Criterion Confessions

THE HIT - #469

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:36:00 +0000

At the end of last night's episode of The Office, Michael Scott (as played by Steve Carrell) says that, in a moment of what was admittedly mild violence, he saw his life pass before his eyes. In the end, he had four kids, a hover car, and a hover house. I guess that's one benefit of being an "optimist savant" (I doubt that's a term, but there it is): what everyone else sees as a finale, you see as a beginning. The rest of us see into the past, your imminent death is not an imminent death, but a window to the future.

I didn't think about that at all while I was watching Stephen Frears' 1984 crime picture The Hit. I rolled from my Thursday night sitcoms into this British pulp without considering if there was a thread between them, because why would I? It was only when I was pondering whether there was some other way to open this review than with a cold summary that it came back to me. If Michael Scott were to be kidnapped by a pair of criminal assassins and taken on a drive out of Scranton to New York to have his brains blown out in front of David Wallace, it would likely never occur to him that he was really going to die. He would smile and chat and roll along in oblivious contentment. His is the certainty of survival.

It's quite the opposite for Willie Parker, the aging gangster played by Terence Stamp in The Hit. He knows exactly what is waiting for him: the certainty of death.

The Hit opens in the mid 1970s. Willie has turned state's evidence, selling out his partners in a couple of bank heists in trade for immunity. As he exits the courtroom, the men he doomed serenade him with "We'll Meet Again," the old standard made famous by Vera Lynn during WWII. It's a sentimental tune turned to threat.

Flash forward ten years and Willie is holed up in Spain, living a life of quiet contemplation, alone with his books, bicycling the countryside. The jig is up for Willie, however, and that day, a group of young thugs are waiting for him. They put a sack over his head, throw him into a car, and deliver him to a pair of killers who have come looking for him. One is an experienced triggerman named Braddock (John Hurt), the other a twitchy kid by the name of Myron (Tim Roth), a bleach-blonde punk on his first job. Braddock and Myron are to drive Willie up to Paris, where he can answer to the recently released crime boss he put in jail. Then he will be shot.

It was meant to be an easy grab-and-go, but the kids who nabbed Willie killed the cop who was guarding him on their way out and so now the heat is on. The police are on their trail pretty quickly, though always a few steps behind. The posse is lead by an officer played by the great Fernando Rey, whose presence is always felt despite the fact he only has a couple of lines to speak at the very end of the movie. That's star power right there, commanding the screen without saying a word.

The road trip is one of constant screw-ups. A detour to get a new car off a local hood gains the group a fourth passenger, a Spanish prostitute named Maggie (Laura del Sol). The same stop also adds another body to the pile-up, Maggie's British boyfriend, another ex-patriot crook (Bill Hunter). Each pit stop only serves to blow their cover more, the cool criminals slowly unthawing and unraveling. Myron suspects this is all Willie's doing, that the Zen master with the white hair and white clothes has a plan to get under their skin and unnerve them, and judging by the evidence, he may be right.

Willie's monastic lifestyle seems to have served him well. When we first see Willie in court, he doesn't appear to be very smart. He's slow on the uptake, and it turns out he was merely the driver for the robberies. It's a low-level position in the criminal scheme of things, but symbolically, Willie does fulfill a role as a delivery agent, shuttling the others to their fate. By the time his own fate catches up with him, he is older, wiser, better spoken, and seeming free of any cares. He lightly accepts his kidnapping, cleverly manipulating Myron for information and needling both men in stressful situations to fray their nerves and give them cause to doubt the other. He's got them both made out pretty good, and he particularly sees Myron as a weak link. This is Tim Roth's big-screen debut, and he's already a feral little weasel, particularly as displayed in an impromptu fight Myron engages in at a roadside bar. He doesn't know when to shut up or settle down.

Braddock is the opposite. He is cool and measured, and John Hurt is as cold as Roth is hot. This puts Willie in the middle as someone who is neither one nor the other. His refusal to show concern, to scream or fight or even try to escape, undermines the confidence of both men. He knows he's going to die, what does he have to be so happy about?

Well, everything really. Willie has accepted that all life is transient, that death is a move from one state to the next, and as he tells Myron, what happens on one side is pretty much the same as what happens on the other. If John Lennon, one of his personal heroes, could face the Grim Reaper, so can a nobody like him. Today, tomorrow, what's the difference? There is an almost religious serenity to how he carries himself. He looks like he is dressed to go down to the water and be baptized, a costume that I can only assume is intentional, particularly since on what could be his last evening on Earth, rather than run for it when he gets the chance, Willie instead stands by a waterfall and lets the mist cleanse him.

In the midst of this, the girl is the wild card. If being robbers is a game that boys play because they decided to never grow up, then the women are on the other side of the board where the game gets real. Unlike Willie, Maggie wants to survive, and indeed, has been making moves to ensure her survival since before these guys crossed her path. Laura del Sol is smart and feisty in the role, constantly looking for an angle out. Hers is the part of the watcher, the one who must always be looking and then react.

Stephen Frears had an extensive television career before transitioning into features with The Hit. I am sure the no-fluff approach displayed here is attributable to that background. When you're used to constrained resources, you learn to make anything count, and there is certainly nothing wasted here. The look of the film (it was shot by Mike Molloy) is cold and bare, with the action mostly taking place either in the car or in big, open spaces. The script by Peter Prince (Waterland) is extremely economical. There is nothing said in this film that doesn't advance the narrative. No stray outbursts from Myron, no extraneous speeches from Willie. Like I noted, we don't even get any instructions from the head of the police, they maintain a silent pursuit. Confidence affords an artist the luxury of never having to explain himself.

Like any road movie, The Hit isn't really about where these people are going, but how they get there. Or more accurately, how they arrive. Prince and Frears save a few surprises for the finale. When faced with the inevitable conclusion, each person reveals his or her true nature, and ultimately, the movie says something about what it means to live tough. (Spoiler: the toughest of all is the one without the penis.) Who is posturing, who has the courage of their convictions, will any of them see their future staring back at them from the barrel of a gun--these are things you have to watch the movie to find out.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 10/09

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:41:00 +0000

IN THEATRES...

* Amelia, Mira Nair's biopic of Amelia Earhart is an emotionless snoozer. Starring Hilary Swank.

* Antichrist, the new Lars von Trier philosophical shocker is one of the most unsettling movies I have ever seen. Not for the faint of heart or the quick to judge.

* Astro Boy, a cool looking movie that is stuck somewhere between the quality of the original material and a misguided desire to satisfy the kiddie market.

* Coco Before Chanel, starring Audrey Tautou as the fashion designer in her formative years.

* A Serious Man, the new Coen Bros. mind blower. I know everyone has seen the trailer, but I am including it above just because it's one of the best ever. And best of all? It tells you NOTHING!

* No Impact Man, a documentary about Colin Beavan and his family, who tried an experiment of living off only sustainable resources for a full year.

* Where the Wild Things Are will make you believe in the impossible in every way.

ON DVD...

* Actors & Sin, a slick entertainment-themed double-bill from Ben Hecht.

* British Cinema: Renown Pictures Crime & Noir (Blackout, Bond of Fear, Home To Danger, Meet Mr. Callaghan, No Trace, Recoil), collecting six films from the 1950s, none of them very good.

* Luis Bunuel's Death in the Garden, a 1950s potboiler from the surrealist director's Mexican period.

* Diary for My Children (Napio gyermekeimnek), a 1984 film from Hungarian writer/director Márta Mészáros is a personal portrait that is maybe too personal to effectively communicate its tale.

* Il Divo, a flashy Italian biopic of politician Giulio Andreotti.

* Fados, Carlos Saura's performance documentary on a particular style of songcraft from Portugal. Lots of songs, very little information.

* Lightning Strikes Twice, King Vidor's mild melodrama about women who fall for the wrong men.

* Management, in which Steve Zahn stalks Jennifer Aniston and they call it a "romantic comedy." Both terms are almost entirely wrong, though there are glimmers of quality.

* My Fair Lady, the Audrey Hepburn musical is reissued and downgraded. Keep your old DVDs, they are better.

* Whatever Works, the Woody Allen/Larry David movie comes to DVD, and I revisit my old review from its theatrical run.

WINGS OF DESIRE - #490

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:39:00 +0000

"There is no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants...invisible...transferable. A story of new ancestors."

I still remember seeing Wings of Desire the first time. I had heard about it from watching Siskel & Ebert, and knew vaguely that it was the same filmmaker who was responsible for Until the End of the World, which I had not seen either, but I obsessively listened to the soundtrack, which I had purchased for the new Depeche Mode track. Just as that CD had introduced me to a bunch of bands I didn't really know, expanding my musical horizons (Elvis Costello covering the Kinks was like a double-shot of "What's this good stuff?"), Wings of Desire would be important to my understanding of experimental narratives and cinema as art. If nothing else, it made foreign films that didn't have samurais in them a little less scary.

I only begin this way--the first two paragraphs in a movie review shouldn't really lead with a first-person pronoun--because I think Wings of Desire is a "Where were you when?" film. Where were you when you first saw it? Who showed it to you? Who were you? Up until a couple of days ago I had forgotten, for instance, that I had given the previous DVD edition to one of my best movie pals several years ago. He had never seen it before that. Wings of Desire is just that kind of film. Once you've seen it, you don't keep it to yourself. (And you certainly stop anyone you can from seeing the remake. Friends don't let friends watch City of Angels.)

Released in 1987, Wings of Desire is the brainchild of German writer/director Wim Wenders. The filmmaker was at the zenith of his creative powers in this period, with Wings being in the middle of his three best fictional films, sandwiched between Paris, Texas and the aforementioned Until the End of the World. (Seriously, when the hell are we going to get a DVD of that?!) That's some esteemed company, but even amidst those films, Wings of Desire is still the best, the uppermost tip of Wenders' artistic spear.

That's because Wings of Desire is the film that could not be made by anyone else, that could not be made at any other time. This was two years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I think that fact alone would have changed the tenor of Wenders' masterpiece. Though there is very little mention of the political situation in Berlin at the time, the separation that city felt was very much a part of the subtext. Wings of Desire is about a world divided, about the line between the spiritual and the physical, the fanciful and the practical. Between the poetry of words and thought and the true poetry of life.

Bruno Ganz stars as Damiel, one of an army of angels assigned to Berlin. In this reality, angels act not as guardians, but as witnesses. They wander through our lives, silent and invisible, observing our activities and eavesdropping on our thoughts. They might follow one person in specific, or they might roam through a crowd, sampling a little something from each. There are wonderful scenes on a plane or in the public library where the sound mixers scroll through the gathered people, moving from one inner monologue to another the way we flip through channels with our TV remote. In the library, there are almost as many angels as there are mortals, all looking for something interesting to commit to memory or maybe scribble down in one of their little notebooks.

Damiel shares just such discoveries with his best friend Cassiel (Otto Sander). After centuries of observing the human race, they are still capable of being charmed by our irrational behavior. Just reporting that he saw a woman close her umbrella and allow herself to be drenched in a downpour brings a smile to Damiel's face. What unpredictable creatures! What must they feel? How do things taste? What's it like to really hold something in your hand? The angels can take objects from us, but they are merely copies and not tangible. It's not the same.

Call it divine existentialism. Our earthly version of that philosophy ponders what it must be like to transcend the physical and join the divine; for an angel, the crisis of identity involves shedding your wings and eternity and becoming flesh. Damiel has grown tired of watching, he wants to start doing things. The final catalyst for "taking the plunge," the human idiom for what is essentially a fall from grace, is a beautiful trapeze artist, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), that the angel has become smitten with. She is his human analogue, soaring above the ground as she does, even wearing a pair of feathery wings. Marion dreams of flying, Damiel dreams of walking--opposites, prepare to attract!

The transformation from heavenly to earthly creature thankfully comes in the final third of the film. Had it come sooner, it would have made for a much cheaper experience. There is nothing wrong with the end of the film, it's actually quite perfect, and Bruno Ganz is at his most compelling as the excited new human rushing through Berlin, seeking every sensation, tasting his first cup of coffee and learning to whistle. His childlike exuberance is infectious. The romantic meeting is also splendid, with Wenders and co-writer Peter Handke avoiding the triteness of love story coincidences by properly joining the fates of Damiel and Marion early on. Though angels can't directly influence a human, they can make their presence felt, and Damiel's constant hanging around lends Marion peace while assuring that he will be familiar to her when they meet face to face. (At a Nick Cave concert no less. Some vintage footage here!)

The romance is sort of the cherry on top, and the rest of the movie is the true sundae. It's the build-up, the gathering together and the exploration of this world. Wenders takes us on a tour through the city, showing us people from all walks of life. Under his gaze, living is a lyrical happening. One of Cassiel's favorite people, an old poet named Homer (Curt Bois, who had acted in his first movie eighty years before Wings), asks why no epic ballads have ever been written in tribute to peace the way they have been about war. This would seem to be a personal challenge that Wenders has made to himself and buried within the movie proper. What Cassiel and Damiel observe is like a visual song celebrating an everyday peace. It's not all happy--there is suicide, bills to pay, drug addiction--but there is a nobility to forging ahead, to making your own personal story even if no author is ever going to write it down. It's easy for the angels, they pass through everything unharmed; humans have the ability to touch and be touched in turn. Divinity has its purpose, but as Peter Falk, playing himself as a former angel, informs Damiel, there is nothing to compare to the sensations of the finite.

Wim Wenders and Peter Falk

Falk's role also connects the film to history. He's come to Berlin to make a movie about a private detective in WWII, and extras stand around on the set wearing Nazi uniforms and clothes marked with the Star of David. The past is alive and well within the city, and old newsreel footage is cut into Wings of Desire, seen from car windows, the ghost of memory. It's another division between realms, one of many in the movie. Wim Wenders and cinematographer Henri Alekan (Topkapi), along with assistant director Claire Denis, create a vivid visual division between the heavenly and the earthly. The angels and what they see are shot in crisp, cool black-and-white (restored here to a more silvery hue rather than the gold of previous DVDs) while the mortal experience is shown to us in full color, rich in tone and often garish. Humanity experiences the full spectrum, whereas the angels' vision is limited. For all of their peeping in on our brains, the angels are confined. They can't do anything else. This is the core of existentialism: choice is what makes us free. Our imperfections define us. The brightest light burns half as long.

For all these happenings, Wings of Desire actually ends on a downbeat. Though Damiel has found love and joy with Marion, Cassiel is now alone in the heavenly realm, watching his friend's new life without anyone to talk about it with. His divine plight is one of loneliness, but as the final words of Homer and the "to be continued" card that precedes the credits tell us, this is only the beginning of the story. Like an acorn falling from a tree, Damiel is only the first. The sequel, Faraway, So Close!, was several years off, and I don't recall it having the same impact. Maybe it was best to leave well enough alone. Somehow the suggestion that maybe Cassiel will follow Damiel's example is more effective than him actually doing so. It's probably because it allows us all to be Cassiel, looking to a more hopeful future all our own. The follow-up story itself ends up being too specific, and thus not satisfying.

I don't recall movies from the same period being nearly as hopeful as Wings of Desire. Not without resorting to treacle. Wim Wenders manages to avoid the schmaltz. Wings of Desire is the work of an artist who can see a better world on the horizon and is using his art to reach out for it, to pull it closer. His message remains in the abstract, but it's no less effective for not being spelled out. That angelic power of observance, the god's eye view afforded by the camera, equalizes all life in our vision, let's us find ourselves within it, and forever changes how we see things in the process. Or at least that's how it was for me. How about you?

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

Z - #491

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:19:00 +0000

In the 1990s, when the original Rodney King trial went the wrong way despite what to most people was pretty compelling evidence, arguments were made about what we think we see versus what we actually saw. A video of a man being beaten, we were told, was not clear-cut. You see that club there? It's not actually connecting. And it's only one vantage point. You weren't there. How could you know?

Last year, there was a Hollywood movie actually called Vantage Point where the investigating feds piece together a political assassination using all the different cameras in the crowd. I never saw the movie (just like most people), but it wasn't hard to guess that the plot hinged on the idea that even with so much photographic evidence, with surveillance everywhere, the truth is still a puzzle put together from many points of view. It's the Rashomon conundrum of the digital age. The more people who see a thing, the more angles we can look at it from, the more differing interpretations can garble the message.

While that's not really the point of Costa-Gavras' 1969 political thriller Z, I was struck by how ahead of the curve he was in predicting how placing cameras in different places could show us the same event in different ways. Z is shot a lot like a documentary, an investigative procedural that has aesthetics in common with the Nouvelle Vague and the films of Francesco Rosi, and would in turn inspire Alan J. Pakula, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh. Z could almost be seen as a stylistic fulcrum on which the two sides of that equation balance, the link between Salvatore Giuliano and All the President's Men, The Battle of Algiers and Zodiac.

Written by Costa-Gavras alongside Jorge Semprun and based on a book by Vassilis Vassilikos, Z is a loose retelling of the real-life killing of leftist Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis. In the movie, Yves Montand plays a charismatic Socialist activist who preaches pacifism and equality. Known only as "the deputy"--though Z starts with a statement that all resemblance to actual persons or events is far from coincidental, names are obscured and often forgone completely--the film opens on a day when he is to deliver an address to a large gathering of sympathetic followers. Police pressure has caused the Party's venue to disappear, however, and amidst the scramble to find another locale, the deputy's team also hears about a possible threat on their man's life. The deputy insists the event will go on as planned, staged on the same night as the Russian Bolshoi is performing in town. Their demonstration will provide a counterpoint to the bourgeois ostentation.

