having loved The Panic in Needle Park, I thought they would know what to do with a grand romance between two self-destructive lovers.
Anyway, you see where this is going. Pierson's A Star Is Born made me respect Cooper's film more. It may be the more honest version of this story. Besides, whatever I may think of its point of view (worth noting that my view of the film as an annoyingly nihilistic screed is not shared by most who have seen it), at least it had one, and it was directed with purpose and conviction. More importantly, Lady Gaga and Cooper give better performances and have far more chemistry than Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. The latter are in fact on completely different wavelengths. Streisand overacts and accentuates every single gesture attracting all attention to herself, which may be diva arrogance or the only way to realistically approach acting across Kristofferson here. If she would have gone down to his level, the whole film would have sunk completely. He gives a strangely blank performance. "There is no pain visible on your face" is the truest line spoken in the film.
Despite this, there are some things that work better here than in Cooper's film, and some of that may actually have to do with the contributions of Didion and Dunne. The centerpiece performance here, where Streisand first stuns the world with her talent comes way after she has fallen in love with Kristofferson. In the 2019 version Cooper first helps Gaga go viral with 'Shallow' and only afterwards does Gaga start seriously falling in love with him. More importantly, it's also only after she falls in love with him that Gaga realises the extent of Cooper's brokenness. The film shows the audience how much of a dysfunctional alcoholic Cooper is, but that's not how it is in the early scenes with Lady Gaga. While clearly not 100%, he is charming, gentlemanly and professional. This is not how Kristofferson is presented to Streisand. He is an annyoing and disfunctional asshole from the start and she barely ever sees him in a different way. For us, neutral observers, it may be hard to see how she can fall in love with him, but why should we need to know and accept her heart and her thinking? Just like Kitty Winn, in The Panic In Needle Park she is allowed to have irrational personal feelings that only she fully understands. These decisions make Kristofferson seem much less like a tortured martyr than Cooper, and give much less the impression that Streisand owes him something.
This film has also much love for music and for performing and for engaging the audience in the performance. In the majoirty of the music scenes, the film forgets the plot for a bit and entirely cedes the limelight to the performances. They are not meant for character development, but for highlighting the talents of Kristofferson and Streisand and the joy the audience gets from them. In the end, this does lead to the hilariously misguided final moments in which it seems Streisand has completely forgotten the tragedy that just befell her. Worse, not one of the songs she sings as a famous star is nearly as good as 'Queen Bee', the song she sings as a struggling lounge singer.
Monday, October 4, 2021
175. End of the Century
Sunday, October 3, 2021
174. The Parallax View
Song - Fool's Overture (Supertramp)
Movie: The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)
In which Alan J. Pakula and Gordon Willis transform into prime Steph Curry. I don't usually like writing such pseudo-hip sentences, but that's what the shotmaking in this film makes you do. There is not a boring shot in sight here and every frame is constructed to be both cinematically interesting and fit the overarching ideas of the film. Especially in the outdoor scenes, there is so much going on in the frame, with things to see both in the foreground and in the background. Yet you never a get full picture of what is going in the shot. There is always something in the frame that passes by too quickly, or is just blocked out of view, or can't be quite clearly seen. And even if you are not missing anything, you are often left with the impression that you are, that something interesting or worthwhile is going on that you haven't noticed. Similarly, the full scope of the story/plot (of a reporter who tries to uncover the real truth behind the assassination of a senator) doesn't become clear until the end, in part because of small plot holes. Those plot holes are I think unintentional and the result of some sloppy screenwriting, but this is the kind of movie that makes you doubt your own thinking.
The film is ruthless too. The hard cut between the scene in which the distressed Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), fearing for her life, confronts reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) and the next scene in which she is lying in the morgue is the most astonishing example of that. So is a boat trip and its aftermath, when it first starts becoming clear to us that Joseph never really had the upper hand, and never will. Every step he takes seems to be orchestrated and expected by The Parallax Corporation, something he only finds out when it's too late. The film has a bleak worldview, but I found that the ending does offer a glimpse of hope. The film begins and ends with a Commission giving a press conference on the closing of its investigation into the murder of a senator. In both cases it concludes that the murderer acted alone and that the conspiracy theories by the public are completely unfounded. Yet, the language in the last press conference makes it obvious that it's becoming increasingly harder to lie to the public.
