245. Ladyhawke

Song - Total Eclipse Of The Heart (Bonnie Tyler)

Movie: Ladyhawke (Richard Donner, 1985)

In the early days of this project I wrote up The Fabulous Baker Boys, lacking the vocabulary to talk about 'Makin Whoopee' without it coming off as creepy or boringly obvious. But I can say that it's a curse on the audience to cast 80's Michelle Pfeiffer and then make her appear half the time in the guise of a hawk. Out of jealousy, the Bishop of Aquila (John Wood) has damned her and her lover Navarre (Rutger Hauer); she, Isabeau, is a hawk by day, while he is a wolf by night. And every sunset and sunrise they are tortured by an ephemeral glimpse of each other's human bodies. They can only bring an end to this ordeal by appearing together at the Bishop during a solar eclipse. That's why they need Gaston (Matthew Broderick), the only one to have ever escaped out of the prison beneath the Bishop's palace. Of course, the real reason for Gaston is that without him this would have to be an austere film about two cursed lovers silentily battling the forces of nature and of the Bishop. That  would have required a lot physically from Hauer and Pfeiffer but the real pain would have been for the producers, who would not have gotten their return on investment. 

Still, you should be able to satisfy commercial demands without being unfavorably compared to Black Knight. Who doesnt't remember the 2001 comedy about a stereotypical black comedian who has to adapt to his surroundings when he is magically transported into medieval times? It's much better than Ladyhawke, which essentially imagines how a stereotypical 80's high school teen would behave when transported into medieval times. Firstly, Martin Lawrence is inherently funnier than Matthew Broderick. Secondly, Broderick plays Gaston as a lazy student who gets accidentally sent to 14th Century Italy and now has to use his rudimentary knowledge of history to survive. That could be quite funny, but Gaston is conceived as a pickpocket from the actual Middle Ages, and the film wants him to be both that and a time-travelling Ferris Bueller. Which leads to a lot of irritatingly daft lines, often enunciated by Broderick as if he is participating in an oral exam. 

The film's attempts to merge the medieval with the contemporary also extend to the score produced by Alan Parsons. It's typical 80's synth-heavy (I think) pop with sudden ocassional outburts that make it seem as if you are listening to an orchestral score for a traditional epic. I quite liked the music, but it never really meshes with the action and the images on screen, making it feel a bit too disparate from the movie. The truth is that Hauer is the only one who succesfully adapts to what the film is trying to do. He portrays Navarre as a stoic courageous romantic who would rather express his love for Isabeau and his honorable family history than his discontent with Gaston. He is often given sarcastic zingers in response to Broderick's shenaningans, but he delivers them as if they are beneath his dignity, as if he feels that he shouldn't be saying what he does.

244. Son of Mine

Song - Bestel Mar (Rowwen Heze)

Movie: Son of Mine - Gluckauf (Remy van Heugten, 2015)

You can't tack on a redemption arc in the final 15 minutes after spending 1,5 hour wallowing (convincingly and entertaingly!) in bleak violent nihilism. It's not only absurd to ask for sympathy for one of the most irredeemable brutes I've seen recently, it's also a betrayal of the writing and Bart Slegers's performance. The film is really strong in portraying Lei and his son Jeffrey (Vincent van der Valk) as figures fully devoid of humane qualities, or any capacity for moral introspection and goodness. Both men act as if they are driven purely by greed and prehistoric survival instincts - one of the film's most memorable moments is van der Valk's evil, lecherous little laugh as he discovers that he gets to transport some young foreign prostitutes for a crime boss. He doesn't end up doing anything to the women, but that laugh is horrifying enough. 

The aforementioned crime boss Vester is played by Johan Leysen as if Christoph Waltz was the film's first choice. He carries himself with an unearned air of sophistication, pretending that he is trying to save ghouls like Lei and Jeffrey from themselves, while desperately needing them for his dirty jobs. He is a ruthless killer giving orders in farmers overalls, befitting the setting. The film takes place in the mining villages in the southern part of the Dutch province of Limburg and all the actors speak in dialect. Van Heugten smartly does not tie any social considerations to Jeffrey and Lei's behaviour, while still showing how their lives are shaped by context-specific details. A meeting with gangsters from Liege is quite notable as it reminds that in a big city these men would hide in the underwould, while in the Limbug vilages they are part of the fabric of society, living their lives alongside everyone else. As none of the villagers are introverted types, this leads to some tense and darkly funny conforntations that always have the potential to explode in many different directions. That makes its key plot twist, expressed only with a quiet cut, only more effective.