The rally is far from peaceful. As the police stand by and watch, there are multiple skirmishes and attacks, the last of which leaves the deputy bleeding in the road. The culprits, Vago and Yago (Marcel Bozzufi and Renato Salvatori), are arrested and their story about being harmless drunk drivers perpetrating an unfortunate hit-and-run is accepted as fact whereas any counter theories are dismissed as Commie propaganda. Only after the deputy dies does an autopsy reveal that his skull fracture is more consistent with a clubbing than with an auto collision. A diligent prosecutor (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and a gutsy reporter (Jacques Perrin) start digging further, and pretty quickly, more inconsistencies in the story begin to show. Connections between Vago and Yago and a right-wing religious group further reveals connections between that group and the chief of police (Pierre Dux) and his right-hand thug (Julien Guiomar). Further attacks on witnesses only fuel the prosecution, as does government opposition.

Costa-Gavras takes us through the investigation step by step. He lines up each piece in their natural order, only taking minor detours into extraneous character stuff (Vago's sexual predilections; the deputy's heartbroken wife, played with stalwart grace by Irene Papas, and even glimpses of their marital strife). Working with renowned cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot the bulk of Godard's 1960s films (and who also shows up on the other side of the camera as a British surgeon), he shoots most of the action as if it were a documentary. Coutard's camera is rarely nailed down, but often moving with the flow of activity, acting more as a cold witness than an active part of the story. The fact that we can be everywhere at once creates a kind of hyper-naturalism. Z looks real, but it's not bound by time or space. Flashbacks are common, quick glimpses of memory, and even moments of minor comedy.

When the deputy is struck down, we see it clearly. The truck drives by, Vago leans out and hits the man, and the crowd parts to let them leave. Or is that what happened at all? I don't think that Costa-Gavras means us to really doubt what we saw the first time, but as we see the event as it is described by others, we see how the story of the drunk driving could appear plausible from their field of vision. It also keeps us on our toes, we're never quite sure of who knows what. Even one of the deputy's own people isn't positive the man got clubbed, and when he tells the story, we don't see the fatal blow. We do see the cruel hysteria of the crowd, snippets of the onlookers and enemies circling the victim playing backwards and forwards like we're flipping through snapshots. Costa-Gavras also drops out most of the audio, leaving only the elements the witness relates. It's cinema as point of view, as unreliable and incomplete as that can be. Watching Z, you can start to understand how one can argue about the veracity of a length of videotape.

As Z moves forward, it builds up a head of steam, and the investigation gathers its own momentum. Though the prosecutor doesn't make any grand speeches, he emerges as a heroic figure, committed to fairness and the truth. He is as distrusting of any one side as he is another. Trintignant plays him without any affectation. He's as straight a straight shooter as you're likely to get. On the other hand, there is nothing selfless about the reporter's pursuit of the story, the way he always secretly takes photos even when instructed not to and is aware of the monetary value of the information he's gathering. Perrin is loose limbed and energetic, jumping around and sometimes quite literally chasing the story. These guys are like the European version of Redford and Hoffman.

Interestingly enough, despite the successful exposure of the conspiracy, Z does not end on a hopeful note. Costa-Gavras gives the film a coda where things get worse instead of better. A news broadcast by Perrin informs us of the fate many of the players suffered, and a voiceover and text scroll details a government crackdown that follows, shifting Z out of amped-up Neorealism and into Orwellian sci-fi. It's a far more cynical way to close the movie than, say, Nixon being taken down (to continue the All the President's Men comparison). In this, too, Costa-Gavras is ahead of the game. In the decades that followed Nixon's souring of the American political system, we've often seen those members of his party who succeeded him use unsavory methods to take back the respect Tricky Dick lost them. It's much easier than earning it, and much more effective in demoralizing the public so they won't question the government's methods again. The ending of Z isn't science fiction at all; it's clairvoyant.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

Costa-Gavras

MONSOON WEDDING - #489

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:05:00 +0000

The first words that appear as Monsoon Wedding goes into the final credits are "For my Family." As far as movie punctuation goes, it couldn't be more perfect. It makes more sense than, say, "The End." Mira Nair's light-hearted drama is about nothing if not about family. It's the sort of work of art that could not be made without knowing all the love, anger, and frustrations that come with the most common of bonds. Sabrina Dhawan's script casts a wide net, pulling in all the distant strands of the Verma clan, with relatives coming in from America, Dubai, Australia and probably all points in between. This is a gathering that reflects the new global culture, and not in some falsified sense of politically correct diversity a la Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married (which, in retrospect, owes a ton to Monsoon Wedding; get me an intellectual property lawyer, stat!). Consider the Verma backyard as the starting point, the paradise where man began, and they've now gone forth and multiplied.

The occasion of the family reunion is an arranged marriage. Aditi Verma (Vasundhara Das), the daughter of Lalit (Naseeruddin Shah) and Pimmi (Lillete Dubey), is to be married to Hemant Rai (Parvis Dabas). The Rais currently call Houston, Texas, their home, and they have returned to India for the grand celebration of a traditional wedding. Lalit is a successful merchant, but he's going into debt up to his eyeballs preparing a lavish four-day festival for his daughter. The wedding planner is a slick hustler named P.K. Dubey (Vijay Raaz), who before the ceremony is over will have found love himself, gaining the hand of one of the servants at the Verma house, Alice (Tillotama Shome). Her anglicized name is a symbol of the Westernization that was occurring all across India, as is the tattoo on the shoulder of one of Aditi's cousins (Neha Dubey) and the way everyone talks in an indistinguishable mix of English and Hindi. Not to mention all the cell phones--though, this is 2001, so they're twice as big as our phones now and just as crappy.

I wasn't all that impressed with Monsoon Wedding the first time I saw it. It seemed silly and cliché, the convenient arrangement of comedy and family drama being too...well, too convenient. Even on second viewing, I still felt much the same way through the first half hour or so. Dhawan's script relies heavily on soap opera. For instance, the bride is having an affair with a talk show host (Sameer Arya), and she has only agreed to the marriage with Hemant because she's convinced her lover will never leave his wife. Her confidant is her older cousin Ria (Shefali Shetty), who has been in Lalit's care since her father died but who has not yet found a husband herself. This is common romance movie stuff.

Except what Mira Nair and Sabrina Dhawan do with this set-up is so much more than that. The matters of the heart that they are going to explore are not confined just to the bride and the groom, nor is it a simple matter of who loves who and who doesn't and why or why not. Amidst all of this chaos are conflicts of old traditions and new, questions of responsibility, family secrets, and even an upstairs/downstairs division between servant and employer. The courtship of Dubey and Alice is one of the more understated and effective aspects of the movie. Dubey turns out to be sweet and intensely romantic, and the contrast between the ostentatious display he designs for the Vermas and the much smaller, much more intimate one he creates just for Alice is beautifully rendered.

Mira Nair is a filmmaker who has always had an eye for lush compositions that she then contrasts with the real world. She likes trying to erect a little perfection within an imperfect setting. Look at her adaptation of Vanity Fair again, and notice how the costume design and art direction is as frilly and lovely as any costume drama, but she likes to show how the clothes get dirty and the cuffs grow frayed. In Monsoon Wedding, production designer Stephanie Carroll works overtime bringing Dubey's monolithic marigold ladders and flowing tents to life while also making them appear fragile and tenuous. Those orange starburst flowers don't want to stay in place, they litter the yard as if they were literally falling out of the sky. Given how gorgeous and brightly colored all of costume designer Arjun Bhasin's clothes are, it takes a flower that looks like flames to stand out.

If Monsoon Wedding were merely a pretty movie, it would be pretty enough to keep watching even without a good script. Luckily, as much attention is paid to the complexities of the characters as it is to the environment they inhabit. Each character gets his or her own story line, and each story line is fully fleshed out so that it is satisfying and contributes to the overall effect. Aditi's struggles with fidelity, Ria's hidden demons, even the tattooed cousin getting her Australian in-law to embrace his Indian heritage, which serves as counterpoint to Aditi moving on to America--all of these intriguing parts form an impressive whole. Again, on paper, this may read like something you've seen before, but Monsoon Wedding is written and performed with such honesty, it proves it's not how original the story but the quality of the execution. The familiarity of the clothes could make you miss how well they are worn the first time you watch the film, the way it did with me, but try it again, you'll start to get it the second time around.

Monsoon Wedding may be overrun with women, but the most memorable character in the movie is the father, Lalit Verma. A proud man, Lalit understands tradition and has hopes for how things should go. Naseeruddin Shah plays him at the edge of nervousness, like at any moment he could collapse from the burden of it all. He is a man of many contradictions, encouraging Ria to go to America and become a writer, a fairly progressive move, but he's rigid when it comes to his son, who likes dancing and cooking and may need to step through a closet door in the near future. Shah has many powerful scenes. He is fierce and noble when declaring his intention to protect his girls, but shockingly brittle when that determination is put to the test--and it's all the more admirable that he stands up given the doubt he must overcome. The scene that really sticks with me, though, is the morning after a startling revelation, when the father figure wakes up crying. Very few words are exchanged, but his wife pulls him into her arms, and we see the true strength at the heart of the Verma family. It's neither one nor the other, mother nor father, husband nor wife, but the two of them together.

With all of these primal emotions swirling around, it's no wonder that the filmmakers would turn to a symbol as primal as the weather to represent them. In the days leading up to the wedding, the weather is as scorching as the drama. By the time the titular monsoon comes to drench the wedding party, it's not a tempestuous explosion a la the madness storm in King Lear but a full-on release. Ironically, Lalit tried to protect his girls from just this kind of downpour, paying Dubey extra for waterproofing. That's how much the man's head had gotten turned in the wrong direction. This rain is exactly what the Vermas needed. Dodging the showers first cause them to huddle together, and then to let loose, to dance without any worry, to forget what might separate them. Even Dubey and Alice are welcomed into the circle. A rainstorm can, yes, be overwhelming and even deadly, but as Monsoon Wedding reminds us, it also cleans, refreshes, and rejuvenates. Wash away the old to make way for the new.

The Monsoon Wedding - Criterion Collection DVD is a 2-disc special edition. The discs are housed in a foldable cardboard book with plastic trays, and it fits in a marigold-colored outer slipcover. The artwork from the opening credits is used to illustrate the box and accompanying booklet, linking the packaging to the movie in a smart, classy manner. The book has lovely photographs, an essay by author Pico Iyer, credits, chapter listing, a glimpse at a special piece of production art, and a guide to the bonus films on DVD 2.

For some reason, one of the listed Seven Short Films that is supposed to appear on the second disc is on the first disc instead--a fact that is likely to confuse you, as it did me, if you decide to go ahead and watch the extra movies before you dig into the Monsoon Wedding supplements. You might find yourself nosing around on DVD 2 looking for a movie that isn't there. Possibly because it had a strong influence on the filming of Monsoon Wedding, The Laughing Club of India is attached to the main feature's bonus material. It's a 2000 documentary, just over 35 minutes in length, that looks at the rather puzzling concept of "laughing clubs." These were a popular occurrence in Bombay, a gathering of folks to get together and...laugh. In its way, it fits in with Nair's other work in that it looks at the lengths people will go to get by and alternative choices that may seem strange to outsiders but that work for the individual. The laughing clubs are an attempt to create something positive in a world that may seem overwhelmingly negative, a celebration of life for the sake of it. A monsoon can come as rain, or it can come as a giggle fit.

Mira Nair

These themes come up again and again in the Seven Short Films collective. The other six of these are featured on DVD 2, and they are a real treat. These are all rare pieces helmed by Mira Nair, spanning three decades, from 1982 all the way up to 2008, three documentaries and four fiction films, some as short as eight minutes, some as long as an hour. Each movie is preceded by an optional video introduction by Nair where she discusses at length her inspiration and some of the details of each production.

The lead documentary, and Nair's first real cinematic endeavor, 1982's So Far From India should be of particular interest to fans of Monsoon Wedding. Nair and photographer Mike Epstein follow an Indian immigrant from his new home in New York back to his old village in India. There he is reunited with his wife and a child he has never really met. Their marriage was arranged just before the man left for the U.S., partially to keep him from getting involved with any Western women. The movie explores the concept behind this arrangement, as well as the economic practicalities of a family relocating across the world. As in many Nair films, her characters are displaced, caught between two cultures, searching for a new personal niche.

India Cabaret (1985) is the second documentary. It's a character study of several Indian strippers, made as a kind of social experiment to examine what makes one woman "bad' and another "good." Frank conversations with the girls are intercut with their performances, and Nair even follows one of their regular clients home and talks to his wife, juxtaposing her feelings about a woman's role in a man's life with the strippers' feelings about having taken their destiny in their own hands. The film can be quite funny, but also quite sad, especially as it follows one of the girls back to her home village and shows how her family now shuns her, despite her being the most successful among them. India Cabaret ends on a positive note, however, letting us see how the most outspoken dancer, Rehka, manages to make her plan for a new life come to fruition.

The four fiction films that follow the documentaries were all made for politically motivated anthologies, and they focus on themes of social change and personal identity. The 1993 piece The Day the Mercedes Became a Hat follows a white family leaving South Africa as the power balance is shifting all around them, while Nair's 2002 segment of 11'09"101 - September 11 shows how another family must fight to maintain their ground in the country they've chosen for themselves. Scripted by Monsoon Wedding-scribe Sabrina Dhawan, the 9/11 story is based on the actual plight of the Hamdani family, whose son Salman disappeared on 9/11. It's a true mystery, since Salman had no connection to the Twin Towers, he should have been on his way to work when they fell. Upon being reported missing, he was initially branded a terrorist despite there being no evidence to suggest that was true. When his body was found at Ground Zero, it was discovered that Salman had died a hero. He had been trained as an EMT and had rushed to the attack site to help people.

Salman Hamdani's mother never gave up on her son, nor does she give up on the country that he died in aid to, despite them getting it so wrong about him. Nair is sympathetic to these kinds of patriots, whether they are on the right side of justice or not. The white family who, like so many others at the time, flees from South Africa in The Day the Mercedes Became a Hat also draws empathy from the filmmaker, who as a resident of South Africa herself, realized that there were whole generations of Caucasian immigrants who knew no other home.

Sexual politics take center stage in the final two films. 2007's Migration was made in India as part of an AIDS awareness project that Nair produced, and 2008's How Can It Be? was part of a film that was meant to express different facets of the global community. The former is a none-too-subtle melodrama that moves up and down class lines as infidelity and deceit opens the way for HIV to spread; the latter is a story of a religious woman, played by Konkona Sen Sharma, who decides to leave her home and family and pursue a different passion. Both offer tough choices with equally tough consequences, though How Can It Be? is about the sacrifice asked of women who want to affect positive personal change and Migration is about how poor choices affect us all. Watch for Wedding's Vijay Raaz in Migration, this time playing the role of on-the-street condom pitchman.

Some of the fictional shorts are a little obtuse, but they are all intriguing. They are also quite lovely, shot with Nair's usual eye for detail and sometimes sporting more experimental framing than in her more conventional narrative pictures. The documentaries also shed some light on Nair's creative origins and how she used nonfiction to develop her incredible powers of observation. These are like the missing links in the cracks of a filmmaker's evolution.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

DUSAN MAKAVEJEV: FREE RADICAL - ECLIPSE SERIES 18

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:57:00 +0000

My first exposure to Serbian director Dušan Makavejev was reviewing his experimental 1971 feature WR: Mysteries of the Organism when Criterion released it on DVD a couple of years ago. As is immediately obvious from reading that piece, I was not altogether won over by Makavejev's style. WR was both too all over the place and too on the nose for me. Though his filmmaking was playful, it was also too heavy in its intentions. To say I wasn't all that excited when this new boxed set came around would be to put it mildly.

Well, I was wrong. I should have been excited. Dušan Makavejev: Free Radical - Eclipse Series 18 strikes me as having everything I felt WR was lacking. The three films here, representing Makavejev's earliest full-length work, are as stylistically inventive as anything out of the French New Wave and rooted enough in traditional storytelling to keep them from showing their age. If what was radical yesterday was content on being merely radical and nothing more, it can appear predictable or mundane today; if it has a solid foundation to give the experiment something firm to stand on, the material can sustain its freshness and speak to audiences regardless of the era. Such is the case here.

Dušan Makavejev: Free Radical showcases work the writer/director made in the former Yugoslavia over a four-year span, from 1965 to 1968. It kicks off with Man is Not a Bird, a romance wrapped up in the politics of everyday struggle. Set in a mining town near the Bulgarian border, it involves the arrival of a revered construction foreman named Jan Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec). Rudinski has been charged with updating the copper mill to be compliant with safer, more efficient modern standards. He meets Rajka (Milena Dravić, the sexy star of WR), an attractive young hairdresser who is used to turning heads in her sleepy 'burg and just as used to putting those heads back where they belong. She sets Rudinski up with a room in her parents' house, and she and the older man eventually have an affair. Perhaps it's the appeal of the new and the different, or maybe it's the attraction of the temporary that brings them together. Maybe it's the fact that they can have an intelligent conversation, or even his indifference. It's hard to say how the fires of passion are stoked, but Rajka also ends up with a local truck driver, the rapscallion Bosko (Boris Dvornik), whom she beds on the night Rudinski is honored for his good work.

Perhaps Rakja is punishing Rudinski for valuing his job over her. That would actually make it ironic that she ends up having sex with Bosko in his truck, his mobile workplace. There are a couple of thematic threads that run through Man is Not a Bird that suggest valuing one's work over one's personal relationships is not a good thing. Running parallel to this story is the tale of Barbulović (Stole Arandelovic), a boozer whose antics keep getting him in trouble. He is stepping out on his wife (Eva Ras), who makes no bones about confronting the other woman and raising a stink about how Barbulović is always moaning about having to work at the factory but then blows his money on harlots. Our introduction to the cad actually comes at the beginning of the film when he is arrested for a nightclub brawl he claims to have had no involvement in. The violence ended with the stabbing of the performing chanteuse, whose cautionary tale about the roving eye of love could have saved all of these folks a lot of trouble had they heeded her warning. The film is bookended with a more grandiose orchestral concert, the one given in Rudinski's honor. There is a subtle commentary here, of the low-culture performance for the workers vs. the high-culture performance for the boss. Both musical interludes indicate some form of betrayal.

