180. Paris Blues

Song - Still Got The Blues (Gary Moore)

Movie: Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, 1961)

I've never been much into jazz, but I've always greatly enjoyed stories about the jazz scene. Paris Blues is no exception and has all the familiar elements that makes these stories so appealing. There is of course a band of moody musicians with very specific ideas about the kind of music they want to make, leading to the formation of outsider, (culturally and musically) diverse, slightly odball communities shaped by musical compatibility. They play in bars that are just classy enough to give the audience a sense of sophistication and just crummy enough to give them a sense of danger and discovery. That also shapes the attitudes of the musicians themselves, who like to present themselves as artistically accomplished, fiercely independent and just a little bummier than they truly are. That such a role would fit Paul Newman like a glove is to be expected. I found it more surprising that Sidney Poitier is so comfortable playing a carefree cool musician utterly uninterested in leaving Paris to go back to America and fight for black liberation. It's quite a joy to see them play respectively Ram Bowen and Eddie Cook. The film is beautifully lighthearted and for the most part asks nothing more of them than to convey their pleasuure in playing jazz and courting Lilian (Joanne Woodward) and Connie (Diahann Carroll), two friends on holiday in Paris.

I've never been much into Paris either. I've always found it a city that insists a bit too much on its own greatness, being way too self-conscious about its famous sites. From  Montmartre and Sacré-Coeur to the Arc de Triomphe and from the Louvre to the smallest street, everything feels designed to maximally overwhelm you by its beauty and grandeur. Admittedly, it often succeeds! It would be ridiculous to call Paris ugly or unpleasant, but it does feel a bit like the city and its mythology are lording over the people in it. Paris Blues, partly because it is filmed in black and white, manages to counterbalance this mythology a little bit. It's filled with scenes of the two couples walking across the city, falling in love along the Seine. They see many of the famous locations of the city, but are never dwarfed by them. There is one scene in which Connie and Eddie are standing in front of the Notre-Dame and you only truly notice the cathedral when one of them points it out. I found the way in which the city blends in with the character here highly appealing. I have not been to Paris in a long time and wasn't rushing to. This film made me want to go again. It helps that the carefree natural charm of all four main actors is reflected in the atmsophere at the jazz club where they are playing and that Ritt is clearly inspired by the emergence of the French New Wave without really committing to it, which gives the film an even more nonchalant tone, with Louis Armstrong's call-and-response scene as a great highlight. 

I first heard about Paris Blues when reading about the controversial decision by the producers to block the depiction of interracial relationships. The film was originally conceived with the idea to have Newman and Carroll and Poitier and Woodward as the two couples and the actors were not happy with the decision to change that. It would have probably been more dramatically interesting if the producers were more courageous. But both Woodward and Newman and Poitier and Carroll were a real-life couple during filming and their easygoing chemistry really contributes to the pleasurable vibe of the film. Besides, while interracial romances may have been (and still are) rare in American film, that's even more true for interracial friendships. Especially interracial friendships between men and women in which they give each other romantic advice,  without being affected by racial stereotypes. 

179. Jimmy's Hall

Song - Jimmy (Boudewijn de Groot)

Movie: Jimmy's Hall (Ken Loach, 2014)

"Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses." 

The first half of this film is a wonderful representation of the ideas and feelings behind "Bread and Roses". It basically consists of a series of short vignettes depicting the joys of socialist idealism. and contains some unexpectedly graceful passages. I could have watched hours more of Irish villagers passionately dancing, discussing politics, reading literature, defying the Irish establishment, and loving and caring for each other in their small modestly utopian hall.. In the second half, it loses some if its grace, getting way too didactic in dramatising the antagonism between Jimmy Gralton's activitsts and their enemies,, but for a long while this is the ideal version of a Ken Loach film. 

I also found Loach's didacticism more welcome here than in his other films. I don't know much about 1920's/1930's Irish history, and was for example surprised to find that the IRA and Gralton were enemies. Gralton was an Irish socialist activist who became the only Irish-born person to be deported out of Ireland. He had spent 10 years out of exile in the USA after establishing a town hall in which his fellow villagers could get together to dance, play sports, study literature, discuss politics, sing, be educated, and create meaningful communities independently from the church and the state. The church and the state are no fans of such heresies, like even less that the villagers get politically conscious helping poor families in land disputes against the rich aristocracy, and smell trouble when upon returning from his exile, Gralton aims to re-establish the now decrepit townhall, and possibly reconnect with his old flame Oona.