I was so surprised and enamored by how van Heugten set up the final act that I thought he could do only one thing to lose me, and, well he did. To be fair, Lei's sudden desire to do good and be absolved for his sins doesn't entirely come out of nowhere. The film is not shy to show the crosses he wears, even if it never considers how the idea(l)s behind them may shape his life. Even so, Lei starts the film blithely shooting a rifle at his ex-wife's house, effectively kindapping his son, and only gets more brutal from there. It's hard to believe how anyone working on the film could think the last 15 minites sentimentalising him were a good idea. Still, Son of Mine was in 2016 the big winner of the Dutch equivalent of the Oscars. Even with a better ending that should have been Sam de Jong's Prins. 

243. Alice's Restaurant

Song - Massachusetts (Bee Gees)

Movie: Alice's Restaurant (Arthur Penn, 1969)

I have a lot of love for the (American) counterculture movement, but its ideals tend to be better than its movies. Alice's Restaurant is an adaptation of Arlo Guthrie's 18-minute breakout song Alice's Restaurant Massacree, essentially a glorified podcast in which Guthrie rambles on about a rather insignificant incident, with a superficial anti-war message added to the back of it. The film has Pete Seeger cover Woody Guthrie's (Arlo's father) Pastures of Plenty and an unknown singer perform Joni Mitchell's Songs to Aging Children Come. Both songs barely last three minutes, but evoke much stronger images and feelings just through their lyrics and performances than anything the movie actually visualises. That's perhaps understandable; Alice's Restaurant Massacree is such a literal-minded song that the movie doesn't really have anywhere to go.

Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Joni Mitchell are probably three of the greatest American artists of the 20th century and it is not entirely fair to complain that Arlo Guthrie is not as poetic as them. Unfortunately, there are many other reasons why he is the main problem with the film. For one, he has barely any screen presence and can't act. In a previous post on Trading Places, I wrote how much I love Eddie Murphy for essentially always breaking the fourth wall between him and the audience. Well, Guthrie seems to be breaking the fourth wall between him and the director. You get the feeling that he is concentrating so much on making sure that Penn approves his line deliveries and expressions that he is barely able to convincingly interact with his fellow actors. The bigger issue is that this also seems to be his attitude towards the counterculture in general. Alice's Restaurant Massacree feels like the equivalent of an overexcited teenage boy telling his older friends about the first time he bought alcohol, without yet knowing how to drink it and experience its pleasures. To an extent, that's understandable as Guthrie was 20 when he wrote the song, but what makes the whole thing even more grating is that he combines his childish affect with ironic swerves that are meant to make him seem more knowing than he is. 

Guthrie's strained presence permeats the whole film, There are too many stiff and stilted scenes that peter out indifferently and as a result there is so little connecting tissue between individual moments that everything feels even more inconsequential than it is on paper. Some dialogue scenes come off as so affected it almost feels as if the actors have been dubbed. Thankfully, in the second half, the focus moves away a bit from Arlo towards Alice (Patricia Quinn) and her boyfriend Ray (James Broderick). Aside from owning a restuarant in Stockbridge, Massachussets, they also own a deconsecrated church where they host (parties for) various fellow travelers in the counterculture movement. Alice sleeps with many of these visitors, but always returns to the much older (and seemingly monogamous) Ray, who is a bit of a mysterious figure. It is unclear whether he is a genuine believer in the ideals of his communitiy, or a con man who uses the movement to exert power and manipulate the people close to him. Alice and Ray's relationship is a fascinating one (they are not good for each other, but are ultimately all they got) and leads to broader questions about the counterculture movement as a whole. Whether it's secular or not, Alice's church sees much of the same rituals.

242. The Third Man

Song - Vienna (Ultravox)

Movie: The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

It's not as great as Casablanca, but similarly to it, The Third Man is about a man who has to choose between the greater, moral, good and his personal feelings towards an important figure from his past. And like Rick Blaine, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is a foreigner stuck in a city that has become a hotbed of international intrigue. Unlike Rick, however, Holly believes that doing the right thing will also get him the girl, failing to realise that 1949 Vienna is way too complex for straightforward expressions of love and loyalty. The city is divided into four sectors, ruled by the Americans, Brtions, Sovjets and French, with its central area designated as an international zone and the ravages from the war still highly visible. Not an ideal state of affairs, and as The Third Man shows, one that was for obvious reasons not much liked by the locals. Yet, the film also paints a vivid picture of Vienna as a place of opportunity and escape for a diverse crowd of intellectuals, diplomats, spies, hustlers and outcasts, turning it into a perversely appealing city where you can forge new identities, make fortunes on the black market, and have the freedom to operate in the shadows, to be disreputable outside the control of traditional and centralised institutions. At least, if the Russians don't get you. 