These two music numbers are interwoven into the narrative in their complete form, shot as if part of a documentary. Makavejev also shoots the factory scenes with a similar style, showing the effort of the workers in all its dirty detail, sharply contrasted against the more staged cutaways to the factory owner far away in his office. He is portrayed as corrupt and clearly in control of the communist party, dictating their policies like some kind of mobster lobbyist. There is no question where Makavejev's sympathy lies, and he clearly has affection for the working class. He doesn't believe they are perfect, but he does appear to enjoy showing them slacking off and doing whatever else it takes to get back a little of their own from those who would exploit them. Their foibles are shown with humor, whereas the higher-ups are far more sinister.

Not that it's so black-and-white. The director also has a sympathetic interest in Rudinski's predicament. He is a man who is neither one side nor the other, a sort of industrial mercenary who gets the job done when required. Makavejev shoots his encounters with Rakja in an expressionistic manner, capturing their lovemaking in tightly framed abstractions. Even in this early film, Makavejev is exhibiting a penchant for a freeform style, refusing to be locked down to any particular narrative aesthetic. The story takes many detours, seemingly going off track, but then coming back around to sew each added element into the main fabric. The most notable of these sidelines is the hypnotist (Roko Cirkovic) who provides an evening's entertainment by goading his volunteers into doing all manner of crazy things, like thinking they are birds and then watching them flail around on stage, unable to take to the air. Barbulović's wife directly references this stage act by telling her husband's lover how she believes that hypnotism is Barbulović's true talent, that all men lead women into a trance to get what they want. Man is Not a Bird extends this theory to include all social constructs. The need to work, political ideology, romance--these are all a form of social hypnosis, a great con to make us believe we are happy and that we can escape the mundane. Rakja seeks escape from love, for instance, only to have neither lover take her out of this tiny town. This is why man is not akin to birds, because man can't truly fly free.

Sex, crime, science, art, nationalist politics--these all return in some form in Makavejev's 1967 feature, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator. Once again working with a mish-mash of documentary footage and fictional narrative, Makavejev establishes an alternating formalist structure for the film. It opens with a real-life sexologist, Dr. Aleksandar Kostić, lecturing about man's fundamental needs before introducing us to Izabela (Eva Ras) and her friend (Ruzica Sokić), two switchboard operators out on the prowl for a good time. They meet a Turkish man named Ahmed (Slobodan Aligrudić), a sanitation expert, who takes Izabela home. So begins a long, loving relationship, both tender and sensual, which plays out while trading off with more educational interludes, all of which connect to the main narrative in some way. Izabela playing patriotic music is followed by footage of a real political rally, or a scene of her baking leads to a lecture about the physiology of chicken eggs. (The close-ups of Eva Ras breaking an egg into flour are later echoed in WR.)

We also get a glimpse of Ahmed's job in newsreel-like footage about Yugoslavia's rat problem. He is part of the crew of exterminators who are trying to rid the country of gray rats, which themselves were allowed to enter the land so that they would get rid of the black rats. It's the nasty cycle of power, one political party coming in to oppress another. It's also meant to make us distrust Ahmed, as he is a suspect in Izabela's homicide. As if flipping the switch between fiction and documentary weren't enough, Makavejev has also worked a little murder mystery into the script. Structured like a true police drama where we know there has been a killing before we know how or why, the second interlude shows Izabela's body being retrieved from a well while we hear a criminologist, Dr. Zivojin Aleksić, explain the process of cleaning and identifying a corpse. It's a harsh, clinical lecture, and it makes us feel uneasy even though our connection to Izabela is not all that strong as of yet.

Love Affair connects back to Man is Not a Bird in that some of the tragedy is born out of infidelity. Izabela is constantly being hit on by the postman (Miodrag Andric) who delivers to her work, and she eventually relents. In a scene reminiscent of Godard, Izabela breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly, to confess that she is weak and, as she puts it, not made of wood. It's a reasonable appeal. Makavejev seems to be saying that our social structures, our fear of sex and our subsuming our individual desires to the greater need of the State leads to unnatural reactions. Unhappy people act in unhappy ways, and once we finally see the death occur, we realize that Ahmed is not simply some cold-blooded killer. This is not a grandiose revelation, Makavejev doesn't underscore it with an ironic orchestral swell the way he does the sexual ruining of Rajka in Man is Not a Bird, but rather shows it in a very plain fashion. It's sad enough as it is. The scene perfectly illustrates the ease with which the filmmaker moves between styles. The cuts between the fact and fiction are seamless; in fact, in Love Affair, he really blurs the lines between the two. The naturalistic staging of the drama makes it almost indistinguishable from the documentary footage. It's like meta-Neorealism.

1968's Innocence Unprotected gives Dušan Makavejev a remarkable opportunity to obliterate the lines between fictional filmmaking and documentary storytelling. In this movie, Makavejev repurposes an old film that had long gone out of circulation despite being Yugoslavia's first sound picture. It was made during WWII by Dragoljub Aleksić, an acrobat and strongman. Though it was shot entirely on the sly, it was later misconstrued as a film made in collaboration with the Nazi occupiers and not just banned from being shown, but also removed from the history books.

Makavejev takes this bizarre melodrama and recontextualizes it. Having tracked down the living actors and crew members, including Aleksić, Makavejev creates a non-fiction frame around the old footage, moving back and forth between the original production and people's memories of the same. The tale is pretty fantastic, including performers hiding in a soundstage darkroom while the German propagandists shot their own footage outside. Aleksić made Innocence Unprotected in the hopes of making money, and in its original form, it's mostly a self-aggrandizing excuse to show off his freakish stunts. Breaking and bending iron with his teeth, making his muscles dance, dangling from an airplane by holding a leather bit in his mouth--Aleksić is the kind of sideshow performer that Makavejev loves (see also the circus scenes in Man is Not a Bird). He's a true original, an individual who lives his life as he wishes, and one that also ran afoul of a bureaucracy that refused to let such characters roam free.

In Makavejev's hands, Innocence Unprotected becomes both propaganda for the common man's power to resist oppressive governance, but also a parody of the propaganda. I actually started watching the movie believing it to be a pitch-perfect mockumentary, right down to the bad acting in the "found" film; only midway through did I stop and read the liner notes and realize this was entirely real. An incisive social critic, Makavejev has found a greater meaning in a particular piece of art by examining its historical context. He uses newsreel footage of German atrocities and maps illustrating the warmongers' advances on his country's border to embolden Aleksić's ridiculous fictional romance with greater meaning. A wicked stepmother (Vera Jovanovic-Segvić) selling out her orphaned stepdaughter (Ana Milosavljević) to a wealthy scoundrel (Bratoljub Gligorijević), only to have her rescued by the unflappable hero makes for a wonderfully blunt allegory (complete with twist ending: Aleksić pretty much ran off with whatever money was made before the film was banned, leaving his comrades out in the cold). It illuminates the struggles of the Serbian people, first under the Nazis and then under the Socialists, as well as the personal struggles Dušan Makavejev must have gone through in order to make movies under the censoring eye of the government. Not unlike Aleksić, Makavejev would eventually be persecuted for his art. After his next film, he would be exiled from his homeland for nearly two decades.

Seen as a whole, the three films collected in Dušan Makavejev: Free Radical - Eclipse Series 18 show the emergence of a new cinematic voice, a singular artist who would go on to further challenge his audience and often alienating people--including this particular stuffy critic. This trio is playful, creative, culturally rich, and full of insightful commentary on the human condition, particularly the way our personal lives become entangled with society's imposed restrictions. Dušan Makavejev proves himself to be every bit as inventive as his European contemporaries, and as full of cinematic whimsy and film knowledge as anyone who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema. This boxed set is a true treasure.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

DELAYED DEVOTION

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:01:00 +0000

My apologies to my readers for missing an update last week. I hate not hitting my deadlines, even self-imposed ones. I got caught up in a variety of things, including computer troubles, several other freelance commitments, and I think the general sludge of autumn emerging. Everything these past couple of weeks has taken longer than expected. This is only the second or third time in two years that I have missed my weekly post on this blog, so I suppose I have an okay track record. Like always, I'll make up for it by upping the output here in the next two weeks, staring with Dušan Makavejev: Free Radical later today, and then working my way through the next three Criterion releases: Monsoon Wedding, Z, and Wings of Desire.

Never fear, I may have stumbled, but I don't stay down for long. Thanks for your patience, and while you wait, please enjoy this hold music...

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE - #475

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Things aren't so good for Eddie Coyle right now. Old age is not the best place for a hood to find himself, and now that he's cresting 50, Eddie can't face the consequences of his life. A smuggling job gone wrong has a prison sentence hanging over his head, and if Eddie gets locked up, he knows that will be the end for him and his family. His kids barely know him as it is. Eddie knows the score in all things, and he fears that it will end up as a running tally of misfortune rather than a jackpot. Other crooks retire to Florida, he just wants his stake on the beach, not this spot in limbo. Eddie is working small-time jobs on the side, mainly procuring guns for bigger heists. His brain is sharp, but his body is limited. His pals have given him the cruel nickname of "Fingers." It's because one time Eddie screwed up and landed the wrong person in jail, and so the organization exacted their own punishment for the mistake: Eddie's hand was stuck in a drawer and it was slammed shut on him, making it so his digits will never be right again.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a 1973 crime movie directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away) from a screenplay by producer Paul Monash and based a novel by George V. Higgins. It stars Robert Mitchum as Eddie Coyle. If you need a guy whose been around the block a few times, you can't go wrong with latter-day Mitchum. Hell, he'd seen all four corners of many a block even in his early days. As one of the last great iconic screen actors of the studio system, Mitchum was the man's man and the rebel, playing a convincing bad guy but perhaps at his best when the conflicted hero. Some of his best roles touched on the Eddie Coyles of the world at different periods of their self-awareness. He is the man who has realized that he's made the wrong choice and now finds himself inextricably tangled up in it.

Eddie's friends are the usual collection of bad guys and black marketeers, and their classification as allies is questionable at best. Among them is Artie Van (Joe Santos) and Scalise (Alex Rocco), the go-between and the bank robber whom Eddie is buying guns for. Yates shows us several of Scalise's bank jobs, though largely keeping us in the dark as to his identity and the inner workings of his gang until midway in the picture when we finally see him and Eddie together. Just like everything else in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the robberies are filmed in a stark, meticulous manner, placing faith in the audience's ability to submerge themselves fully into this underworld and go along with a minimum of explanation. Scalise's crew begin each heist by going to the home of one of the bank executives, and they take the man's family hostage until the robbery is done. All of them wear identical masks so no single thief distinguishes himself. They are careful and exacting, no screw-ups. Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.

Eddie trusts Scalise, and he wants to be in good with him because if he can keep out of jail, Scalise is likely where his big retirement score would come from. To get the pistols Scalise requires, Eddie deals with Jackie Brown (Steven Keats), an arms dealer who represents a totally different era than the one Eddie has come out of. Driving a lime green hot rod, wearing his hair long, getting excited over his illegal booty, Jackie comes off as someone who is just playing around. Eddie takes a kind of fatherly role with him, schooling him on the consequences of his actions. There are extended scenes of Mitchum explaining to this kid just what could happen to him if he wises up. It seems to work, as Jackie develops a healthy paranoia when working with the people who want to buy and sell the rifles.

Another of Eddie's friends is Dillon (Peter Boyle), the bar owner who hired Eddie for the job that got him busted. Eddie is a stand-up guy and isn't selling Dillon out, but a weary tension still exists between them. Eddie can say he will forgive and forget, but until his jacket is clear, not really. Dillon's bar is a bit of a criminal hub, and this makes Dillon a pretty important informant for the police. He has regular contact with Dave Foley (Richard Jordan), a cop who feeds him $20 bills in exchange for info. Their encounters are strange. They stroll the city engaging more in philosophical abstracts than they do with illegal specifics. If Eddie is in limbo, these guys own the keys to the kingdom. The way the one-eyed man is the king of the blind, these guys are the timekeepers in the waiting room of eternity. They are content to wait this out.

Paul Monash, a veteran of television and of other crime-oriented pictures, is himself content to leave out the unnecessary, and he revels in the jargon and the speech patterns of his bad guys (as well as a little Bostonian lilt thrown in, reflecting the city where the movie is set). Unlike a lot of modern writers, who are afraid that if they don't footnote every piece of slang the audience will get scared and leave, Monash has faith in the words to carry their own meaning. Context and performance can create the space for an unfamiliar turn of phrase to make sense. If the audience believes what they are watching, they aren't going to get hung up on the particulars. This trust goes both ways, too. For having faith in the viewer's intelligence, the viewer gives that faith back and trusts Yates and Monash when the filmmakers purposely leave things vague. How all the pieces are going to fit together is never readily apparent in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I suppose on paper this movie could be charted as a fairly standard outline, but if the filmmakers ever made one, it's like they removed every third item, creating blanks they would only fill in by suggestion later.

Eventually Eddie sees a way out. The cop Foley could vouch for him with the prosecutor if Eddie turns snitch. It's the one value left in Eddie's criminal code that he's hung on to. In fact, he's still not ready to give up the other guys in the smuggling operation, but maybe he'd sell out Jackie. The problem is, working with the police isn't that different than working with the crooks: once you're in, you're never getting out. They always want more.

I had heard a lot of praise for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and I had been interested in seeing it ever since I read an essay about the flick in the back of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' comic book series Criminal. In all honesty, I was nonplussed when I watched it, but now the more I think about it (and write about it), the film is coming alive in my brain. I'm realizing how much more is going on in the inner workings of the plot and its characters. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is very much a 1970s movie--its drab colors and almost metallic coldness visually clue you in to its era almost immediately, whereas Dave Grusin's jazz funk score dates it horribly--but it's a 1970s movie that is gazing backwards with regret. This is neo-noir looking at the glamour of classic noir and finding it wanting. Eddie's motivation is not the promise of reward, but the escape from despair. He is old, broken, and empty. Youngsters like Jackie don't understand his sacrifice, whereas Eddie's contemporaries don't really honor it. He is a man left alone, who has followed his own rhythm and found that when the music ran out, he was dancing on his own.

This makes the brutally ironic ending all the more harrowing. I've written about that killer noir ending in many of my other reviews of crime movies, the sort of final moment where the plan falls apart, it's all for naught, crime doesn't pay. Usually, that means losing the money, walking away empty handed. For Eddie Coyle, it's the whole shebang. Stitched up and framed, stuck on the wrong end of poetic justice, he pays the big price. It's an existential conundrum, the consequences we can't outrun, the very fate we tried to steer away looping around to bite us on the ass. And yet, the game is still being played. Those kings of limbo? The cop and the informant? They are nothing less than God and the devil, playing at both sides and meeting in the middle, bemused by the cruelty of human life.

Included with the Criterion DVD of The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a reprint of a 1973 Rolling Stone article writer Grover Lewis put together after a visit to the movie's set. It's fascinating how Robert Mitchum talks to Lewis. He pontificates on a variety of subjects, largely unprompted, and he sounds a lot like Eddie schooling Jackie. He is full of old wisdom and he can't understand how said wisdom is not more common. Is his performance in Eddie Coyle an actor so dominating a role that it becomes him, or did Mitchum choose to be in the film because it matched who he was? It's impossible to say, but reading how he knew Eugene O'Neill and Dylan Thomas, or about his visit to Vietnam, or why he acts simply because he doesn't want to do harder work, it really seems like we're getting to know an actor who we think would otherwise be closed off and protective of his true identity. I expected someone more like Cary Grant, who was careful of his brand and left himself back at home. Not so with Robert Mitchum, he is what he is, and what he is ended up on the screen.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 09/09

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:58:00 +0000

IN THEATRES...

* 9, the new animated film from Shane Acker turned out to be one of the most disappointing movies this year. Pretty, but pretty vacant.

* The Baader Meinhof Complex, an involving docudrama about the 1970s campagins of the European terrorist organization, what Luke Haines called a "Hate Socialist Collective."

* Big Fan, the Patton Oswalt-starring drama is a good portrait of one man's chosen isolation and obsession, though it may be getting oversold in the hype.

* Bright Star, Jane Campion's portrait of the romance between John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish).

* Capitalism: A Love Story, an important message from Michael Moore. Keep an open mind, you don't have to be his fan to listen to the message.

* Extract, Mike Judge's new comedy. Some big laughs, but ultimately too uneven.

* The Informant!, my favorite movie of recent memory and one of the best of the year. Steven Soderbergh delivers another winner in this offbeat comedy starring Matt Damon.

* Lorna's Silence, a suspenseful drama from the Dardenne Brothers.

* Whip It, Drew Barrymore's directorial debut is an endearing turn on the sports flick starring Ellen Page.

* Whiteout, the Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber comic book comes to the big screen. As an original editor on the comics, what did I think...?

* World's Greatest Dad, an unfunny black comedy from director Bobcat Goldthwait and Robin Williams. I am surprised by the reviews of this, as I am apparently the only one who found it execrable. I didn't laugh at all, and seeing Robin Williams' penis...well, that speaks for itself.

* Zombieland is funny and gross. A great time at the movies. Woody Harrelson, FTZ.

ON DVD...

* The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh scores another big win in this experimental picture with Sasha Grey.

* Important Things with Demetri Martin: Season One, a pretty good attempt at a thinking man's sketch comedy show.

* Mad Monster Party: Special Edition, a new reissue of the Rankin-Bass horror send-up, one of my favorite movies from my childhood.

* Observe and Report, Jody Hill's divisive dark comedy. It made me laugh.

* Treeless Mountain, the second feature from director So Yong Kim. This quiet tale of two young sisters and their private world is wonderfully observed and poignant.

