186. The Big Chill

Song - You Can't Always Get What You Want (The Rolling Stones)

Movie: The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983)

Kevin Kline could have spent all his life getting praised for playing dignified, thoughtful types. Instead he became of the greatest farcical actors of modern times, earning an Oscar for playing a slapstick character. It's a mystery why he hasn't yet been cast by Wes Anderson or in one of the upcoming Knives Out films. The Big Chill is not a farce, but it is a film in which he has, by design, the least challenging and the most underwritten role. He is supposed to be the straight man among his friends who have all kinds of inner turmoil. He responds to this situation by even further downplaying the complexity of Harold, a character who is fully satisfied with his life and career and sees no need to spend any time thinking hard about what might happen, could have been, or should be. His total indifference to navel gazing, thoughtful discussions or painful reflections radiates from his face, often bordering on contempt. In many similar films this would be presented as a facade for typical suburban fears, anxieties and insecurities, the idea being that if you think too hard about your life it all comes crashing down. Not here. Kline doesn't suggest any subtext or deeper meaning behind Harold's casualness. 

Harold and his friends should have many reasons for reflection. They've gathered together after a long time apart to mourn Alex, an old college friend who killed himself. They are Sam (Tom Berenger), an unfulfilled television star in Hollywood; Sarah (Glenn Close), Harold's wife, a caring matriarch who had once an affair with Alex; Michael (Jeff Goldblum), a womaniser using humor to mask his insecurities; Nick (William Hurt), a depressed impotent Vietnam veteran; Meg (Mary Kay Place) a single lawyer who feels her biological clock ticking; Karen (Jobeth Williams), an unhappy housewife who once had dreams of writing. Finally, there is Chloë (Meg Tilly) Alex' much younger girlfriend with an implied history of mental illness and an unhappy childhood. All these characters get some wonderfully observed moments, giving their actors time to shine. But none of those scenes are particularly surprising. These people don't get the opportunity to break out of the mold that Kasdan has created for them and do something that would be out of character. Still, it is worth noting that making Hollywood star Sam the most down to earth character is not a choice usually made in these kinds of reunion films. Also worth noting is that the chemistry between all the actors is great. They are very convincing as a group of friends who haven't seen each other in a long time and they all become quite sympathetic. William Hurt and Glenn Close excel playing characters in gravely concerned, deeply serious, and dour moods and, while having both of them in the same film can be a bit much, their expressions alone are enough to turn it from a comedy into a comedy-drama.

In the end, partly because everyone else is depicted a bit too stereotypically, Kline's Harold actually emerges as the most interesting person in the film, and certainly as the most honest one. He is neither a dimwit nor an asshole, but is often oblivious to his friends' worries and dismissive towards the two main questions the group has: why did Alex kill himself? And what happened to their youthful revolutionary ideals? He believes the first question can't ever be answered and is just a waste of time, while finding the second one annoyingly obvious: the answer to that is money and Harold doesn't know what more there is to discuss here. They were poor students, and now they are rich adults. What should happen? Both those positions are uncomfortable, but probably much closer to the truth than most theories floated by his friends. The film never directly supports or makes these same claims, but these ideas always kind of stay in the background, floating around as a possibility, while the group talks and talks, hoping to find the exact answer that will both be truthful to their current selves and bring back the good old times. Harold may not be searching for any of that, but no one else ends the film as a stockholding business owner engaging in free love. 

185. Collateral

Song -  Under the Bridge (Red Hot Chilli Peppers)

Movie: Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004)

Collateral came out only four years before Iron Man, but the two feel like belonging to two completely different eras. The rise of superhero blockbusters has largely removed stylish star-driven 'Ordinary Joe' action movies out of the cinemas. That's a shame, cause these films kick ass and can be a gateway to further film exploration. Collateral is one of my favorites of this century, in part because it was one of the first films that made me realilse that the cinematography of a film can not only convey just as much information as the screenplay and the performances, but can also communicate things that the screenplay and performances can't. It's a film that makes it extremely obvious that the way in which a director arranges and presents sounds and images is just as important as which sounds and images are presented. At my first watch, the coyote scene was the most striking example of this. The lit up eyes of the coyote; how the second coyote strolls in rhythm with the music; the way in which the city streets surrounding Foxx and Cruise are lit up and framed in relation to them and the cab; It was evident that all these elements don't primarily serve a narrative purpose and that the unusal way in which they are filmed may well be the main reason for us seeing them. I found this cool as shit, in part because it was clear that there was more going on here beyond the unusualness. Mann was expressing certain ideas about Max (Jamie Foxx) and Vincent (Tom Cruise), the relationship between them, and their relationship to the city that couldn't be expresed through dialogue alone. At the same time, while presenting LA in a more stylised way than most filmmakers, he also made the city feel more tangible and immersive than more 'realistic' films. At certain moments it really evoked the feeling of being out at night in a brightly lit city.  