The biggest legacy of The Parallax View is a sequence in the middle, in which Joseph, posing as a potential recruit of the Parallax Corporation is subjected to a short film where he is shown words like 'Happiness', 'God', Country, 'Father', etc, followed by images reflecting those words, e.g., a pile of money, a church, the American Flag, a fatherly figure. Throughout the film Joseph is shown different configurations of words and images, and it doesn't take long before this word association game takes a sinister turn. An image of a gun follows Happiness, an image of Hitler follows the word Father, Country is followed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a happy all-American family follows the word 'Enemy'. It's both an unsettling sequence and a joyously cinematic showstopper (I have seen it many times, despite seeing The Parallax View only twice), It's also a sequence that opens up many possibilities for pretentious writing about media, propaganda, capitalism and the American Dream. I am not going to that here, in part because the scene itself highlights better why Twitter and Facebook have sent so many people off the deep end than any thinkpiece or academic paper you could write on the subject.
Saturday, September 11, 2021
173. Punishment Park
Monday, August 16, 2021
172. Alice in Wonderland
Thursday, August 12, 2021
171. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Song - More Than A Feeling (Boston)
Movie: Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Portrait de la jeune fille an feu (Céline Sciamma, 2019)
I grew up on films like Speed and Daylight, in which a man with special skills ends up in a fraught situation together with a group of terrified people and one especially resourceful woman, who takes the lead in getting the job done together with our hero. By the middle of the film it's already clear that our two heroes are falling in love, but they can't act on it. No matter how much they pine for each other, first they need to finish the job. The people need to be saved from the tunnel, the bus needs to be stopped. But once the task at hand is completed, the sparks fly and we swoon, more even than in an ordinary romantic comedy. It's not just that Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock get each other after finishing a daunting work, it's that they fall in love through working together, without love necessarily being their intent. They just see each other at their best and nature does the rest. Speed is still the best action movie ever made as far as I am concerned. But its place as the best workplace romance is taken by Portrait of A Lady on Fire. The painting needs to get painted, but afterwards....
I am not trying to be glib here and pretend that I can only enjoy a lesbian romance by comparing it to a kick-ass action movie. Both movies genuinely do have many of the same pleasures, and in fact that is one of the great strengths of Portrait of A Lady on Fire. The job, for a long while, takes precedent over the romance. And even after Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Heloise (Adele Haenel) start their love affair, Sciamma keeps showing them performing domestic/professional (the distinction between the two is often blurred) tasks in great detail without adding an explicitly romantic/erotic component to them. In doing so she briefly lets them (and us) experience the domesticity of a married life they'll never have. In the process the film also normalizes love as something that simply flows out of regular daily activities. Love, no matter how passionate, is here not presented as something that encapsulates and defines the entirety of our lives. Rather, it's something that exists next to work and the ordinary responsibilities of daily life, something you have to make time for. That makes it more special, not less.
This approach works so well, in part because Noémie Merlant gives one of the great performances of the past few years. She comes to the coast to paint and presents herself as an exacting, pragmatic painter for whom that is a job. She is not a genius artist, but she cares and is serious about her craft and her professional obligation to get the job done. She knows that as a woman in her profession she is disadvantaged, but she views that as a fact of life, and herself as a worldly woman who is able to navigate around those bumps and who has made herself a decent life. She doesn't feel the need to complain much and seems reasonably satisfied with everything. This approach to the character is what makes the film. It's easy to imagine how tempting it must have been to make Marianne/Heloise explicitly feminist, or to frame their love affair as an explicit revolt against the patriarchy, but Sciamma never forgets that her characters live in the 18th century and respects the audience to get the political connotations without underlining them. There is no need to make grand statements, Marianne and Heloise don't even see each other as lesbians, the word is not mentioned, the taboo is not mentioned. Their love for each other is special, that it happened is not.
I have seen this film twice now and liked it both times very much, especially because it is so surprisingly different from Sciamma's previous film Girlhood. That was set in the French banlieus and after a promising first half descended into boring social realism so desperate to make some sort of grand statement that it ended up perpetuating cliche stereotypes (in both form and content) about the people it depicted. Here she completely abandons her realism for classicism and the lush, grand and colorful compositions nicely contrast with the understated performance of Merlant, while also inviting you to look at the world (and Heloise) the way Marianne does.