THE WHITE SHEIK - #189

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:28:00 +0000

The buttoned-down, mild-mannered file clerk and amateur poet Ivan Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste) has brought his new bride, Wanda (Brunella Bovo), to Rome for their honeymoon. Rather than enjoying each other's company alone, however, Ivan has planned the whole trip around visiting with his family, the highlight of which will be an audience with the Pope. Given the sprightliness of Ivan's eyebrows when he mentions their return to the hotel in the evening, it doesn't appear that he intends the whole trip to be taken up with pious gesticulation, but as far as Wanda is concerned, that would be all right, too. She doesn't seem all that thrilled to be a newlywed, and those eyebrows freak her out a little. (I don't blame her. They freak me out, too.)

Wanda also has a secret. When her husband is napping and she is supposed to be bathing, she sneaks out of the hotel to go to the offices of the publisher of her favorite romantic fumetti, the photo comics popularized by the Italians. There she hopes to meet Fernando Rivoli (Alberto Sordi), the actor who plays the White Sheik, Wanda's favorite character in the comics. She has drawn his portrait, which she plans to drop off and then sneak back to her hotel before Ivan notices she is gone. The Sheik has other plans, though. He gets one of the other actors to load Wanda onto a truck and take her out to that day's photo shoot at the beach. Once he has her trapped there, the low-rent Rudy Valentino tries to seduce her. Meanwhile, poor Ivan is left to try to keep his family from discovering that Wanda isn't really upstairs with a headache.

The White Sheik was film #1 1/2 for Federico Fellini, and his first as a solo director. Released in 1952, it didn't exactly set the world on fire, and though it has had a critical reevaluation since, I still find it to be a mere trifle in the director's early career. This movie seems like a warm-up, with key moments acting as rehearsals for the more realized features to come, including I Vitelloni and Nights of Cabiria.

What Fellini is trying to do here is make a simultaneous homage and satire of early cinema, with the fumetti replacing silent movies. I suppose that choice could be a subtle dig at the state of motion pictures, that their best days are frozen in still images on a page, but The White Sheik doesn't feel that sharp. Wanda is the perpetual dreamer who will discover that her invented paramour is a lout and an oaf, a lesson she will have to learn before she can settle into marriage with Ivan; likewise, Ivan is going to learn that women are not as delicate nor as innocent as he has believed. Consider that Wanda's salvation comes during an amusing suicide attempt, where statues of angels on all sides of her offer redemption (or perhaps the way out) by coyly keeping their backs turned to her. It's okay, they aren't looking! On the other hand, Ivan is rescued by a couple of hookers.

It's that scene with Ivan and the ladies of the evening that truly points out that something is not quite right with The White Sheik. Ivan meets two women, and of them is Fellini's wife and his soon-to-be-regular star, Giulietta Masina. She is playing an early version of her Cabiria character, coming onto screen doing a little dance, mimicking a performance she just saw. In a way, she is no different than Wanda in that her head is in the clouds, her thoughts taken up with fanciful entertainment, and she reacts to Ivan's story like it's a soap opera being played out for her pleasure. She quickly exits again, leaving with a fire eater no less, and the spark she brought in with her goes right out.

Up until Giulietta's arrival, The White Sheik is playing at being a screwball comedy, but it never really finds its pace. Leopoldo Trieste, who with his curly hair and moustache looks like a Gilbert Hernandez cartoon, is running around, mugging for the camera, and playing the hapless husband. He is accompanied by Nino Rota's buoyant music, but the score always seems to be racing around Ivan like an eager puppy rather than adding to the spring in his step. The comedy here is too subdued. If it were a car, it would be pulled over for driving too slow while the rest of the cars speed by. Fellini can never really get it started.

I was actually surprised by how little presence Alberto Sordi had as the Sheik. He gets some great comic moments in I Vitelloni, Fellini's next picture, and pretty much steals that entire movie, but as the swishy lover, he's fairly bland. His best scene comes when the bubble bursts, when he has to defend himself against his angry coworkers and his even angrier wife. There is so much personality on that beach at that moment, Wanda is right to run. Brunella Bovo is barely a shadow amidst the spectacle.

When it comes to The White Sheik, it may be a case of too many cooks. Michelangelo Antonioni originally wrote the script for his own debut but never directed it, and then Fellini and Tullio Pinelli rewrote it, and a fourth writing credit is given to Ennio Flaiano. Then again, it's not uncommon to see that many names on the writers' card in an Italian movie of that era. I'm more inclined to think it's just a case of a neophyte filmmaker still finding his bearings. There is little in the cinematography that distinguishes itself, and the editing is often jumpy. In short, it's a well-meant effort that is just a tad clumsy. Not terrible, possessed of a few chuckles, but ultimately as full of nothing as its title character. The Sheik is all charm and smiles until you get that turban off, and then you find he's nothing special, just an okay actor dressed up to look fancy. He's likable enough when he's around, but you aren't that sorry when he leaves.

THAT HAMILTON WOMAN - #487

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:35:00 +0000

It's often said that real-life couples make fairly terrible onscreen lovers, that the removal of sexual tension between the performers takes any fire out of the performance. If they've already had each other, they don't look like they want each other anymore. Naturally, there are exceptions, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall being the most obvious example from classic Hollywood. While their contemporaries Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh don't nearly match those two in terms of chemistry, they do make for a fairly convincing couple in 1941's That Hamilton Woman, the second of two movies they made together. Both of those films were produced and directed by Alexander Korda, and That Hamilton Woman was tailor-made for this scandalous pair. What better for the film world's most notorious adulterous couple than a movie about one of history's most famous versions of the same?

Set at the close of the 18th century, That Hamilton Woman stars Olivier as Lord Horatio Nelson, the naval hero who pursued Napoleon's fleets around the world, staving off the French conqueror's expansion of his empire. Leigh is Lady Emma Hamilton, the wife of the British Ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray). Their marriage was one arrived at by less-than-conventional means. A commoner by birth, Emma entered high society via a gossip-ridden past, leaving dancehalls and brothels to be the kept woman of various men, including William Hamilton's nephew. This younger Hamilton ended up selling Uncle Will his art collection to pay off some rather heavy debts, and along with the statues and paintings, he included the subject of one of the traded portraits--Emma. Though at first incensed by this breech of trust, Emma relents and makes the best of the arrangement, becoming a regular face around the royal court in Naples.

The paths of Nelson and Emma cross when the seaman comes to Naples upon the outbreak of war with France in hopes of enlisting this allied country's Navy to aid England. Though William promises to move Nelson's request through slow bureaucratic channels, Emma surreptitiously uses her friendship with the Queen (Norma Drury) to get Nelson his ships at the speed with which they are required. Nelson is impressed by this seemingly frivolous woman's diplomatic powers. Behind her parties and her fancy dress lies Britain's real diplomatic influence, just as the Queen is the real influence behind her beleaguered King (Luis Alberni). For the next several years, even as constant warring takes an eye and an arm from him, Nelson continues to make Naples a port of call, fomenting the friendship between himself and Emma, and ultimately, succumbing to the fires of romance.

Given the year of production, there is a none-too-obvious double meaning in Nelson's campaign against Napoleon. The film had Winston Churchill's full support, and the terms with which Nelson speaks of the French madman and his will to power, as well as the pride and praise lavished on England, were meant to stir up patriotic pride in the moviegoing public. I suppose we could read even further into Walter Reisch and R.G. Sherriff's screenplay and discern that the portrayal of Emma's efforts on behalf of her country and its fighting men is meant to remind modern ladies how they can contribute to the battles on the home front. Of course, this also can require great sacrifice, and the biggest one in That Hamilton Woman comes about 2/3 into the film when the lovers agree to return to their spouses for the good of England. Every citizen must do the right thing for their country, even if it means never-ending unhappiness. As far as propaganda is concerned, it's actually handled more deftly than my description makes it sound. In fact, were you to never flip over the DVD box and consider the date at the top, you probably wouldn't even make the connection. I could have actually done with it being a little stronger myself. The only sea battle we get to see is the one at the climax of the picture, and it's magnificently staged. A little more blood and thunder of that variety couldn't have hurt.

Then again, That Hamilton Woman isn't about passions realized, but about denial and separation and the price of hidden love. War, gossip, prior commitments--these are the things that push lovers apart, but also the source of their determination to be together. This is where the reality of Olivier and Leigh's actual lives crosses over with their fictional cinematic lives, and how Korda, whether he knew he was doing it or not, skirted around the problem of an acting couple playing sweethearts onscreen. The two had been married the year before, having finally secured divorces from their former spouses, and they had suffered interference from American producer David O'Selznick, who continually aggravated their efforts to work together, and less-than-generous press coverage of their affairs, both private and professional. By the time Korda rolled his cameras, the duo had a pretty solid grasp of what Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton had experienced over a century prior. Once their love has been confessed, most of their scenes begin with distant smoldering and end in painful separation. The few embraces they share are impulsive explosions, made all the more eruptive by the denial that has held them apart. (And, in case we weren't fully aware of the danger, Korda helpfully places a smoky Vesuvius in the distance, viewable from Emma Hamilton's bedroom window.)

That Hamilton Woman first quite snugly with the other popular melodramas of the day, including many that Olivier and Leigh starred in. Korda's direction is straightforward and sincere, with the look of Wyler's Wuthering Heights and the underlying darkness of Hitchcock's Rebecca, both of which featured Laurence Olivier. The film's historical setting and its concerns with the role of women in wartime are also fittingly reminiscent of Vivien Leigh's most famous turn as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, even if the drama is far more contained this time around. Leigh's later career is largely comprised with roles of women who succumb to adultery, such as Anna Karenina and The Deep Blue Sea, and Emma's fate, as witnessed in the bookends on this picture, points the way toward the fate of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. It's almost as if Hollywood branded the actress with a scarlet letter they would never let her remove.

Indeed, despite the backstage truth, Hollywood had quite a few limitations on how it could show such activity in front of the curtain, which is why the final act of That Hamilton Woman goes into such dark territory. Both cheaters had to be punished, it didn't matter whether the story was based in historical truth or not. Personally, I think the movie is better beforehand, what with all the stolen glances and whispers in the shadows, and this is why Nelson's last stand is so vital. Otherwise, the bleak nature of those last scenes would be too much. As it is, in terms of plotting, there is actually too little, with Emma's sad collapse happening too quickly. The very last lines of dialogue, delivered as we return back to the framing device, sound tacked on, as if to explain why the story stops short. And then there was no more, you say? Cue "The End."

Even so, I still quite like That Hamilton Woman. Olivier is fantastically conflicted, playing the egotistical Nelson like an unsure schoolboy whenever it comes time to make a decision about Emma, and Leigh also quite ably shows the dual nature inherent in her role. Emma's sprightly exterior is the product of much calculation. She's a woman used to finding a way to get her way. In the end, her problem is that the world has greater claims on the man she loves, and it's the world that gets to write the story.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

THE HUMAN CONDITION - #480

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:01:00 +0000

As a fan of early-20th Century American literature, I always noticed that the one group of writers that could inspire real envy in all of the famous Americans was the Russians. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the like are regularly mentioned by Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their crew as the authors they most looked to in terms of what they wished they could do, the level of craft they aspired to achieve. For a long time, I didn't understand why, because like many young readers, I was a little frightened by the prospect of reading these legendarily long tomes. Charles Dickens wrote books that fat, and I didn't much care for him, so what chance did these Ruskies have?

Then a couple of years ago I finally read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and that changed everything. While I can't claim to have gobbled up a ton more since then, the densely plotted yet deftly told Anna Karenina made me realize what inspired the men who inspired me. The writing is detailed yet lyrical, the story complicated but has enough soap opera to keep it from being boring, and the characters are so richly drawn, you feel like you get to know each and every one, no matter how insignificant. Having experienced Tolstoy, it helped me understand what Steinbeck and Fitzgerald were trying to do when they wrote the mammoth East of Eden and Tender is the Night (respectively), both books I read (and in the case of Fitzgerald, reread) in my post-Anna K. world.

Funny that I should be scared of a big novel, though, as I've never been scared of big cinema. Granted, watching a movie takes place in a set amount of time, and at my reading speed, I've had books drag on for upwards of a year for me. Still, I've spent weekends devouring the whole Godfather set or a complete season of The Wire, an entire evening in an uncomfortable theatre watching The Best of Youth, so why not some time flipping through the pages of War and Peace? When it comes down to it, such substantial artistic experiences are rare. How often do we really get to see or read a truly brilliant work of such incredible density? Berlin Alexanderplatz looked like an insurmountable expedition when I cracked open the box, but I had watched all fifteen hours within two or three days and never checked the clock out of boredom. Shouldn't, then, Proust be on my nightstand?

Masaki Kobayashi's nine-and-a-half-hour film The Human Condition was released as three parts over three years, spanning 1959 to 1961. On this new Criterion edition of the landmark film, the three-part structure is preserved over three discs, and it includes the original intermission breaks in each part. So, really, The Human Condition is like a six-chapter novel, the equivalent of six ninety-minute television episodes. Not so daunting when you think about it that way, is it? Not that you'll likely stop at any particular break. Just like reading a good book, I watched The Human Condition into the wee hours, dropping out and going to bed when I just couldn't keep my eyes open anymore, then picking it up where I left off the next day.

Now, even if watching The Human Condition isn't a daunting task, reviewing it is (I know, and get on with it already, right?). To adequately cover the full girth of this particular piece of cinema would practically require a book unto itself. The reason a movie like Kobayashi's is so engrossing is that, like a Russian novel, it is full of recurring themes, side characters with their own lives, and a story that maneuvers through territory as wide as any map--and likely territory that was also covered in the Gomikawa Junpei novel upon which The Human Condition was based. When it comes to a movie of such magnitude, whatever you write in a space like this, it's like using measuring spoons full of water to show someone what the ocean is like. I need flowcharts and character graphs just to keep it all straight!

But here, I'll try...

The Human Condition opens in Manchuria in 1943. Japan is in the middle of World War II and using their occupation of China and the country's natural resources as fuel for the war effort. Kaji, played by Tatsuya Nakadai, is twenty-eight years old and full of ideas. He believes that improving working conditions for the common man will improve production output, and even thinks the Chinese forced into labor are entitled to be treated as human beings. Not surprisingly, some consider Kaji to be a radical. His theories sound vaguely Communist.

Like any young man, Kaji is also interested in romance, and he has been dating Michiko (Michiyo Aratama), who works in the same compound with him. She is ready to get married, he is not, as he fears that any day he could be drafted into the Japanese army. A reprieve comes, however, when he is assigned a position at a remote mine where Kaji can employ some of his crazy notions in the aid of extracting precious metals from the Earth. This important work will buy him an exemption from military service. Eager to do some good, Kaji marries Michiko and the two move to the desolate mining town. There, he befriends the tough but fair foreman Okishima (So Yamamura), but quickly makes enemies of the other bosses, who thrive on bribes and sadistic motivational techniques.

Kaji eventually succeeds, but not without much effort and little praise. Things get more difficult when the army drops off 600 Chinese prisoners and puts Kaji in charge of them. When his enemies help several prisoners escape in order to line their own pockets, Kaji not only loses the trust of the POWs but also runs afoul of a macho military police officer, Sergeant Watai (Toru Abe), who ceases to be amused by Kaji's tactics. Convinced that Kaji has been turning a blind eye to the escapes, particularly once it's revealed that a Chinese boy (Akira Ishihama) that Kaji has taken under his wing has been part of the plot, Watai puts the screws to our hero. Having already been forced to compromise his ideals to the detriment of his self-esteem and his marriage, and often at the cost of lives, Kaji decides to take a stand. His reward? Conscription into the army.

End of Part I, often subtitled No Greater Love; part II is Road To Eternity, and it opens with Kaji on the tail end of his basic training. He and one other solider, the disagreeable Shinjo (Kei Sato), are both outcasts due to their perceived Communist-sympathies, but Kaji in particular has distinguished himself as a sharpshooter. He has also tried to be an ally to the nerdy, pathetic Obara (Kunie Tanaka), who clearly was not cut out for military life. (His kowtowing and almost pathological sycophancy reminded me a little of the similarly pathetic but altogether more unctuous Arthur Storch character in Jack Garfein's The Strange One, released a couple of years earlier but likely just proving there is one in every pack.) The fact that Obara can't be helped is just another lesson about the harshness of reality versus the purity of ideals that Kaji is going to have to learn. While at the start of Part I he is really a student who has not yet been pushed out into the world, by the time he gets to the army, he has experienced injustice in practice, not just in theory. The army will make a man out of him yet. Whether it's the man they want or not will remain to be seen.

There is a crucial moment in Part I where Kaji makes a connection with one of the leaders in the Chinese prison camp, an older man named Wang Heng Li (Seiji Miyaguchi). Wang has been the man whom Kaji has been most eager to have trust him, and even tries to blame Wang's distrust on why some things are going wrong in the camp. It's Wang that expresses that there is more to trust than asking for it, and more to being brave than being stubborn. He cites the fact that they are standing face to face, though staring across barbed wire, and connecting, bridging a divide between their people. It's the men you meet in life whom you find this common connection with that will define the social contract and make the way for real change, be it collective or personal. This encounter will end up being the most important for Kaji in terms of how he deals with the various types he meets from here on out. Which of them will provide the same connection?

It's also an important instruction from Masaki Kobayashi and co-writer Zenzo Matsuyama on how we should perceive what is going on in this movie. Regardless of the vastness of the landscape, it boils down to the people, the ones who connect with each other, and the ones who connect with us as the audience. This is a technique not dissimilar to David Lean's. The British director used large backdrops and epic stories to create portraits of individuals, showing their courage and their fumbles in the face of situations that were larger than they were. For as awesome as the images we see are, for as breathtaking or soul crushing the locales, it all comes back to the man in the center of the frame.