The Third Man may portray a world that has long disappeared (though Vienna is still a city of immigrants and one of the centres of international spycraft), any contemporary freelance (copy)writer will recognise a part of them in poor Holly Martins. Holly is technically an author of mediocre pulp paperback westerns, but low on income, he has been forced to accept his old friend Harry Lime's (Orson Welles) invitation to come to Vienna and write up his new self-funded healthcare startup. Alas, just upon arrival in Austria, Holly finds that his friend has died in a mysterious car accident and decides to investigate the situation. In the process he falls in love with Harry's bereaved lover Anna (Alida Valli), mostly because a beautiful, kind woman talking to him seems to be a rare phenomenon in his life these days. Holly should know better than to pursue her, but the film is partly about how hard it is to reconcile your feelings with the cold hard facts.  

It's easy to see why Reed's direction has become quite iconic. Admittedly, he does overuse the Dutch angles a bit; there are a number of scenes where he goes to such great lemgths to get a canted shot, it almost stops the film in its tracks. You always see what he is going for, but there are some cases where a more straightforward shot would have made more sense, both narratively and aesthetically. But it is interesting how succesfully he combines this stylised approach with a more documentarian one that sets you right in the middle of Vienna and provides a great sense of life in the city, of the atmosphere in its restaurants and streets, and of how the strange political situation influences ordinary lives. It is particularly attentive to how all these foreigners work to overcome language barriers, and the frustration of the Austrians to not be able to speak in their own language to the people in charge of their city. Reed's exaggerated noirish expressions help evoke that unease, the feeling that nobody truly knows anyone in the city, that you don't really have a sense of what could happen at any given point, and the ensuing  impossibility of making long term, permanent plans, knowing that everything could change in an instant. 

241. Maradona, the Hand of God

Song - We Will Rock You (Queen)

Movie: Maradona, the Hand of God - Maradona, la mano di Dio (Marco Risi, 2007)

When the Maradona's first leave the poverty of Villa Fiorito, Diego's mom responds angrily to a shopkeeper who sells her fruit twice as expensive as she is used to. It's a scene that sets up Diego's meeting with the love of his life Claudia, but also works on its own as a sensitive and sympathetic depiction of the honor and dignity of people who escape poverty. Diego's dad gets a similar scene a bit later when his son asks him to not work anymore - Maradona's football skills will support the family, his father can rest. The combination of pride and hurt on Roly Serrano's face in response to that request may be the best acting moment in the film. What makes it even more effective is that Serrano only shows his true emotions once his son has left the scene. It's evident that director Marco Risi is very much in his comfort zone unobstrusively filming subtle, authentically humane moments in the ordinary lives of ordinary citizens. That's a pretty great skill to have when you are not making a movie about Diego Maradona.

When you are making a movie about Diego Maradona, you need a touch of Brian De Palma or Oliver Stone. Risi does understand that, but he never goes as far as he should and his heart isn't really in it, with the exception of a couple of scnees, for example the first time Maradona makes love to Claudia. Rosi cuts between Maradona's orgasmic movements and his memories of his football successes. As the scene progresses the cuts become quicker, leaving you to confusingly realise that, yes, the lovers are a different age every time the film cuts back to them. It's a remarkably weird sequence, and it's the only time the movie truly gets Maradona's obsessive indulgency across, expressing how it feels to be in his mindset that seems to lack any sort of self-control. It almost gets there again during his overlong wedding speech in which he barely spends time on his love for Claudia and his family, instead listing all his grievances and the people, some long forgotten, who have wronged him. The film is most helped though by Juan Leyrado, playing Guillermo Coppola, Maradona's greedy agent, as if he is the devil incarnate. It is only when he is on screen that the film feels like it is set in the kind of absurd unreality Maradona evoked. 