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
170. Joe
Sunday, August 8, 2021
169. The Wizard of Oz
Song - Heart of Gold (Neil Young)
Movie: The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
There are many classic films I haven't seen, simply because I never got to them. The Wizard of Oz is one I've actively avoided. Whimsical wholesome (children's) fantasy is a genre I am quite allergic to, especially if it also involves fantastic creatures and simple moral lessons packaged in needlessly elaborate metaphors. Few things in popular cinema have alienated me more than the enduring success and popularity of the Lord of the Rings films. So it may seem like faint praise that I enjoyed The Wizard of Oz more than The Lord of The Rings, but I genuinely liked the film, if only because it's cool to see how much of modern popular culture is influenced by it. I knew about Over the Rainbow, did not know that 'The Yellow Brick Road', 'Ding, dong, the witch is dead!' and 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain' also come from it. And I just can't remember where I've heard/seen 'Surrender Dorothy' before, but I definitely have.
Additionally, while I may not be a fan of this particular brand of fantasy, I do like movies that accentuate their own fakeness. It is a loss for modern movies that nobody anymore makes use of matte paintings to present a background or a space. The Wizard of Oz uses them in an even more interesting way than most classic movies; they make its world seem more constructed and artificial. Same goes for its use of colors. Things look more green, yellow and red than is realistically possible and you should not expect realistic looking leaves, grass and water either. In fact, the 'plasticness' of all these elements is made explicitly obvious. It makes the film look odd and weird, and even though 3/4 different directors contributed to it, it gives you the feeling that you are watching a personal, idiosyncratic vision, filled with imagination and some stunning shots. The tornado sequence transporting Dorothy to Kansas, while out of her window she watches all the important people in her life pass by is spectacular. So is the scene in which The Witch (in color) watches Dorothy's aunt (in black and white) through her crystal ball. This is followed by The Witch's flying monkeys starting their flight, reminding of attacking war planes in formation, an image that (I think) only became commonplace in movies after the Second World War.
I did not care for much of the songs (with the exception being the song the Munchkins sing for Dorothy after she kills the The Wicked Witch of the East) and found the performance of Judy Garland a bit too saccharine/childishly ingratiating for my taste. But her interactions with the Tin Man, the cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow are funny, the Lion gives a wonderfully over the top 'diva' performance, and the action sequences are exciting, hold up much better for contemporary audiences than you'd perhaps expect and would be more at place in an Indiana Jones film than in Narnia. Yet unsurprisingly, my favorite moment of the film is the joke involving the Wizard's doorbell.
Finally, it's interesting that the film's ultimate 'moral' contradicts its most famous song. The fakeness of Oz is not just a nice artistic construct, especially not in comparison to how Dorothy's farm in Kansas is depicted. It communicates visually that there indeed is "no place like home" and that you don't need to leave Kansas to find 'real' education, love and glory. Can't think of many recent films that have been either willing to express/explore that sentiment, or that have expressed it with as much nuance (Dorothy and her friends only learn the value of 'home' after crossing 'over the rainbow') and elegance without condescending to either the 'coastal elite' or the American heartland.
Friday, July 30, 2021
168. Only You
Saturday, July 24, 2021
167. Kiss Me Deadly
Song - Twilight Zone (Golden Earring)
Movie: Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)
"You have only one real lasting love. You. You're one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing, but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard."
Christina Bailey (Clorlis Leachmann) correctly pegs Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) merely a couple minutes after he has picked her up from the side of a dark empty road. Mike is a private detective who together with his exasperated assistant/lover Velda (Maxine Cooper, somehow her only major role) specialises in divorce cases/adultery. They are essentially double agents, seducing the partners of their clients and sending the recording as proof they've solved the case. The money is good, so is the sex. The film takes great pleasure in showing the sexual, erotic attraction between Velda and Mike and her provocatively seductive behavior. It takes even greater pleasure in showing contempt to the mores of its times.
Velda and Mike are of course hated by the 'serious' police detectives and polite society. But the film always remains on their side. It agrees with Christina's assessment of Mike, but ultimately sees it as more of a compliment than an insult. It works, thanks to Meeker's brilliant performance, (it reminded me of Jack Nicholson's early and greatest roles) portraying his arrogance, confidence and manly self-indulgence as an expression of his anti-establishment attitude. It's that attitude which makes makes him a man of the people, who will not turn over the distressed Christina, an escapee from a psychiatric institution, over to the authorities, nearly leading to his death. And it's that attitude that makes him stick his teeth into the mysterious case that has led to the death of Christina and the disappearance of many others, despite the fact it's never clear what he'll gain from solving the case. He just can't stand the powerful getting away with it, even if he doesn't exactly know what 'it' is.