And make no mistake, in terms of visual power, The Human Condition is awesome. Kobayashi and director of photography Yoshio Miyajima shot their film in black-and-white at a wide 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Within each frame, we see how barren the mine is and also how cramped the army camp; the unending battlefield versus the stifling forest they escape into (Part III). A figure placed within these vistas can appear lonely and overpowered, or if close enough in the foreground, powerful, eclipsing the world behind him. The size also makes close-ups all the more intimate, such as the scenes between Michiko and Kaji when she comes to visit him at his training base and they share a night in the storage shed. The image panel is all about them, all about their love, be it the tight shots of Kaji hugging her naked torso or when they lie down together. Conversely, when their marriage is strained, moving between them and their separate bed mats within this stretched visual space implies a canyon of loneliness and alienation between them.

Ironically, though the love of Michiko and Kaji is such an important aspect of his strength in the first arc of the movie--she is both a source of power and temptation--the separation of the pair is integral to Kaji's growth in the second. Her visit to the camp is a farewell of sorts. It's tender, and it's sad; Michiyo Aratama is heartbreaking in how she reacts to her husband clinging to her. After she is gone, though, a sour turn for Obara forces Kaji to stand up for something in the army barracks the way he failed to do back at the mining camp. When he slapped the boy Chen on the urging of a superior, he ignored his better instincts for how workers should be treated, and when his inability to push Obara over the hump leads to hazing and dark consequences, Kaji ends up advocating they enforce the army's judicial code. Again, it's ironic in that he ends up maintaining his own moral strength by embracing the army's stringent guidelines and achieves his own purity by insisting on them being followed exactly. It's a similar stance to the one he took at the mining camp, but this time he manages to make it work without letting authority lord it over him.

The isolation from his wife further allows Kaji to create a tighter sense of community in his new surroundings. When asked to train new recruits, he once again insists on reform, and he creates a solid unit by taking a more humanist approach to basic training. Earn their respect and loyalty with kindness, rather than brutality. Unfortunately, when battle does come to Manchuria, it comes too early, and the men aren't ready in terms of skill, but they do share the bond Kaji hoped for. The fighting turns out to bigger than they are, however. Combat is portrayed as pointless and demeaning, Kaji's unit hiding from the enemy like a giant game of whack-a-mole. One man is assigned to each foxhole, so though the experience is a commonly shared one, they are also isolated. The fewer there are to stand together, the more self-preservation becomes important, and Part II ends with Kaji abandoning what is left, running alone into a darkened wasteland, both in terms of its physical, bombed out appearance and the black clouds hanging in the air, and in the metaphorical sense. Our idealist is rushing headlong into an existential abyss.

The battlefield sequences are shot with a startling realism, including impressive explosions and large stagings of battle. The enemy is faceless and distant, but there is a starkness to the detail that rivals Kubrick's Paths of Glory or Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The size makes it alienating and impersonal. All the more interesting, then, that Kobayashi opens part III of the movie, A Solider's Prayer, with a scene that brings the fighting right to Kaji: a hand-to-hand skirmish with a Soviet soldier. What we see of this, some of it as memories (memory plays a big part in this last third, Kaji's shame shown in freeze frame), is more surreal, the warriors framed in tight shots, a brightly lit night sky full of dark smoke behind them. Kaji is now a man taking charge of his own destiny, and that includes killing. A later one-on-one confrontation with Kaji's ideological rival (Nobuo Kaneko) in a labor camp pushes the expressiveness further, with Kobayashi and Miyajima lighting the beating like a scene out of a film noir. Likewise, eroticism is shot like these individual battles, with the camera moving in so tight, the images of these couplings are practically seen as abstracts.

This fifth chapter is concerned with Kaji's long trek home. Reminiscent of Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, it first shows his hike across an empty wilderness, but soon he is consumed by the jungle that stands between death and freedom. Once inside, he no longer knows where safety lies. At the same time, he is denying the rule of the army, taking charge over a Corporal even though he is only a Private First Class, and eventually establishing his own mini-community. He and the few soldiers he is left with pick up a small group of peasants that they will try to shepherd to secure ground. Most of them won't make it out alive, but they still test Kaji's faith and his leadership, the beliefs by which he defines himself. He is becoming decisive, acting on what he knows to be right without hesitation or compromise. It's Kaji's way, like it or lump it.

In these final chapters, Kaji becomes a sort of Japanese Ulysses on his own Odyssey, his one goal being to get back home to his wife. Along the way, he encounters many perilous temptations, including several women who look to his strength and dedication with desire, but who fall under his single-mindedness much the way his wife had before them. He runs across leaders who refuse to deviate from their outmoded missions, make-shift refugee camps, and other soldiers who have lost their way, and who either seek the kind of leadership Kaji offers or the lawless alternative. In all things, Kaji emphasizes choice. Like I said, it's his way once you've come on board, but at each crossroads, any man in his company is allowed to decide which fork to take. Eventually, however, he ends up a POW forced into labor by the Russians, a predicament that baffles him. In his mind, it goes against the Communist ideal he would have expected from the Soviets, and it also takes him full circle: he is now subject to the very work conditions he once tried to stop. There is a great sequence where he confronts the Russian leaders with what he has learned and what he sees as being wrong with their behavior, but his impassioned speech is merely splatter against the language barrier. Oh, futility!

Tatsuya Nakadai is still a working actor to this day, and he has appeared in a number of great films, including starring in Kurosawa's High and Low, Ran, and Kagemusha. He even worked with Kobayashi again in Samurai Rebellion, Kwaidan, and Harakiri. The acting range he displays in The Human Condition is nothing short of extraordinary. Though we only glimpse his character over a handful of years (and, indeed, Nakadai played him for almost as long as the time that passed in the script), we see Kaji go through a full arc. Call it a practical education if you will, growing from an idealistic youth with more stubbornness than technique to an experienced soldier that can enact a philosophy in actual situations and all the way to rock bottom. Just like Ulysses, the final leg of Kaji's journey is spent in the trappings of a beggar, though unlike the hero of myth, Kaji undergoes this development for real.

The ending of The Human Condition is bleak. Kaji spends the final scenes on the frozen Manchurian countryside, a tragic turn given that this is where he has run to in order to escape Siberian imprisonment. The world we see through the camera eye is now bleached out, flattened, a blank slate that cannot sustain life. If we continue to consider The Human Condition with an existential mindset, this is a perfect metaphor for the plight of modern man. Sticking to one's ideals, as Kaji does up unto the very end, is a noble pursuit, but one met with more punishment than reward in a world that demands conformity override individual concern. (Indeed, Kaji's problems with the Red Army's approach to socialism is that it swallows men whole in order to just make them part of the same old injustice.) Kaji has gone as far as he can go, and that is a place where he is completely alone, in a landscape that is literally cracking under his feet. Yet, he stumbles onward, his last thoughts being of his wife, the beacon he has followed, the lighthouse of his principles. In one light, this is tragedy, a man who can't be broken but who breaks all the same--that is the human condition, our moral code still depends on our physical body--but in another light, it's a triumph of the same. One can go on but need not give in.

The last shot pulls away from the figure at rest, leaving it rather than zooming in to join it. The reversal takes us from the personal, back to the widescreen picture, back into the world, carrying the image of the man in the snow with us.

The Human Condition has been out of print for many years, and there aren't kudos big enough for Criterion having brought it back to audiences in such spectacular fashion. I've been kicking myself for nearly a decade now for not buying the original three-disc release after spotting it used shortly after getting my first DVD player. In all that time, I hoped Criterion would put out a set and I could finally correct my mistake. To see Kobayashi's masterpiece at last and in such fine packaging--a beautiful looking multi-covered book, a fourth disc full of extras, a remarkably clean transfer--it's been well worth the wait. The Human Condition is an enriching, incomparable cinematic experience.

HOMICIDE - #486

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:18:00 +0000

I think that one thing all David Mamet heroes have in common is that they always get more than they bargained for. And just when life piles it on, that's when they find the people they thought they could count on aren't really the exceptional individuals they always gave them credit for. It's the Mamet social contract: when you decide to stand up for something, most everyone else will stand against you.

1991's Homicide was Mamet's third feature as a writer/director, following his acclaimed con-man debut, House of Games, and the lighter departure, Things Change. His lead swindler from Games, Joe Mantegna, returns this time as Bobby Gold, a Chicago police detective known for his gift of gab. He's the guy they call in for negotiations, the one who can talk any skel into giving up information. As an example of these skills, over the course of Homicide, he convinces a brother-in-law and a mother to give up their family member and a dog to give up his meal. Bobby has a way of talking to you that makes even the most nonsensical decision make sense.

Homicide, then, could be described as Bobby Gold giving himself a long dose of his own medicine. Though Gold wants to be working the hot case of the moment, tracking Randolph (Ving Rhames), a cop killer who slipped through the FBI's fingers, helping a couple of rookies in over their heads at a crime scene sticks him with a case of an elderly Jewish shopkeeper shot in the back at her ghetto bodega. Though Bobby at first sees this as a routine case he can mostly ignore--his partner, Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy), advises that he just look busy long enough for it to go away--the further he gets into it, the more he finds. And the more he talks himself into believing and doing.

The deceased is the mother of Dr. Klein (J.S. Block), an influential man amongst Chicago's Jewish leaders. Though his mother continued to run the family store, it wasn't necessary, as her years of labor paid off and her son is now rich, and with those riches comes the ability for Klein to make his mother's shooting a top police priority. The good doctor and his daughter (Rebecca Pidgeon) insist that the attack wasn't about money--the predominantly black neighborhood harbors an urban legend that the old woman had a treasure hidden in her basement--but about her faith and her ethnic background. The victim had been an activist and part of the efforts to establish Israel as an independent state. Even if her murder wasn't directly connected to that, her family believes it was still motivated by an old hate.

Mamet sets up a complicated racial dynamic in Homicide. Chicago's most wanted, Randolph, is a black man who had the white FBI bust through his door, guns blazing, stirring up tensions in the divided city. Though the cops present themselves as a united front, a single race united by their badge--or "star," as they call it--they haven't entirely melted into one singular race. Sully's Irishness is mentioned, as is Bobby's Jewish heritage. In a moment of anger, Bobby uses the N-word. Only homophobic slurs cross all lines--no one wants to be called one, but the usage is unrestricted.

Still, it's important that we know that Bobby considers himself a cop first and foremost. Not a Jew, nor a Jewish cop, but a cop. He sees himself in the middle, as all police officers do, and that is a suitable stance until people start demanding he take sides. Randolph's mother (Mary Jefferson) is aware that it's a white police force coming after her child, regardless of the different skin tones in the room. She appeals to Bobby's humanity to form some kind of allegiance, but it's already too late. The Kleins have already disparaged his loyalty as a Jew, repeatedly questioning his sense of identity. It gets under his skin, particularly as he starts to discover that the conspiracy the Kleins believe took their mother has some foundation in truth. World War II may have ended more than four decades prior, but a shadow war has continued all these years, conducted in back rooms and hiding behind the veil of "crazy talk." Bobby stumbles into a cabal of Jewish leaders and is even shown a secret Nazi hideout. The challenge repeatedly posed to him: what will you do to protect your people? When will you stop being a cop, stop being neutral, and be a Jew?

Smartly, Mamet's script maneuvers around the political and ideological issues in favor of the personal and emotional ones. There is a sticky morass that the story could be bogged down in. The dead woman may have committed criminal acts in the name of revolution, and there is pressure for Bobby to do the same. It's not really about the larger right or wrong, though, but about how Bobby views the world and his place in it. When it all gets broken down, he isn't sure he's made a fair trade. Being a cop instead of being a Jew seems hollow when Bobby considers the prejudice he has had to overcome. He is always having to prove himself; as Sullivan points out, he's always the first guy through the door to greet danger.

Mamet emphasizes the divides between the many sides in ways that are both class-related and emotionally salient. The most obvious representation of the differences between people is where they live. The ghetto where the old woman was killed is a crumbling ruin while the penthouse where her son lives is immaculate and austere. Bobby repeatedly asks why she kept working "down there," so there is even an above and below. Cinematographer Roger Deakins (a regular collaborator of the Coen Bros.) further illustrates these differences using color and lighting. The ghetto is mostly dark and cold, with lots of grays and blues. Look at that opening scene where the FBI is after Randolph: he practically turns the night air into ocean waters, including the swirling sea foam represented in the smoke that hangs in the air. On the flip, the Jewish homes are white and gold, so warm they practically glow. The racists are associated with red, as seen in both their propaganda flyers and the borders of their swastika flags. Once again, in the middle, the police station is neutral, with no obvious color scheme, nothing to call attention to itself.

Language is also important, as it is in any David Mamet production. The police have a shared syntax, swapping jargon, completing each other's thoughts, and using abstraction to separate themselves from the world they need to serve and protect. When out in the real world, they adopt a patronizing tone. This is met with a much more laid-back street vibe when in Randolph's neighborhood, but the Kleins and their friends answer in an even more elevated tone than the police. They are actually more patronizing, and they speak to Bobby as if he were a criminal subservient to their authority. It's no wonder that he can't help but be suspicious of their motives or even initially get caught suggesting it's their own behavior that gets the Jews in trouble. Homicide would be a lot less complicated if they made it easier for Bobby to get on board.

Fans of Mamet's work love listening to his dialogue. He has a specific rhythm to his writing that plays out best when two characters are having a back and forth. It's often repetitious, with what one person says being picked up by another and parroted back. In a literal sense, a verbal exchange is occurring. Beyond the construction of his sentences, Mamet also encourages a stilted, dispassionate delivery. (Matching that, the camerawork is fairly straightforward, favoring steady, leveled shots over any visual trickery.) In Homicide, this even-toned way of speaking acts as an equalizer. Everyone is who they are, they are comfortable in their position, no need to get heated about it. The characters that do yell--most notably, Mr. Patterson (Louis Brown), the African American bureaucrat who gets on Bobby's case at the start of the picture--act improperly when they raise their voices. It's an affront to shout and disturb the tranquility of the conversation. It's as if language is the one thing that keeps us civilized. Joe Mantegna is a master of the Mamet style. His voice has a soothing effect when he keeps it low, and he can make it menacing by merely changing the tone, no need to alter the pace or the volume (oh, Fat Tony, how I love you). Next to him, William H. Macy makes for a good foil. There is a twitchy eagerness to his performance that makes it seem his manner of speaking is a genial put-on that he can't wait to burst out of--and at various times, he does.

All of these themes and ideas are worked into what, on its surface, is an average police procedural. Thus, we also get some standard genre scenes with the cops pursuing suspects, etc. The Randolph case goes by the book, whereas the Klein case is less ordered and downright strange. When Bobby goes off on his own, Homicide shifts into a kind of dream world. It's secluded, antiquated, looking the same but not quite. As he would in a dream, Bobby buys into the illusion, even when his instincts suggest maybe he shouldn't. He's trading one star for another, the imperfect pentagram of his badge for the more pliable hexagram of the Star of David. Yet, for his character arc, this is where it all goes wrong. Once Bobby stops being a cop first and foremost, his police work takes a nosedive--a change foreshadowed by the symbol of the broken holster and the gun Bobby can never seem to hang on to. At the same time, the new identity he has embraced isn't wholly him, nor did the people who conned him into it ever expect it to be. Once again, a Mamet lead has had to learn the hard way that oldest of dramatic truisms: to thine own self be true.

This is why at the end of Homicide Bobby finds himself totally alone. He is bruised, battered, and unable to perform the duties of his job. He has become extraneous. I am not sure how I feel about the film's final scene. It doesn't have the gut-punch effect Mamet was hoping for, the attempt at an ironic "What was it all for?" seeming to be tacked on for no real purpose. It's a film noir convention, the ending that renders the rest of it pointless, the hero getting gutshot or the money blowing away in the rain. Granted, there were more obvious ways to go, and Mamet teases us by making us think the prisoner who has throughout Homicide been promising to explain the nature of true evil Bobby is finally going to give up the goods. This could have led to some very hammy writing, and really, saying nothing is much stronger and carries its own suggestions: evil is what casts us out, what demands our silence, what erases the lifeline of language. That would have been enough, the image of Bobby sitting alone while life continues without him would have sufficed. The extra reveal comes off as trying

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 08/09

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:29:00 +0000

IN THEATRES...

* Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's amazing WWII movie. I've got a few complaints, but it's really an astonishing filmgoing experience. I loved it!

* Ponyo, Miyazaki's latest (and possibly last) movie is geared toward younger kids, and as a result, will leave the adults only partially satisfied. Pretty to look at, there is more good than bad, but not the masterpiece his fans have hoped for.

* Taking Woodstock, a rare stumble for Ang Lee. I think it's the split-screen that does it to him. People don't like it when he gets all fracturous and fancy.

* Thirst, Park Chan-wook's vampire flick, is too long and often too slow, but some cool ideas, story twists, and a great performance by Kim Ok-vin in the female lead still make it worth seeing.

Nicolas Hitori de's take on Shoshanna from Inglourious Basterds

ON DVD...

* 2X Catherine Deneuve: An excellent modern drama, Après Lui, and a terrible 1970s "satire," Marco Ferreri's Don't Touch the White Woman

* The Astonishing Work of Tezuka Osamu, collecting 13 animated shorts by the manga/anime legend.

* Big Man Japan, a confused mockumentary about giant monsters and giant monster fighters in Japan. See it for the fights, fast forward through the rest.

* Chinese Odyssey 2002, a romantic parody of martial arts films reteaming Chungking Express stars Tony Leung and Faye Wong. It's even produced by Wong Kar-Wai, and director Jeffrey Lau includes lots of subtle digs at the director. Too bad this U.S. disc is edited.

* I Love You, Man, one of my favorite comedies of the year, now on DVD.

* Pete's Dragon: High-Flying Edition, an old Disney musical that is pretty predictable, but still entertaining. Plus, you know, animated dragons are hep.

BONUS...

Comics fans and cinephiles should check out Scott Morse's hardboiled fusion, The Projectionist!