The International Film Fesival of Rotterdam once screened the film Nazidanie, a pseudo-documentary about Zinedine Zidane, that basically turns his story into a biblical, mythical prophecy that culminates with him headbutting Marco Materazzi. Not every film about enigmatic sporting heroes can be like that, but a film about Maradona that calls itself 'the Hand of God' needs to go much more into that direction than this one does. Maradona is one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century, whether you like football or not. There are very few people in the world who can say that they have singlehandedly reconfigured the entire identity of a city. Maradona's Godlike stature in Argentina and Naples is not just related to his football greatness, but also (or even, more so) to the fact that he achieved football greatness despite breaking every possible rule of how to get there. He would neither be as tragic or as popular if he had been less deviant and less self-destructive, but it's hard to make a mainstream film that toes that line. Risi's struggles are quite understandable, as he can't either explictly condemn or glorify his lifestyle and drug addiction. As a result he ends up whitewashing Maradona in the final scenes in a way that feels quite dishonest. It's not needed too; I don't wanna be a conspiracy theorist, but I am susceptible to the idea that as the rules of football increasingly benefit the super rich, football is increasingly implementing measures that make it harder to deviate from those rules. VAR sucks for other reasons too, and will only make Maradona's "hand of god" goal more iconic. 

240. At Eternity's Gate

Song - Vincent (Don McLean)

Movie: At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2018)

Paul Gaugain (Oscar Isaac) is tired of impressionists! He tells van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) that painting shouldn't be anymore about objective reproductions of reality. Rather, painters should give their own interpretation of how they see the world. In other words, a van Gogh painting of a mountain should primarily tell you something about van Gogh's worldview, rather than the characteristics of the mountain. This would be a revolution, notes Gauguin: "The faces you paint are yours. And they'll stay because of you. People will be known because you painted them and how you painted them, not because of who they are. And people will go to museums to see paintings of people, not to see people who were painted." These words pretty much summarise Schnabel's approach to making the film. It is quite telling that the scene in which they appear is essentially the only one that places van Gogh in a broader context.  

There is very little resembling a traditional narrative here. Its key scenes are three long conversations van Gogh has while in treatment. One of those is with a priest played by Mads Mikkelsen, the other two with doctors played by Mathieu Amalric and (unknown to me) Vladimir Consigny. In all three scenes, but especially in the one with Consigny, Schnabel goes out of his way to show as little as possible of van Gogh and his conversation partner in the same frame together, and he also rarely has an actor speak while the camera is on the other person. Moreover, during these conversations, Dafoe is filmed in a medium close up, while the other actors are often seen in an extreme close up, with their heads barely fitting the frame. The result is that it never feels like we are watching a conversation between two people who talk directly to each other, in the same space. And when van Gogh is asked why he paints, he always gives different, somewhat evasive, answers, never letting us feel as if we have a comprehensive understanding of what drives him. 

There are more formal gambits Schnabel makes throughout the film. At certain points the lower half of the frame is blurred, while the upper half is presented clearly. Some scenes are shown from van Gogh's point of view, essentially turning his eyes into a roving camera, but not all these POV shots share the same visual markers. Sometimes, a grey-yellow-ish filter has been put over them, reminding you of the visual palette of van Gogh paintings, without going so far to make them resemble the actual style of these paintings. Other times these subjective shots share the exact same color and lighting as the objective ones, but are filmed with a shaky handheld camera. The handheld camera is also used to film van Gogh in third person, showing him painting, or wandering through nature. As a result several sequences feel like they come from a 19th century home video, where we see things from exceedingly odd camera angles. At some point we get a shot of van Gogh's feet with the camera seemingly placed on the floor. There are also multiple scenes where dialogue between the characters is repeated in voiceover, sometimes before the 'original' sentence has even ended. In a similar way, images fade in and out of each other, repeating mulitple times in a single scene.

Especially at the beginning, this strange, incosistently applied blend of filmmaking aesthettics can be quite frustrating, as there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind it. It is not an approximation of van Gogh's style, and it gives the impression that the film is somewhat confused about its own view of the painter. As the film went on though, I started to appreciate it as a sensory experience that reflects van Gogh's frazzled mind. After a further while you realise that it also respects his mind. The film is much more interested in exploring how van Gogh may have expressed himself, and in his thoughts about his life, work and mental state, rather than in telegraphing all the ways in which he is suffering. Finally, there is also something to be said for making a film about van Gogh purposefully alienating. Schnabel doesn't follow the conventions of either contemporary biopics or of contemporary arthouse cinema, daring people to be somewhat put off by it and its vision, and disregard it, risking that his film will have the same fate as van Gogh's paintings. Worth noting here that I found most of Schnabel's experimentation quite cool. Even if it doesn't always work, these are not things you see every week in movies.  