It's an attitude the film sees as necessary and moral but ultimately pointless. The establishment is corrupt and out to crush you, and it eventually will. All you can do is follow your own rules and make bonds with the other lowlifes of society. Those include a Greek car mechanic, an Italian home-mover, a failed opera singer forced to perform for an audience of one in run-down apartments, and a black boxing trainer terrified for his life. Mike's cocky attitude softens in the presence of these people. He becomes friendlier, treating them with affection and concern, even occasionally allowing himself to show fear when they are in danger. The film has a genuine love for these forgotten members of a multicultural working class and their need to bond together in solidarity against the special interests of the police, high society and the government. Those special interests are in the end a bit too much of a McGuffin for my taste. I perhaps would have wished for a little bit more background in the motivations of the film's villains, but am not sure that this would have led to a better film. It definitely wouldn't have made the final scenes as eerie and haunting as they are.
Saturday, July 17, 2021
166. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
Song - (Everything I Do) I Do it For You (Bryan Adams)
Movie: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Kevin Reynolds, 1991)
I like Kevin Costner, but the world would have been a better place if he realised that Bull Durham is his greatest film. Unfortunately, the man cares too much about being perceived as noble and wholesome, which has led to some films and roles that are far less interesting than they could have been. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is one of the worst offenders with Costner never disappearing from his "oh how anguished I am for having to make such great sacrifices" mode. At the end of the film, there is a cameo by Sean Connery as King Richard, providing more joy and wit in a couple of seconds than Costner does through the entire film. He also doesn't have much chemistry with either Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (who does give the most confident and realistic performance in the film).
Unfortunately, even aside from Costner, the other actors have problems of their own. Slater never looks convincing as someone who supposedly lives in the 12th century, and the film gives up pretending at the end with an explicitly anachronistic one-liner. This is not some sort of egregious mistake and was obviously at least partly intended as a sort of clever self-referential joke. Unfortunately, it comes at the worst moment, taking you right out of the film's most exciting moments, the only sequence that takes the time to set up the action, inviting you to think along with the characters and to follow and understand their battle plan.
I also don't much care for Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham, who too often feels like a retread of Die Hard's Hans Gruber. Rickman seems completely lost in his own world, you never get the feeling that he ever even thought about aligning himself with the tone of the film or with the other actors. Now, as someone who is a bit predisposed against joyless gloomy epics like this, I do somewhat respect Rickman's belligerent attitude towards it, and anytime you get the chance to make lazy screenwriters explain why you'd kill someone with a spoon, you have to take it.
Finally, the film doesn't really know what to do with Morgan Freeman, but it deserves credit using him to portray the sophistication of the Arabs the crusaders fought against. The film introduces Robin Hood as a heroic fighter in these crusades, but never engages in the kind of stereotypes against Arabs that you would usually see in these kinds of films. It even goes out of his way to present Freeman's Azeem as a rational man of science and compassion.
Friday, May 14, 2021
165. Wild at Heart
Song - Me And Bobby McGee (Janis Joplin)
Movie: Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990)
Some two years ago I started watching Twin Peaks. I stopped doing so after the "It's Happening Again" episode in season 2, which I felt was a perfect encapsulation of everything the show was about. I didn't see how Lynch could possibly improve or move on from that - the extended scene in the bar in particular is one of the greatest things ever filmed. Wild at Heart never stood a chance against Twin Peaks' episode 14 (and can't measure up to the rest of Twin Peaks either), but it is quite entertaining, sometimes funny, sometimes tense and unsettling, and in the end even endearingly romantic. Unexpectedly you do root for Cage as he steps over all those cars to get back to his Lula (Laura Dern).