LAST HOLIDAY - ESSENTIAL ART HOUSE

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:49:00 +0000

George Bird has been leading a content bachelor's existence, working as an agricultural machinery salesman in a quiet English town. He'd probably keep going on this way until retirement or death, whichever came first, and in a sense, he has. One morning, a stop off to the doctor about a minor complaint reveals a much more severe disease. According to this diagnosis, George has Lampington's Disease, a rare condition that will cause him to fall into a coma and die within a matter of weeks. The doctor's prescription? Take the money and run. He advises George to enjoy his final days, don't just sit around and wait to die.

This is the premise of Last Holiday, a light 1950 dramedy by director Henry Cass (Blood of the Vampire) and writer J.B. Priestley (An Inspector Calls.). George is played by Sir Alec Guinness, at his stoic and most dapper best here as the meek man who is suddenly forced to adopt a whole new outlook on living. George cashes in his savings and his life insurance, quits his job, and alights to a fancy hotel a couple of hamlets over. There he will let Lampington's take over while he luxuriates in everything the hotel has to offer.

Only it's not so easy to become a different person when the specter of death hangs about to make sure you remember who you are. George isn't entirely ready to relax. Decked out in second-hand suits bought off another dead man, he is seen by the other guests of the hotel as a bit of a mystery, new blood that is clearly more than he seems. For his part, George doesn't understand how to embrace idle leisure. He's too proud of being common to try to pass himself off as uncommon. Therefore, the first friend he makes at the resort is the head maid, Mrs. Poole (Kay Walsh), whose natural empathy causes her to wonder exactly what George is hiding. Her good sense is also affronted when George later disappoints her by allowing himself to be wooed to the other side. She can't understand why a good man would throw his money after bad rubbish, but that's because she doesn't know that he will have no other opportunity to spend it.

Life has taken a funny turn for George. By running out on him, it has given him newfound possibilities. Encouraged by Mrs. Poole, George speaks honestly to the other people in the hotel. He tells a blowhard politician what is wrong with his policies and a rich shipping tycoon how cheap materials have ruined British industry. He also inspires an old inventor to pick up a pencil again and helps a less refined couple (played by Sidney James and Jean Colin) gain acceptance amongst the upper crust. It's a whole lot of tough love, and George gives it in full to Sheila (Beatrice Campbell), a seemingly centered woman married to a real lout (Brian Worth). She's the one Mrs. Poole is worried about, the older woman perhaps seeing her own compulsion to come to the aid of those in trouble in George, the man she most wants to help. When George discovers that Sheila's husband can't pay their rent, he chastises her for not making the swindler get a job--but he gives her the money anyway. In turn, she gives him kisses on the elevator.

They aren't false kisses. I think Sheila really has affection for George. Everyone does, and it's genuine. They see George as a happy-go-lucky enigma. Lucky he is, happy not so much. Ever since he received his death sentence, George has found his fortunes have totally changed. He wins at the horse raises and poker, he's got more than one woman vying for his attention, he can predict the weather, and people are listening to him and offering him incredible opportunities. Of course, he can't take them, and that goes a long way toward why he isn't happy. Just about everything has started to remind him of death. Until he started to think this way, George never noticed how many mindless clichés referenced the big sleep. As if that weren't enough, Henry Cass regularly uses breaking glass--a window, a mirror--to transition from one scene to the next. It's a little too on the bull's-eye, both as a symbol of his emotional state and as foreshadowing, but it's effective nevertheless: life is fragile and can be shattered with a light touch just as effectively as with a meaty fist.

Cass and Priestly manage to balance the gravitas of George's predicament in Last Holiday with a light and breezy tone that makes this little fable of mortality peculiarly charming. The theme is that man should enjoy his time while he can because he never knows when it could run out, and even if it's too late, George still discovers what can happen when an individual stops accepting his meek and meager existence and reach for something more. With an actor as likable as Guinness, it's easy to believe that so many would take notice of him, and he's also able to give them all a piece of his mind without seeming like a beast or a know-it-all.

The best moments of the movie, especially in terms of acting, are not part of the comedy; rather, they are the handful of times when George can't maintain his brave face. There are multiple quiet scenes where one of those many reminders hit him, and Guinness sits and silently contemplates where he is going. They are subtle moments, and they pass almost imperceptibly, fitting too easily in with the rest of the narrative, which itself is handled with delicate hands. Well, for the most part. There is some broad societal comedy, particularly in relation to the elderly and the female, but that stuff is outweighed by the toned-down, more ordinary actions of the other characters as they bond. Likewise, the ordinary direction never insists itself and only ever enters with pleasant and polite gestures. It's hard to say if such simple workmanship is on purpose or if Henry Cass is merely a director who gets the job done too efficiently for his own good, but as far as Last Holiday is concerned, the level playing field he establishes is exactly what's needed. George remains the star of his own story, nothing else even tries to compete.

Well, that is, up until the ending. Given the nature of the picture, I never really expected Last Holiday to go the way I would have liked. My hope was that it would be a movie where a man, believing time is short, makes a positive impact on a new group of people and then nobly and happily goes to his deathbed content. My expectation was that the positive impact would occur, but that George would get some kind of reprieve, he'd find some way out of the disease.

What we get is neither of those things. Instead, Priestley and Cass have decided that there is not enough irony in George's turnaround, and so they have to take his newfound luck and twist it further. I'm not sure if it's the right ending for Last Holiday or its common man hero. I get that their goal is to show how quickly most people forget, and how as soon as he is absent, George's seize-the-day message is dropped, the rosebuds gathered having sprouted phantom thorns. (Further irony, the only two people who stand by George are the women, the maid and the crook's wife, who jealously coveted George for themselves.) I am just not convinced that's the conclusion Last Holiday needed. It's a good ending, and it basically succeeds at what the filmmakers want to do, but it takes George out of the action in a way that isn't really satisfying. Is it fair to George to give him the new life he thought he could never enjoy, and then pull the rug out? As gods of their invented worlds, writers and directors can be capricious and cruel--not unlike the stuffed shirts they seek to ridicule.

And perhaps that's the biggest irony of all.

SCHIZOPOLIS - #199

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:30:00 +0000

Revisiting another old piece of writing, studying another favorite contemporary director.

When Steven Soderbergh's Schizopolis came out on DVD in 2003, I reviewed it for the Oni Press newsletter we sent out every week. In keeping with the cheeky nature of the movie, I wrote a straight review, but then I ran it through Babelfish or some other online translator, and sent out the review in Portuguese, with only an English tag on the end:

Steven Soderbergh é quase como o equivalente do filme de um criador dos comics do indie. Escarranchando linha entre far-afield creativo anarchy de independente retrato gosta LIMEY e mainstream glitz como OCEAN'S 11, segura um ou outro lado do arco do retrato de movimento com aplomb igual, a maneira a, deve nós diz, Greg Rucka pode mover-se da RAINHA & do PAÍS e QUERER SABER A MULHER e fazê-la parecer tão effortless quanto pode ser.

Naturalmente, se todo o you'd visto for 1996's SCHIZOPOLIS, o you'd não tem nenhuma maneira de saber isso. Este é Soderbergh's a maioria de película do out-there. Compreendido de três seções que reapproach a mesma história dos pontos diferentes também de lançar view--while para fora dos apartes que critiquing a religião do consumerism e de um precursor à sorte do "extreme" comportamento que typify nossas fatias diferentes atuais dos culture—it's do entertainment do JACKASS arguably de Soderbergh's para possuir a mente. A natureza de It's muito mostra como louco é, portraying masturbating, moldando sua própria esposa como a mulher ele simultaneamente fraudes sobre e tem um caso com, aparentemente salpicando a saliência witless' dialogue com as linhas dos he's das notas começados dos executivos do estúdio do filme. Soderbergh ele mesmo introduz a película, e com o ar de hubris sly, double-edged, di-lo se você don?t o começar, it?s sua própria falha, não his. E em muitas maneir!

as, é direito. Você aren't que vai começar-lhe todos os primeiros it's do time--and sua própria falha se você tentar do sustento do don?t. Porque você deve realmente.

And, of course, when you see it, suddenly this will make sense, too.

I have since misplaced the original text. I might have it on a disc somewhere, but I am too lazy to hunt for it. Instead, I'll just run it through Babelfish again:

Steven Soderbergh is almost as the equivalent of the film of a creator of comics of indie. Sitting astride creativo line between far-afield anarchy of independent picture likes LIMEY and mainstream glitz as OCEAN'S 11, insurance one or another side of the arc of the picture of equal movement with aplomb, the way, must we say, Greg Rucka can move of the QUEEN & of the COUNTRY and FONDNESS TO KNOW the WOMAN and to make it to seem effortless so how much it can be. Of course, if all you'd seen will be 1996 ' s SCHIZOPOLIS, you'd does not have no way to know this. This is Soderbergh's the majority of film of out-there. Understood of three sections that reapproach the same history of the different points also to launch view--while for is of the aside remarks that critiquing the religion of consumerism and of a precursor to the luck of it "it distinguishes" behavior that typify our current different slices of culture-it's of entertainment of the JACKASS arguably of Soderbergh's to possess the mind. The nature of It's very shows as wild it is, portraying masturbating, molding its proper wife as the woman it simultaneously frauds on and has a case with, pparently sprinkling the salience witless' dialogues with the lines of he's of started notes of the executives of the studio of the film. Soderbergh he himself introduces the film, and with the air of hubris sly, double-edged, say it if you don? t starting, it? s its proper imperfection, not his. E in much maneir! , he is right. You aren't that it goes to start all to it first it's of the teams--and its proper imperfection if you to try of the sustenance of don? t. Because you really must.

Wow, you'd think if the internet did the original translation, they'd know how to put it back. No such luck. I am pretty sure "FONDNESS TO KNOW the WOMAN" is actually Wonder Woman, which Greg Rucka was writing at the time, but boy oh boy, talk about getting lost in the translation.

As a goof, though, I still think it fits well with Soderbergh's movie, a scattershot string of improvisations and formalist exercises that the director fashioned into a thought-provoking comedic narrative. A large part of the fabric of Schizopolis is about language as a tool of communication, be it honest or deceitful. The way people talk is warped throughout the movie. There are scenes of a husband and wife speaking in literal phrases of intent, breaking down their words to the meaning beneath the outward expression; multiple segments where an exterminator converses with his sexual conquests using random exclamations, the duos sounding like refugees from spy movies; the male members of a love triangle talk in Japanese and Italian (and later, a third member in French) while the woman between them speaks in English. They all understand each other just fine, and though the viewer's instinct is assume he or she is missing something, everyone watching really understands, too. There's no confusion about what is going down--which is just what Soderbergh was hoping.

These are intellectual pranks in a film full of egghead jokes and self-reflexive stunts. Schizopolis is a freeform experiment in smarty-pants comedy, borrowing its style and structure from Monty Python, the Monkees movie Head, and most obviously, the Beatles movies directed by Richard Lester. I say "most obviously" because Soderbergh--who wrote, directed, shot, starred in, and also composed some of the music this time around--names a character Lester Richards. This character only appears at his own funeral, another switch-up if you consider that Schizopolis is obviously more of a revival of Lester's filmmaking style than a eulogy. (Though, alas, a revival totalling only one film; you could possible count 2002's Full Frontal as a sort of spiritual sibling to Schizopolis, but the tone is radically different.)

Schizopolis was made off the beaten path after the one-time wunderkind had suffered a series of defeats following his much-lauded debut, sex, lies, and videotape. I'll admit, I had all but ditched Soderbergh after The Underneath, a film that I would later come to appreciate, but upon its release in 1995, I dismissed it as cold and self-important, reflective of a growing boredom in mid-90s indies (and perhaps best personified by Hal Hartley, whose films I can't stand). The director returned two years later with Out of Sight, one of the most accomplished pieces of filmmaking in his career, kickstarting a string of incredible pictures that has lasted more than a decade. One could theorize that Schizopolis shows Soderbergh dismantling everything he knew about cinema in order to get back to the kind of solid, classical filmmaking he would soon demonstrate an affinity for. Operating without a script, avoiding stars, chasing his whims. The movie opens with the director addressing his audience, insisting any lack of understanding is on the part of the viewer and not the creator, and urging them to pay the full ticket price over and over until they get it, a naked appeal for money in a film that so obviously rejects commercial concerns.

Throughout, Soderbergh deconstructs scenes the way he deconstructs language when the married couple speaks in intentions rather than accepted terminology. Some of the characters have names that sound like the descriptive credits of minor players at the end of movies, be they direct like Attractive Woman #2 or absurd like Nameless Numberhead Man. Soderbergh even correctly guesses some of the trends that would take over Hollywood, including Scientology (here called "Eventualism") and reality television. The exterminator, named Elmo Oxygen and played by David Jensen, becomes the star of a guerilla filmmaking project where he goes around beating on people and pulling mean-spirited stunts. Another mirror being held up to the movie we are watching?

More self-reflexiveness: Soderbergh plays the husband, Fletcher Munson, and the wife is played by his ex-wife Betsy Brantley; the real-life estranged couple playing a fictional estranged couple. This makes it more than a casual joke when a second Soderbergh character breaks through the illusion to realize he is having an affair with his own spouse. In a way, that's what's really happening. Schizopolis often doubles up on characters and concepts. The workers at Fletcher's office, which happens to be the local headquarters of Eventualism, believe that there is a spy and a mole within the company, despite being words for the same thing. The term "spy" was only introduced becuase someone was trying to explain what a mole was. Soderbergh slyly makes another movie joke and references the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out
here by suggesting that the spy and the mole actually are one in the same, a dirty trick where the interloper will never be found because he is searching for himself.

Which could also sum up Schizopolis, especially since the transition between the first and second act (clearly numbered by Soderbergh) is a neo-Bunuelian device where Munson discovers his own doppelganger, the dentist Dr. Jeffrey Korchek, also played by Soderbergh; of course, he's the man that's having an affair with his own wife. That realization comes as the identities pass between the copycats, a kind of mind-meld where Munson knows he is Korchek and vice versa, two sides of one split personality. The editing in the sequence where Munson looks through Korchek's window is amazing, a series of cuts moving around Munson in a circle, capturing him at different angles and distances. There are other such realizations of self in Schizopolis, wherein movie montages make fantasy lives visible, Munson and Korchek seeing what their different possible choices would lead to, their potential lives flashing before their (and our) eyes. Adding further to the layers, not only does the director play his own characters, but Munson is also a speech writer for the head of Eventualism, and as he writes the words his boss will say, Munson becomes him, too.

Yes, it's confusing when you lay it out like that, but Schizopolis keeps up a breakneck pace that makes it nearly impossible to pause for reflection. It's a technique Soderbergh borrowed from Richard Lester: if the audience's main concern is just keeping up with you, then they aren't going to get caught up in how absurd everything is. I think if you did, Soderbergh could turn it back on your anyway. Schizopolis is its own moebius strip, a movie about itself by a filmmaker in conversation with himself. On the DVD, quite literally; as it turns out, Soderbergh has recorded a commentary where Soderbergh interviews Soderbergh. He plays the two distinct roles, interviewer and interviewee, asking himself questions and answering them. Granted, the information revealed is often dubious, but that's not the point, is it? Where else do you expect truth? In Eventualism's message of self-actualization? Not likely!

There's a famous quote about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Writing about Schizopolis is like that. Or maybe more like making a chef's salad with reel-to-reel tapes. Too many things misconstrued, not enough nutrition to be drawn out of an outdated mode of expression. Sadly, even with the bad translation of my old review, I'm pretty sure I got closer to getting at the essence of this movie the first time, back when I was younger and wasn't trying so hard. I got over my laziness and went looking for the original file, but that line of communication appears to be long gone. I found the back-up disc that I made literally the week before I wrote the review, but no other back-up for the next eighteen months. Clearly, that's just poor planning, a joke on myself but without a punchline.

Oh, and by the way, there ends up being a mole after the fact, but the term was really more of a clue of who they should have all been watching. Rearrange the letters in the name "Elmo." See what I mean?

CHUNGKING EXPRESS - #453/FALLEN ANGELS

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:57:00 +0000

Every six months or so when DVD Planet has their biannual sale, I fill in the holes in my Criterion Collection, picking up whatever discs did not make it my way since the last purchase. Just last month I finally got a hold of Chungking Express, directed by my favorite contemporary director, Wong Kar-Wai. I'm surprised I held out so long. I guess since it was my fourth time purchasing it on DVD, the urgency was not there. My intention was to watch it and write a new piece on it, but it occurred to me that I had already written about the film once before. Three years ago, a Korean Region 3 double-pack of this film and Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels was released, I was lucky enough to receive them for review [original publication here], and I wrote the following piece on the films as a pair. I liked the essay well enough that, rather than write a new article, I decided to reprint it here and add some additional thoughts after.

* * * *

Wong Kar-Wai fans will debate endlessly about his films. Not just the strange and elliptical plots, but the meanings of images and even further, how those images are presented on DVD. Most of his work hasn't been given the best treatment in the DVD age, a real crime when you consider the singularly beautiful work he has done with cinematographer Christopher Doyle. So, even though in most cases one has cause to groan when a bogus upgrade edition of a given Hollywood studio picture tries to tempt us into a double dip, when a Wong Kar-Wai movie finally gets done right, it's cause for celebration.

This new Korean twofer combining 1994's Chungking Express and 1995's Fallen Angels is a real boon for Kar-Wai aficionados. Finally, these two movies look the way we've always dreamed they could, and the new packaging is sleek and affordable. Coupling these two films together also makes sense, as they are interconnected in the usual amorphous Wong Kar-Wai way. When he was first shooting Chungking Express, the auteur intended it to have three distinct stories. When the first two grew too long to accommodate a third, the remaining narrative was spun off and put together with some other ideas to make Fallen Angels. Thematically, the two films are simpatico, like lovers who are so well-matched that they finish each other's sentences. Revisiting them back to back was a real treat, I must say.