The film's individuality only makes its postcript more questionable, noting that van Gogh died after being accidentally shot by some kids. This is not the official account of van Gogh's death, but a theory put forward by two historians. It seems to me like the kind of theory that mostly serves to give attention to its creators, and though it is less damaging than, say, the idea that, due to his poverty, Shakespeare couldn't have written his works, it still seems like the kind of dumb thing you should stay away from.  I have written before that I really like art that knowingly presents false/alternative versions of history and mixes facts with fiction and mythmaking. I think that this can be more insightful about history and historiography than a straightforward retelling of the facts. Nonetheless, there are good and bad ways to do that. At Eternity's Gate's ending is I think an example of the latter, as the film is explicitly subjective throughout its running time, presenting nothing about van Gogh as objective fact, except for this alternate account of his death. It should have at least made clear that its claim is contested. 

239. Trading Places

Song - The Wall Street Shuffle (10cc)

Movie: Trading Places (John Landis, 1983)

In a famous scene in Trading Places, Eddie Murphy looks incredulously into the camera as the Duke Brothers (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) condescendingly explain the concept of a BLT sandwich to him. It is technically the only scene in the film that explicitly breaks the fourth wall, In practice, there is never much divide between Eddie Murphy and the audience. It's one of the many reasons why when I was a kid/teenager, he was pretty much my hero. There is most likely no film I've ssen more than Beverly Hills Cop, except maybe Beverly Hills Cop III, and there are still very few scenes that make me laugh more than the introduction to Serge or the malfunctioning superweapon. Murphy's willingness to get silly and ridiculous, while at the same time confidently and irreverently taking the piss out of the world around him is unmatched. And while some actors disappear into the movie and make you forget that they are acting, in his heyday, Murphy was the opposite; it was always clear that he was performing for the people watching, and committing so much to it that he almost felt like a friend who did everything he could to share his joy, energy and humor with you. His closest equivalent may well be Freddie Mercury, and it's no coincidence that Queen has become one of my favorite bands, or that Seinfeld has become one of my favorite shows. That's great because of, rather than despite, Jerry's inability to keep a straight face. Take Pulp Fiction too. When I first watched it, it was blowing my mind pretty much from the start, but I only truly fell for it during Tarantino's scenes that have very little purpose beyond expressing how much fun it is to be able to act/goof around and do cool/silly stuff for an audience. That's the real reason why you wouldn't readily see a scene like that in a movie today.  

Eddie Murphy is of course an infinitely better actor than Tarantino or Seinfeld and it shows in Trading Places. It was only his second feature film and it is still expecting that Murphy acts in the service of the story, rather than pretty much building everything around him. Yet, Murphy is so good at what he does that even this film can't stop him from going off on superbly improvised comedic setpieces. That does ocassionally mess up the film's rhythm a bit, especially in the first scenes with Murphy, and it takes until the New Year's train for everyone in the film to align and execute the kind of sublimely escalating comic chaos Murphy and Landis (The Blues Brothers is still one of the most ridiculously fun movies ever made) were so good at. It's the one sequence in the film that takes time to set up characters and situations that are inconsequential to the plot and provide space for throwaway jokes that also serve as buildup to even funnier moments. 

If Trading Places wasn't as supremely funny as I remembered (I have probably not seen this movie since I was a teen. Same goes for my other Murphy favorites, The Beverly Hills Cop's, Coming to America, The Distinguished Gentleman and Bowfinger), it makes up for that by being much sharper than I remembered. It is genuinely scabrous in its depiction of the super rich, their empty rituals, and their treatment of their (often black) servants, without making it seem as an over the top joke. The close up of 'The Heritage Club's' motto "With Liberty and Justice for All" after the club's black housekeeper kicks Murphy away is a nice example of the film's subtlety, as are the wonderful opening credits. Providing snapshots of diverse locations in Philadelpia, they are a great reminder of how easily urban divides are taken for granted and normalised. And I really liked that the film proves Randolph Duke right, nurture is indeed more important than nature, but not in the way he thinks. Louis Winthorpe (Dan Aykroyd) does turn to crime when stripped from his wealth, but he also becomes kinder and more humane when hanging out with people like Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis). In turn, the moment Ophelia gets access to a butler, she immediately starts treating him like her personal property. This also sets up the film's great ending, that is both happy and cynical.