I will at some point restart Twin Peaks, as I am especially curious about Season 3. Besides, it is just aesthetically pleasing to watch, and what I liked most about Wild at Heart is how much it shares with Twin Peaks. For example, how everytime someone in the film lights a match, it is accompanied by ominous sounds and images of burning and fire. Or Angelo Badalamenti's score, which is somehow both haunting and comforting. Haunting, because it is often used to accentuate something mysterious and potentially evil, but also comforting because there is a softness to it. It's pleasant to listen to it. The same can be said for Lynch's imagery, that's full of warmth and bright colors. And he clearly loves the characters he creates and the actors he works with, giving them freedom to go into all kinds of unexpected directions. It's also fun to see here some of the core cast of Twin Peaks show up in small roles. I also liked that the most Twin Peaks-like performance comes from J.E. Freeman, the actor playing hitman Santos, who does not actually appear on the show, and was amused that Sheryl Lee keeps only appearing as a spectral presence.
I find the relationship between Lynch's concerns and his style quite interesting and appealing. It may feel quite counter-intuitive to make pleasantly watchable films about the great darkness of the world, but if you believe (and repeatedly point out throughout your work) that there is great uncontrollable and unknowable evil in the world lurking in many corners, shapes and forms, it would make sense for your art to go out of its way to show that it itself is not evil, and in fact, rather comfortingly enjoyable. That's a big 'if', it's worth noting. The absurdity in Twin Peaks is much more part of a coherent worldview than in Wild at Heart where at times you have to wonder whether you are watching a prankster throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Much does though, and even if some of that is rather stupid, it does lead to stuff you won't readily see in other directors' work.
I did sometimes wish that Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe and Diane Ladd chilled out a bit (Cage is great), but even that makes some sense as it taps into the world view of angsty and exhilarated teenagers with heightened emotions and big feelings. The car accident scene is another great example of that. It's morbidly funny and uncomfortable, but also a rather great expression of the fear of an insecure teenager that losing some important documents will be the end of the world. Finally, as an aside. I already thought that the John Wick films would age rather badly (their fights become kind of repetitive and follow the same patterns) before finding out that their world building is pretty much ripped off from this film.
Sunday, May 9, 2021
164. Kes
Song - Blackbird (The Beatles)
Movie: Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)
You don't often see Ken Loach be compared to Scorsese or Tarantino, which is why the best scene in this film took me by surprise. It involves a football training at PE class, and Mr. Sugden, pretending to be Bobby Charlton. Mr. Sugden is the teacher of the class, the 'captain' of one of the teams, and the referee of the game. He makes a show of being better than his 12/13-year old pupils, fouls with impunity, awards himself a penalty, decides that the keeper moved to early when missing the penalty, and wildly celebrates when he hits the retaken penalty. He glorifies his own talent, trash talks his students' skills and mistakes, and after the game turns the water cold when his keeper Billy is showering, to punish him for not saving the decisive goal, letting 'Tottenham Hotspur' beat 'Manchester United'.
The whole sequence could come straight out of Mean Streets, especially because Mr. Sugden and Brian Glover's performance is the driving force of the scene. Moreover, Loach consistently highlights the difference in strength, physicality, skill, and aggression between Mr. Sugden and his pupils and lets the scene continue for much longer than needed, highlighting the laughable absurdity of it all. Whenever a team scores, he starts filming in the style of a TV coverage of an actual live football match, complete with a text at the bottom of the screen informing us that it's 'Manchester United 1 - 1 Tottenham Hotspur'. The sequence is unquestionably an indictment of the teacher's abuse, but it also the teacher's abusive behavior that is the source of the sequence' cinematic qualities and pleasures. Who knew that Ken Loach influenced Fight Club?
I am a bit flippant, but it's a genuinely interesting choice Loach makes there. Kes is, among other things, an indictment of the British school system, showing how it uses (physical, emotional, and verbal) violence to beat the individuality out of the students and train them to become cogs in the machine. Billy's care for his falcon Kes is one of the few things that he gets to do in the film that allows him to assert his individuality and to do something that goes against the plans society has for him. Billy is lonely and has few friends, and Kes does alleviate his loneliness, but this is not the kind of gooey film, believing that his relationship with Kes is a genuine alternative to real friendships. Rather, it shows that through the care for his falcon, Billy gets to express himself and form more meaningful relationships with his classmates and teachers. That in itself is a triumph. The film's view is that it's hard to express who you are in such a conformist environment. The only other person who attempts to do so, is Mr. Sugden in the aforementioned football match, but he can only do so by imagining he is Bobby Charlton, Safe to say, that this doesn't lead to a more meaningful relationship with his students.