I would call Chungking Express Kar-Wai's best pop single. While later films were concept albums and symphonies, this one was a summer 45 that you can play over and over, learning every word and only loving it more, much the way Faye Wong's character never stops listening to "California Dreaming" in the film. Its two story lines criss cross at only a couple of points, but they play off each other in fascinating ways. In the first chunk, a man and a woman find love but are unable to connect, while in the second the couple shares a bond before they even know what is happening.

The front of the movie concerns itself with a lovelorn police office, He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro, House of Flying Daggers) who is pining for May, a girlfriend who has broken it off with him. Zhiwu dials his voicemail repeatedly in hopes she left him a message and buys a can of her favorite fruit every day hoping to somehow connect with her. Each pineapple can must be dated to expire on May 1, his birthday, a deadline for his heartache to expire, as well. When May doesn't come back to him at the start of the month that bears her name, he eats all the pineapple and then goes out drinking. At the bar, he meets a woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin, The Bride with White Hair). Ironically, the cop's new love interest is a criminal who has lost her drug mules and needs to get out of town before the property's rightful owners catch up to her. Though they both may find tenderness in one another for the night, she will have to be gone by morning.

The second story comes in as the day passes. Zhiwu goes to a food stand to get something to go, and the proprietor suggests he date his cousin, Faye (Faye Wong, 2046). Mistaking her for a boy because of her short hair, Zhiwu passes, but as his narration informs us, it's what was predestined, as Faye is meant for another man. All four main characters in Chungking Express have voiceovers, all of them in the past tense, emphasizing thematically that these are stories that have happened, that like the cans of fruit they have end points, and like many of Wong Kar-Wai's films, Chungking Express turns on the importance of memory.

The man intended for Faye is Cop #663 (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Infernal Affairs). He was dating a flight attendant (Valerie Chow, To Catch a Thief) who recently chose a different flight plan, and he orders endless cups of black coffee in an effort to stay awake in case her plane lands and brings her back to him. Intrigued by this sad gentleman, Faye takes advantage of an odd opportunity: the flight attendant left #663's spare keys at the food stall. Faye begins sneaking into his apartment, cleaning up after him and altering his life in subtle ways. Eventually, he will begin to notice, and we hope and pray it will be too late for him to resist her.

Chungking Express is a supremely romantic film, and I fell in love with it from the first time I saw it. Faye Wong, in particular, is enchanting. With her pageboy haircut and slim figure, I'd dare compare this debut to Audrey Hepburn's in Roman Holiday. She has that kind of presence onscreen.

By comparison, Fallen Angels is a far more erotic film. If Chungking Express is the pop 45, then Fallen Angels is its B-side. It's a little darker, a little more weird, with Wong Kar-Wai both stretching his legs and thematically summing up his work to that point. Stylistically, there is a marked difference between the two films that you'll notice right away. The camera moves more in Fallen Angels, and it travels faster through the scenery. When it settles, Kar-Wai and Doyle favor extreme and distorted close-ups. They also blanket the movie in more garish colors, laying hot reds and bright greens over scenes. The result is a story that feels far less grounded. Fallen Angels takes place almost exclusively at night, and so it's concerned with the kinds of characters who are active while the rest of us are home resting. Their Hong Kong is more like an Earthly purgatory than a living society. Unsurprisingly, these people are disconnected and operating by habit, waiting for a change.

Kar-Wai connects Fallen Angels to Chungking Express by a couple of well-chosen echoes. The most obvious is the return of Takeshi Kaneshiro as another character named He Zhiwu. Rather than a heartbroken cop, this Zhiwu is a petty criminal. When he was five, he ate a can of pineapple that had passed its sell-by date and the resulting illness left him mute; being unable to talk, he can't run a regular business, so instead he chooses to break into other people's shops after they close and force passersby to sample his wares. By playing at usurping other people's existences, he can put his own on pause.

Another echo is in the female half of an assassin partnership. The unnamed girl, played by Michelle Reis (also in Takashi Miike's City of Lost Souls), is the advance agent for the team, finding the target and investigating the scene. Wearing fluorescent cleaning gloves, she goes through the target's trash to learn about him. Whereas Faye removed #663's rubbish to get closer to him, this girl embraces a man's trash in order to eradicate him. The same hands she uses to sift through garbage are the ones she uses to regularly pleasure herself, the only way available to her for unleashing her desire.

You see, the two killers have never really met. They don't want emotions getting mixed up in what should be a cold, calculated business. Only, it backfires on them and there is still a connection between the duo, whether they like it or not. Trouble comes when Ming (Leon Lai, Leaving Me Loving You), who does the actual killing, decides he has had enough and wants to get out. He attempts to change his habits, and even hooks up with another girl (Karen Mok, So Close), her dyed blonde hair a visual rhyme on Brigitte Lin's wig in Chungking. Such allegiances are fleeting, however, and Ming will inevitably be drawn back to where he belongs.

Zhiwu also attempts a relationship with a girl. Charlie (Charlie Yeung, Seven Swords) is a motor mouth, just like Ming's blonde, and we're never quite sure that the "Blondie" that Charlie is trying to hunt down for stealing her man isn't in fact Karen Mok. She, too, will move on, only returning later in a stewardess outfit, nearly unrecognizable and also not recognizing Zhiwu at all. In voiceover (employed here much like it is in Chungking Express), he refers to her as his first love, which means she is also his first heartbreak. How fitting, then, that she would leave him stranded in the same food stall where Faye and #663 fell for one another.

Forgetting matters of the heart, however, Zhiwu is the only one who is compelled to chase a real connection. He lives with his widower father (Chen Man Lei, In the Mood for Love), and by using a video camera to film the old man, he creates a roundabout mode of communication. He has also found something that all of Wong Kar-Wai's heroes are searching for: a way to preserve memory.

End of Fallen Angels with the Yaz cover song

Though often pushed down to the lower levels of Wong Kar-Wai's canon, Fallen Angels is one of his most visually exciting movies. It is also one of his most lusty, only rivaled by the director's segment in Eros and 2046. Even more important, though, I would posit that Fallen Angels may be Kar-Wai's most hopeful movie. Though some ambiguity remains at the end, the movie leaves the viewer with a sense of elation, buoyed by the doo-wop cover of Yaz's "Only You," a sweet love song. It's quite possible the characters that remain have found their connection at last, and maybe even the route out of purgatory.

* * * *

One of the two Criterion-added features for the Chungking Express disc is a twelve-minute segment from the BBC television series Moving Pictures. Shot in 1996, it was released in anticipation of the British premiere of Fallen Angels and fittingly focuses on both it and Chungking Express. In the piece, Kar-Wai takes us on a tour of Hong Kong to see many of the actual locations used in Chungking, including the store where Brigitte Lin gets in a shoot-out, the Midnight Express food stand, and Tony Leung's apartment, which just so happens to be Christopher Doyle's apartment.

There are two things besides this guided tour that make the program especially revealing for Kar-Wai fans. The first comes from seeing the Kar-Wai/Doyle style aped by people other than the artists that perfected it. In a misguided attempt to spice up the profile, the BBC crew tries to match the film exposure and the neon look of Chungking, and it doesn't work. In fact, it looks especially cheap when placed next to actual clips from the movie. It makes it clear that this aesthetic is not something achieved by accident, but requires careful choices and a clear knowledge of the technology and how to manipulate it.

The second revelation is connected to the first. Over the years, I've encountered several guys who have a chip on their shoulder about Wong Kar-Wai. For whatever reason, they've decided that he's a hack and the real talent is Christopher Doyle. Their theory relied on a hope--to them, a belief--that Kar-Wai would fall on his face without Doyle. When their partnership ended abruptly during 2046, it would be the end of the director's long con, and it would be proved once and for all that Doyle carries all the skill. This is, of course, a groundless assertion, and one that is not proven either by the completed 2046 nor My Blueberry Nights.

It's also not borne out in this BBC piece, where we see the two men together. In one way, they are a study in contrasts. Kar-Wai is a careful speaker, slow in manner, and not just because English is his second language. There is a serene aura around him, and also a reserve, as evinced by his ever-present sunglasses. Doyle, on the other hand, is quick to speak, a joker, and gregarious. As artistic temperaments go, it's no surprise that they end up being complementary, practically being two halves of one whole; likewise, it's not surprising that they would eventually clash. By various counts, their split occurred because Doyle was done with moving at Kar-Wai's speed. The director's meticulous and often contradictory capricious nature was no longer tolerable to the cinematographer.

To listen to them talk, though, it's clear that their working relationship at the time of Fallen Angels is very much in sync. The ideas generally originate from Kar-Wai, and Doyle finds the way to execute them. It's more than one man explaining what he sees, however, and the other figuring out how to make those visions a reality. By the time of this feature, it sounds like they were trading off, experimenting together, sharing one vision. Kar-Wai talks of lenses, Doyle talks of narrative symbolism as represented by shot composition. In a way, it reminds me of the classic comic book model, where the writer and artist are separate. In my own work, I know where my strengths lie, but just because I can't draw doesn't mean I don't have something to contribute to the visuals; likewise, just because the artist didn't generate the script, it doesn't mean she couldn't refashion the story in interesting ways. Neither of us could likely fill in for the other if our compatriot called in sick, we're still essential each to each, but we aren't as far apart as all that, either.

I suppose it's fitting that these two collaborators would eventually split and go their own way, and that time would be a factor. One side was unaware of time, seemingly believing he had as much as he wanted, the other side was too aware of how it could run out. One side was content where he was, the other had to go. Still, why they were together, they shared one way of seeing, and that was important to them, both in terms of how they got stuff done and how that affected the work thematically. Think about how many times a Wong Kar-Wai/Christopher Doyle film hinges on the way people see each other, how many shots there are of one person peering through a particular object to see the other. Like Faye Wong peering through soap-covered glass trying to make Tony Leung come into focus. They are on two separate sides but wish they were on the same. That's the yearning passion of a Wong Kar-Wai movie made simple, and it's what both pulls his characters together and ultimately, more often than not, pushes them apart.

* * * *

One day I'd like to do a project where I rewatch all the Wong Kar-Wai films in order and write about them again that way. One day. For now, most of the links in this review go to previous pieces I've done about his movies, so they will have to do for now. One not mentioned: Ashes of Time Redux.

Comics artist Adrian Tomine draws Faye

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES - #484

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:53:00 +0000

When most movies claim to be "a day in the life," they don't really mean it. Or, at least, they don't mean what the phrase implies, that what we will see is an average day. There is usually something out of the ordinary, some kind of catalyst for change. In her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman gets around this problem by depicting three days in the life: the first day normal, the second day harboring the shift, and the third putting a lid on it. It's an amazing study of one widow's crippling boredom and the humiliation of her day-to-day struggle.

It's the routine that is important to Akerman's portrait. Jeanne, played with a weary realism by Delphine Seyrig, has lived alone with her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte), now in his late teens, for the six years since her husband died. Still in the same apartment in Belgium, still sticking to the regular life of a housewife. Rise early, prepare breakfast, polish her son's shoes, send him to school, do the shopping, enjoy lunch and a coffee, prepare dinner in anticipation of Sylvain returning home, etc. It's the same day-in, day-out, and Jeanne approaches each task with a careful certainty. Perhaps the psychology is best revealed in how she sets out the dinner table, carefully retrieving each piece of dishware from the cupboard, placing them where they need to go. She says nothing, experiences neither joy nor pain, she just moves from one step to the next, fully aware that when the meal is done, she will put everything back, reversing the order, the circle complete.

Sounds normal enough, but I left out an important detail. Each afternoon, Jeanne has a different gentleman caller. They disappear into her bedroom together, spend enough time behind the closed doors for the sun to have changed positions, the once bright apartment having gone dark, and then they emerge, the man pays Jeanne for her services, and he silently leaves. Continuing with the ritual, Jeanne puts the money in a pot on the dinner table, which she will dig into the following morning to give Sylvain some cash for the day. Whether the boy has any inkling of how his mother has been earning their way since his father passed is not known. Perhaps he wonders, perhaps he has an idea, there isn't much communication between them, they are stuck in a routine of their own. Depending on his awareness, though, we can read the one frank conversation between them in a variety of ironic ways. He details how he first learned about sex at the age of 10, and how it seemed to him a violent and frightening act, so much so that he hated his father for it and contrived reasons to sleep with his parents so they could not couple. Jeanne tells him that he need not have worried, a loaded statement that itself could have a variety of interpretations. Perhaps in marriage she accepted no less unctuous a fate than she has accepted now. Maybe it was loveless, and her refusal to remarry--she claims she can't see getting used to another person at her age--is not to honor the deceased, but to avoid another boring non-romance.

This heart to heart is a crucial scene precisely because it is the only time either character opens up. Yet, it does little to bridge the distance between them, just as the viewer can't traverse the distance Akerman and writer Danae Maroulacou has put between their subjects and their viewer. We are mere observers here. Any internalization that appears on screen is not shared, all we have is external. We have the action and the unexplained reaction, and then we have our interpretation. Akerman has cinematographer Babette Mangolte always keep her camera somewhere in the middle distance. There are no close-ups, no emphatic zooms, no elaborate tracking shots following Jeanne from one room to the next. The best we can hope for is to be in a position where the camera can turn and watch her walk away and then wait for her to come back. (The apartment practically becomes an added character, hence the importance of the address in the title; also, note that Jeanne lives on "Commerce Street.")

Akerman favors long takes, letting us see each duty unbroken, the details piling on each other. It's not that each tiny action is important unto itself, but it's the cumulative effect. The director marks the end of each day with a title card. Jeanne going to bed is like punching a time clock at a factory, and then we jump to the next day, punch back in. The tedium of her labors, her lonely toil, these things add up. She and her son barely speak, nor does she exchange any words with her johns. When a neighbor drops her baby off so Jeanne can watch the child while she does her shopping, the woman on the other side of the door, whom we never see, talks Jeanne's ear off, but Jeanne barely responds. Yes, it's all rather boring, and it's meant to be so, so why the hell is it so riveting to watch? (And for more than three hours, no less!) I can only attribute it to the constant movement, that Jeanne is never really still. Even when she sits, Delphine Seyrig is still acting. We may not be privy to what thoughts are going through her head, but we can see that the thoughts are there. The actress gives a methodical performance, but it never appears as such. Delphine Seyrig is Jeanne Dielman. Some will say this movie requires patience, but for me, it passed without me noticing the time at all.

Through this, we come to understand how heavy Jeanne's existence weighs on her, and so it makes sense to us when a small break in the routine sets off a chain reaction the woman can't get out of. When a customer stays too long, Jeanne's potatoes for dinner are overcooked, and she doesn't have enough to make more. So, she has to hurry to the market to buy a new bag and get back in time to peel them and cook them before Sylvain gets home. Otherwise, they can't have the same veal dinner they have every week, each day having its own expected meal. More routine.

This small break from convention is enough, though. The predictability gives Jeanne something more to focus on than what she may be feeling, and when things get unpredictable, the wall crumbles. A simple thing like an empty bag of potatoes suddenly becomes the most important and tragic object in the whole world. It's a heartbreaking scene, Delphine Seyrig sitting alone with a pile of potatoes, fighting back the emotion as she peels them one by one. Jeanne Dielman has come unmoored, and now nothing is going to work as it's supposed to. She can't concentrate on any activity, and she tries to enforce the regular patter with Sylvain even though they are running late. She hasn't even had time to fix her hair, something the clueless son makes mention of. In fact, it's after this that he starts talking about sex as violence. It all keeps Jeanne off balance, and she stays off balance throughout Day 3, as well.

It's amazing to watch the way Akerman and Maroulacou break Jeanne down, and made all the more amazing by how Seyrig executes her performance. Eventually, Jeanne abandons her routine altogether and just sits and stares off into space. She has made two pots of coffee and neither of them taste right to her, she has searched all over the city for a particular button and could not find it, nothing is working. Her denial of her own unhappiness is no longer possible. So, she waits for that afternoon's appointment. Since we've now broken through, Akerman takes us to where we have not been allowed to go before: into the bedroom while Jeanne is working. Up until now, we have been spared witnessing that humiliation, and as a result, I think we've been able to accept it. Like Sylvain, we just don't ask, we only assume Jeanne is fine.

Seeing it now, though, we are witness to how decidedly unerotic the sex is. I guess that towel that we saw Jeanne clean, the one she puts under herself so as not to sully her bedspread, should have been a tip-off, but I don't think anything can quite prepare us for how flaccid even this routine has become. Again, though, we are left with more ambiguity. Stuck under today's hairy beast, who is practically comatose as he goes about his business (at one point I wondered if he had fallen asleep), Jeanne at first looks like she has checked out mentally, but suddenly, she starts to react. She screams and squirms underneath the john. She looks like she is uncomfortable and possibly in pain, but she also looks like maybe she is climaxing. It's another detail that is left up to us. Can she just not take it anymore, and this pig is too lost in his own endeavors to notice? Or has Jeanne's body betrayed her by reacting to his? Either way, something has gone wrong, and this can no longer continue. The sudden action Jeanne takes is shocking, and in so many other movies, would have been a cop-out left-field turn. Yet, all involved with Jeanne Dielman have been so careful in terms of building up to this moment, of chronicling how normalcy turns to chaos, of using the lengthy scenes and the extended running time to push Jeanne from point A to point B to point C, it's a stunningly acceptable move. We get it, we almost applaud it. I'll leave it to others to argue the feminist meaning of Jeanne Dielman; for me, any experience shared with such heartfelt accuracy is more humanist than anything. As one human to another, I empathize.