At one of those land disputes the film has Gralton speak to a group of villagers coming to protest land theft. He touches on familiar socialist points arguing that it's impossible to claim that Ireland is united as one nation as landlords and bankers have different interests than factory workers and miners, that he saw firsthand in New York how a system based on exploitation led to the Great Depression, and that we need to "take control of our lives again and work for need, not for greed. And not to just survive like a dog, but to live. And to celebrate, to dance, to sing as free human beings."  I have a fondness for rousing speeches in films, so I quite liked this, but it is definitely a good example of Lynch's (and Paul Laverty's - his regular screenwriter), tendency for needless sopabox speechifying. Those final words are a blunt representation of everything we've seen in the film's first half which almost makes you want to live and particpate in Jimmy's hall, in the enjoyable company of the villagers expanding their political, emotional and intellectual worlds in a shared space that gives them freedom to create and imagine better lives for themselves. The film's editing is wonderfully attuned to the rhythms of their life and doesn't rush to tell a story, but to give an impression of the various activities going on in the hall, 10 years before and now. These scenes are filmed with great love and patience, letting a reading of Yeats or a class about Celtic singing, or a political discussion go on for longer than nexessary, allowing you to really share in the experience and joy together with the villagers.  And all the while Jimmy and Oona exchange romantic glances, culminating in a beautfully filmed silent dance, an expression of their emotions which they can't quite say out louid - it takes place after Jimmy returns from exile and finds Oona married with children.

It's a great advertisement for socialism, in particular Irish socialism, with the soundtrack filled with those typical Irish folksy symphonies that are half-joyous, half-sentimental. It's all of course heavily romanticised, but a big part of the job of a political movement is to sell a narrative. And the film is a good reminder that one of the reasons for the success of socialism was its promise of "Bread and Roses". It was not just about economic theory and making sure that people who lived in barely livable conditions could live in slightly more livable conditions, but about self-actualisation, individual liberty and the ability to live happy prosperous lives, allowing people to experience and explore wonderful things independently from the trappings of state, church, social class or birthplace. That's an incredibly strong story and one that has been abandoned by too many of the leftist-progressive parties of today. Ofteng torgetting the roses entirely, their message (crudely summarised) often doesn't extend much further than arguing that people deserve more bread or that more kinds of people deserve bread, sometimes even without inagining that more bread is a possibility.  

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.  

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.

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.   

175. End of the Century

Song - Barcelona (Freddy Mercury & Montserrat Caballé)

Movie: End of the Century - Fin de siglo (Lucio Castro, 2019)

The self-assuredness of Lucio Castro stands out, even before we reach the squeaking toy duck. End of the Century is a sort of Before Sunrise, set in Barcelona, only the lovers are gay and during the course of their conversation they find out they have met before sometime over 20 years ago. It hits all the beats you'd expect, but does so in a pleasantly unhurried way, without any of the pretensions or high-minded fussy tendencies that often creep into these kind of artsy debut features. A scene in which a character is reading a book, while the sentences appear on screen and are heard non-diegetically is a notable exception, but for the most part Castro directs as if he is a seasoned director of modest ambition, fully aware of, and at peace with, his skills and limitations. Nothing wrong with that; you don't really need the film to become more than it is, and never even anticipate it, but that's when the squeaking toy duck comes in.

As the film meanders towards its end, Castro suddenly reveals the true depths of his artistic ambitions. He presents it as casually as everything that came before, but by the time Ocho (Juan Barberini) steps on a squeaking toy duck, gets a carrot out of a fully stacked fridge and passes a beautifully singing woman on a Barcelona square, the whole film has been turned upside down, becoming something much more mysterious, lyrical and moving than it first appeared. It wisely never provides an answer to the questions it raises, though the final shot of Ocho is a mistake, as it opens up the possibility for the dullest possible interpretation of the film. Even so, this seems to me a highly successful attempt to merge the proud traditions of 'classic' European modernist cinema with contemporary progressive sensibilities. 

It's a mild spoiler to compare this to I'm Thinking of Ending Things, which made me want to see a more straightforward Charlie Kaufman film, one that focuses more on the mundane relationship drama. Kaufman's obsession with the mind is interesting, as as are his surrealistic flights of fancy. But his biggest strength is that he is an incredibly astute observer of human behaviour, with the road trip to the parents being of one the greatest examples of that. It's much stronger than the somewhat overheated histrionics of the second half of the film. Because Jessie Buckley gives one of the performances of the century, I still liked I'm Thinking of Ending Things quite a lot. But End of the Century is the ideal version of it. 

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.