This film may have ruined Michael Mann for me. I've seen The Insider and Heat and like them both, but feel they can't quite measure up. No film in which the De Niro/Pacino showdown is only the third best scene (I prefer the bank shoot out and Ashley Judd warning Val Kilmer) can be bad, but it never gives me the same immediate-yet-dreamy feeling of being part of the city as Collateral does. It also feels much more forced, trying way too hard to be the Big Action Epic. Yet, there is no scene as tense as the one where Max is standing on a parking lot looking across at Annie's (Jada Pankiett Smith) apartment building, as Vincent is hunting for her on the wrong apartment floor. As a bonus, Collateral also has one of the great nightclub shooutout scenes, though I understand Mann may have surpassed himself in that regard in Miami Vice. Meanwhile, it's not just Mann who is on the top of his game here. Cruise and Foxx are now so committted to respectively playing infallible heroes and cool badasses that it's almost surprising to see them be so good as a cold-blooded villain and an vulnerable everyman. Cruise in particular has a couple of scenes in which he is so direct in his aggressiveness that he becomes genuinely scary. 

There were some very concrete plans to shoot this film in New York, with even Robert De Niro in the Jamie Foxx role. I am very glad this didn't happen. The film deserves to stand fully on its own and not be in the shadow of Taxi Driver. More importantly, Los Angeles and its huge sprawl is really key to what makes Collateral special. The film makes you constantly aware of life in the city going on around Cruise and Foxx, with many shots allowing us to see far beyond the space occupied by the characters. We are being made aware of the many millions of people who are unaware of the predicament Cruise and Foxx have found themselves in and vice versa. They are just one story among many other potential ones. 

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.    

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.     

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. 

181. 1984

Song - Eye In The Sky (The Alan Parsons Project)

Movie: 1984 (Michael Radford, 1984)

During its ending credits a title card informs us that this film was "photographed in and around London during the period April-June 1984, the exact time and setting imagined by the author." That's a curious statement! Because the London, the actually existing city, in which the film was photographed doesn't bear any resemblance to the setting imagined by George Orwell. More importantly, it doesn't bear any resemblance to the city as it is imagined by the filmmakers. The film looks like it has been filmed on a studio set that is designed to resemble an unspecified dystopian city. The outdoor spaces we get to see are mostly grey disheveled streets filled with equaly disheveled concrete blocks that only seem to exist in relation to themselves. Radford never zooms out of a location to give us even a basic sense of the geography of the place. Where exactly is the pawn shop Winston (John Hurt) and Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) visit to hide their illicit love affair? What is surrounding it? How do they get there from one place to another without being seen? Their visit to the country side is equally disorienting. We never get to see how they actually arrive at that spot, presented in exceptionally bright green colors, giving it a fantastical dreamlike look that clearly distinguishes and disconnects it from the drabness of the city.

The country side is also the only place in the film where Winston and Julia are free from Big Brother. Everywhere else they go they are surrounded by giant screens spouting propaganda about the succesful war efforts of Oceania, or about its expanded production capacity. I am a fan of shots in which a (preferably silhouetted!) human figure is envelopped/dwarfed/overwhelmed by a giant screen in the background and this film got plenty of those. Moreover, they are photographed by Roger Deakins, who was evidently an incredibly accomplished cinematographer from they very start of his career. Similarly. I hope the art directors and costume and production designers working on this film got a wonderful career out of it, because they truly did a fantastic job in creating a totalitarian dystopian city that bears little resemblance to their contemporary society. That is also why I could never really get on board with it. The film often seems more interested in expressing its reverence for Orwell's book, than in expressing its fear of totalitarianism. 

That title card at the end explains a lot. Watching the film you often get the feeling that adapting 1984 in 1984 is the main reason for its existence. It is so smothered in artificiality, and has so little sense of (or connection to) the real world that it plays like a book report by people who want to explain why George Orwell's ideas are so important, but can't ever conceive of living in a totalitarian society. The film distances itself so much from contemporary British society that it can't imagine any aspect of British society ever potentially leading to totalitarainism. It's a bit too safely patriotic and has a holier-than-thou attitude (totalitarianism is something that happens to other people, the Brits are just there to highlight the dangers of it) that I found offputting.