The final scene of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is another long take, this time of Jeanne sitting alone in the dark, contemplating what she has done. It goes on for several minutes, and Seyrig keeps cycling through this movement where her head lulls around in a hypnotic circle. As it goes around, the emotions on her face change. Acceptance, sadness, a hint of pleasure even? We're still outside, still witness to a breakdown, yet now we're in it, too. Once we stepped through that bedroom door, we became complicit, and now, despite how much we don't know, we feel it all. Somehow Chantal Akerman has transported us into Jeanne's chair, and as the credits come up, we find it's impossible to get up and leave. These three days have changed her, these three hours have changed us.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles comes to DVD via the Criterion Collection, and they have worked with Chantal Akerman to create a fantastic looking 1.66:1 image transfer. For a movie with such a limited set, it's fascinating that Akerman has chosen such a wide aspect ratio. She and Babette Mangolte likely did so in order to show us more detail, to let us see a whole room; at first, it feels expansive, but as the movie goes on, as we get to know the apartment more, it starts to feel claustrophobic. The place really is quite small.

Anyway, all of that would be moot if this weren't such a good looking disc. The image is cleaned up nicely, the colors look great, and there is only a hint of haziness in scenes of total darkness, the rest looks exceptional. The image has a little grain, maintaining the look of the original film stock, and I like how that adds to our accepting this as a time capsule of the period in which the film was produced.

The final extra is Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Village), Chantal Akerman's first film. This short, made in 1968 and starring the director when she was eighteen years old, is an antecedent to Jeanne Dielman in terms of its limited style and being a portrait of one woman; it is also the later movie's polar opposite. As Akerman notes in her video introduction, whereas Jeanne Dielman is about maintaining established routines, Saute ma ville is about tearing everything down. The short subject shows its youthfulness, it has an almost punk-rock energy and, while I wouldn't call it nihilism, there is an adolescent sense of tragedy at work here. The film's sole character is seemingly on some manic high, destroying her apartment in preparation for destroying herself. There is a much silly comedic business (Akerman calls it "Chaplinesque") that adds to the violent shock of the last two scenes. Even then, though, Akerman lets the movie fade out with an incongruous audio snippet of herself singing, followed by recited credits, suggesting perhaps a Godard influence coming to the fore.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

REPULSION - #483

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:21:00 +0000

Had everything I'd read about Roman Polanski's 1965 creeper Repulsion not tagged it as a horror film, I am not sure I would have realized it was one. Certainly not in the first twenty minutes or so, when Catherine Deneuve's silent, petulant wandering seemed more like affected malaise than a supernatural dread. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I could watch a pretty blonde girl bite on her fingernails for far longer than is probably natural. It also serves Polanski's greater purpose: he is establishing a tenuous reality that the rest of Repulsion will soon be dismantling.

Deneuve plays Carol, a transplanted French beauty who lives in London with her sister, Helen (Yvonne Furneaux). Carol works in a high-class beauty salon, where she is a manicurist for gaudy rich women who alternately treat her as a servant and as a child, demanding she jump at their command and then listen to their advice about men. It's wasted advice, however, since Carol is already wary of the male species. From what Polanski and director of photography Gilbert Taylor show us with their camera, it's with good reason, too. Adopting Carol's point of view, we see 1960s London as a predatory jungle where sweaty bruisers cruise for chicks. Their unwelcome gaze, their even more unwelcome comments, even their unwelcome toiletries--Helen's boyfriend Michael (Ian Hendry) is leaving his razors and things in their bathroom, crowding Carol's personal items--men are constantly encroaching on Carol's existence. Even Colin (John Fraser), the nice guy who is trying to score a date with Carol, runs with wolves. Cutaways to him and his buddies in the pub might as well be set in the locker room for all the randy talk that goes on.

Signs that something is wrong start out normal enough. Hearing Helen and Michael have sex through the walls keeps Carol up, and that's enough reason not to like anyone. Even Carol's fascination with cracks in the sidewalk is understandable: when you're bored, the smallest things become alluring. Even if we don't understand what it is yet, Carol senses that her world is about to shatter. Helen is planning a trip to Italy with Michael, and Carol does not want her to go. Then she will be truly alone, there will be no one else in the apartment, and whatever is waiting to come in, will.

Here Carol's visions grow more sinister. The walls around her start to crack and crumble. The mirror, portrayed in this film as a private place where a woman can gaze at herself and no one else can look back at her (even in the elevator, Helen checking herself in the mirror seems a legitimate way to turn away from Michael; and, indeed, his bathroom stuff is crowding Carol's own mirror space) is now revealing a shadowy figure lurking in the background, intruders in both physical and reflected space. (Again, Michael's earlier presence foreshadowed this sense of unease in her own home; she never knows when he's going to be there.) As Carol gives up and locks herself in, even things that are really there start to decay, to become symbols of her madness--the over-flown bathtub (why not drain it?), the rotting rabbit carcass (why not throw it away?). As the reality grows more sickened, the visions get more violent. The figure comes out of the shadows and violates her. This lack of security makes any real visitor, even someone she knows, a potential threat and not to be trusted. Carol must fight back.

It's easy to flash forward and compare Repulsion to Rosemary's Baby, another Polanski film about a woman who may be going mad and who has visions of a demonic force taking advantage of her sexually. In that later movie, the satanic element is confirmed as real, however, and in Repulsion, we can never be sure if any of this extends beyond Carol's mind. Sure, she wakes up on the floor, undressed and not sure how she got there, after one of the attacks, but she has also blacked out, and there is no other evidence of what happened. Though there are many tell-tale signs that Carol could be cursed--from the rabbit to the gruesome object she carries in her purse--there is no explanation of who might have cursed her or why. I hesitate to even use the word curse when talking about a movie that is portraying feminine problems, as that carries connotations that aren't in the picture. Polanski and co-writer Gerard Brach are more concerned with the outside societal influence that has driven Carol to this state, and they make no suggestion that this is something being perpetrated by her own body.

On top of the lecherous behavior of the men she encounters, Carol seems stuck in a woman's role, trapped by outmoded ideas of what a girl like her should be doing with her life. Working in a salon, with an emphasis on beauty and appearance, demoralizes her. When she first shows signs of "trouble," the use of the word, particularly by her boss (Valerie Taylor), implies pregnancy. Carol should be a happy girl, and if she's mopey, it's because she's gotten up to things she shouldn't have. So, on one side, the men expect it of her, and on the other, the women condemn her for what is expected.

Given Repulsion's portrayal of madness and how it specifically relates to a woman in a changing world, a natural comparison would be "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In that short story, published in 1892, a woman is confined to one room because no one around her understands the nature of her mental problems, and the writer tracks the descent into madness that inevitably takes place the more isolated she becomes. There is even a point where things begin to come out of the walls, much like a later scene in Repulsion. This film also reminds me of The Hours, both the book and the movie, and the way it depicts how the expectations in the lives of a trio of women weigh on them. In the one stunning scene of the very flawed movie (and a scene not in Michael Cunningham's book), director Stephen Daldry shows Julianne Moore's psychosis as a rising flood consuming her and the room she sleeps in. This one scene could also sum up Repulsion, and could even be said to echo the bathtub in Polanski's movie. One interesting distinction, though: all of these other women have connections, have people and family they are beholden to, and still feel alone. Carol really is alone, totally disconnected from all others, and she has no idea how to change that. The closest she has is her sister, hence her urgency in trying to keep Helen from leaving.

Horror movies are often just depictions of madness made real, anyway. So many of the best and spookiest ghost stories follow characters that see things no one else can see, and then ending with a big question mark about whether any of it actually happened or not. The scene that Helen and Michael return from Italy to find is typical of that, with nobody besides Carol being privy to what happened (and strangely, Michael maybe turning out to be a kind of hero...?). The technique Polanski employs to capture the bending of Carol's mind is straight out of the carnival funhouse: distorted angles, extreme close-ups, mirror tricks, gooey walls, disembodied limbs belonging to unseen attackers. The black-and-white photography has a sharp, kitchen-sink grittiness, with on-the-street scenes straight out of the Nouvelle Vague; yet, Repulsion is very pretty at the same time, with Polanski lovingly framing Catherine Deneuve in extended shots where the viewer can just sit and stare at how beautiful she is (making us members of the demons lying in wait just out of frame?). It's the visual dichotomy of the movie: the loveliness of the individual vs. the ugliness of the world. As an actress, Deneuve seems to understand this split. She knows how she looks, she also knows how she feels, and she is not afraid to let both the outward and the inward exist simultaneously.

Repulsion is an often delirious, altogether creepy little movie, with a fair share of "gotcha!" scares and plenty of grotesque imagery that insinuates itself into one's brain. "Haunting" is a good word. The residual of its frights lingers. At the same time, it has a psychological depth that goes beyond bumps in the night. In its portrait of one woman at odds with her own mind, it gets underneath the surface of most horror stories and points to where the fear really comes from. It may be called Repulsion, but trust me, you're going to find yourself drawn completely in.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

L'AVVENTURA - #98/THE BIG SLEEP

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 22:09:00 +0000

This article was written to cross-post with the Robot 6 comics blog, where I am the guest writer for a week, promoting my new comic book, You Have Killed Me.

AND HER TEARS FLOWED LIKE WINE: MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI DIRECTS THE BIG SLEEP

"Yes, and her tears flowed like wine
She's a real sad tomato, she's a busted Valentine
Knows her mama done told her, that the man was darn unkind"

When it came down to writing You Have Killed Me, style came before plot. Joëlle Jones and I knew we wanted to do a comic book that paid tribute to the private detective lore that we loved, but we had to decide how. No irony, no modern context, no gimmicks--we wanted to do it straight. But how straight was too straight? Where does homage become rip-off?

Before I sat down to type a word, I had what could be called "the Hollywood pitch." It's that thing they do in the picture business, where everything is broken down into two comparable things and, by their combination, we can believe the new thing will be twice as successful as the old. I want to make Movie C, and it's Movie A meets Movie B.

You Have Killed Me is Michelangelo Antonioni directing The Big Sleep.

That's how the pitch began, and it's the descriptive that has stuck with the book since. I've said it often, and it still holds true.

If The Big Sleep isn't the quintessential private detective movie, it's at least the quintessential Bogart and Bacall movie. Directed by Howard Hawks, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler and adapted by three writers, including William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett (the writer of Rio Bravo and later, the most non-quintessential Philip Marlowe picture, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye), it was released in 1946. Though it has shades of film noir, it's not a snug fit in terms of that artistic movement. Not as dark, not as cynical, it's rooted more firmly in the pulpy traditions that spawned it. Humphrey Bogart stars as Marlowe, a PI that Chandler described as "a white knight in a trenchcoat," and indeed, he would come to embody the idea of the shamus as a sort of modern-day noble warrior whose armor has seen better days. Marlowe's outer shell can use a bit of a polish, but he essentially stands for something. Though The Maltese Falcon was the movie that made me fall for Bogie, over the years I've come to begrudgingly admit that The Big Sleep is the superior picture.

The plot of the film is anything but simple. Marlowe is hired by old man Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to take care of a blackmailer in possession of gambling notes owed by his youngest daughter, the petulant party girl Carmen (Martha Vickers). Turns out Carmen runs with a dangerous crowd, and on the first night of his trailing her, Marlowe ends up with two bodies on his hands and several more not long after. He also ends up trading barbs with Carmen's older sister, Vivian (Bacall). She's the one that Marlowe will fall in love with, and the one he hopes and prays isn't tangled up in this mess of gamblers, con artists, and wanton women any more than having a dizzy sister sitting in the middle of it.

Howard Hawks is a director who is as efficient as he is stylish. If there is anything that a visual storyteller should take away from his movies is his speed of delivery. There is hardly any time to pause for a breath in his best pictures. When he made His Girl Friday in 1940, he famously amped up the comedy by turning up the speed, instructing his actors to remove all the pauses after a line, for the first word of one bit of dialogue to come immediately on top of the punctuation of the preceding dialogue, resulting in two pages of script for every one minute of film, as opposed to the usual one-to-one ratio. He sticks to that kind of speed in The Big Sleep. It's particularly noticeable in the male/female dynamic, just as it was in Friday, though now it's Bogart and Bacall rather than Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

This keeps the story moving at a pace that keeps the audience as confused as the hero they are following, but since it's coming so rapidly, there's no time to pause and worry about it. Hawks and his writers expertly insert exposition throughout the movie, layering it naturally into the conversation so we don't realize we're playing catch-up. I also like how Marlowe moves his case along, usually by pretending to know more than he does and playing his hunches, letting his target's reaction confirm what he suspects. He can be rather playful and tricky about it. It's a trait that was even more obvious when Dick Powell played the snooper two years earlier in Murder, My Sweet, and a tactic I borrowed for Antonio Mercer in You Have Killed Me. Vivian asks Marlowe, "You like to play games, don't you?" In response, he smiles slyly and says he does.

Outside of the dialogue, Hawks used his mis en scene to drop clues on his audience, to tease the confusion and evoke intrigue. He often did this by hiding details, by only showing part of the picture. Watch the scene outside the house of the effete bookseller, when the first murder happens, and look at the details that both the moviegoer and Marlowe are privy to, thanks to Hawks and editor Christian Nyby. A flash of light, a gunshot, a scream, a door opening, feet running by, a speeding car. We don't yet know anything, but we know someone was killed, a girl saw it, and someone else got away. It's a very quick scene, and you could isolate each element into a single comic book panel to achieve the same effect. The details are specific. It's obfuscation through precision.

Conversely, Antonioni's 1960 film L'avventura is precise in its obfuscation. It explores, but it avoids discovering. The object is to go through the motions of looking for the answers while trying to eventually create as much distance between you and them as possible--though, whether the characters know that or not is up to interpretation. At one point, the main male figure refuses to tell his new lover he loves her. Why? Because she already knows!

Here is the story: society girl Anna (Lea Massari), her fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her sister Claudia (Monica Vitti) go out on a daytime boat trip with their affluent friends to visit some rocky islands out in the middle of the ocean. When it comes time to leave--the visual/narrative symbolism: a shark sighting drove them out of the water and to shore, a weather change is forcing them back to the boat--Anna is nowhere to be found. Is she hiding? Did she fall off the cliff? Did she find another way off the island? There are no clues. Claudia knows that Anna and Sandro were fighting, so whatever measure her sister took, Claudia blames her future brother-in-law. Determined to prove his dedication, Sandro goes looking for Anna, and he eventually reconnects with Claudia. They follow some leads--a newspaper reporter points them to a druggist in a nearby town--but only end up in each other's arms. First Claudia denies Sandro, but she is drawn to him, perhaps drawn by the common bond of searching for Anna. Ultimately, though, she stops denying her desires, and as she does, not only does the search for the missing girl all but sputter out, but Claudia finds herself in her sister's same boring shoes.

I wanted to construct the dilemma of You Have Killed Me's missing debutante, Julie, to be like Antonioni's. Keeping the same two sisters device that both he and Chandler used, I had an older sister disappear from a locked bathroom. The younger sibling is in the bedroom outside of it, and to get out, Julie would conceivably have to pass Jennie. There are no other doors, no other windows, only a sheer cliff's drop to the ocean on the other side of the wall. Engaged just the way Anna was, about to be married, what made Julie run?

I was pretty conscious of the basic conceit I was lifting from Antonioni (who wrote the screenplay alongside Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra), but until I watched the movie again to write this column, I wasn't aware of how much the Italian filmmaker tapped in to the noirish tropes and how much I had really absorbed on my single viewing of the movie eight years ago. For a film that I've touted as one of my favorites, my memory of L'avventura was patchy, to say the least. For instance, I had no recollection of the overbearing father (Renzo Ricci) in L'avventura, and the conversation between he and Anna at the very start of the movie sets up a conflict that is similar to much of what is hinted at about Julie's past with the jilted detective, Antonio Mercer, in You Have Killed Me. Antonioni is establishing a conflict between old tradition and modernity, between the past generation and the present. Daddy wants Anna to marry someone that fits her station, Anna will marry Sandro just to spite him.

Because she clearly doesn't love him anymore. From what we see, Anna barely knows what she feels. As Antonioni sees them, people have become disconnected and out of touch with one another. Anna has cold feet, most likely because Sandro offers a marriage of convenience and a life that will trap her with its conformity. There is a scene where a distraught and lonely Claudia walks through an art gallery where baffled admirers look at abstract art. It appears to be leaping off the canvas, but yet confined by the square frame (not unlike a dynamic comic book panel). At the same time, the gallery building is crumbling and decomposing, and the stucco pattern on its walls could swallow the art into its own dying swirls if the barriers could be broken down. The threat of conformity is everywhere. Did Anna choose to run rather than be swallowed by it? Or did she choose the flux of the ocean, the ever-changing sea, as an escape? Is this the same choice Julie saw herself facing in You Have Killed Me?

There are signs of a certain age ending everywhere. The sisters talk of summer ending, inspired in this sad thinking, a rumination on carefree youth passing, by the shark that swims by, sniffing for blood. The encroaching modernity pops up again and again, often with a sexual or predatory guise, be it the foreign man who tries to trick the young girl on the train or the hungry pack of fellows making a spectacle out of a high-price hooker. Claudia will experience the same thing when left alone in one of the towns she and Sandro are searching, and she will also see the disrespect of lust up close when she meets the young artist who paints only nude pictures of women, and yet has no reverence for art. Anyone can pick up a brush, he says. Throughout, Antonioni uses motifs that suggest that his characters are at once pushing something old away and embracing something new, but that their eagerness to be free of puritanical restrictions has caused them to leap before they look. They are running to embrace new values, but they don't know what they are. There is a recurring image of Claudia closing a door on infidelity, first with Anna and Sandro and then with her friend (Dominique Blanchar) and the painter, and it's both her trying to keep these indiscretions a secret and to outrun them.

Antonioni also uses various touches straight out of crime stories to mark the path Claudia and Sandro are searching. Dishonest smugglers, disinterested police, rendezvous by train, and, of course, doppelgangers. The expensive prostitute looks like Anna, a more mature brunette to Claudia's younger-looking blonde. There is even some confusion with the druggist--was the girl he saw a blonde or brunette? A customer or his mistress? In addition to trying on her sister's boyfriend, Claudia tries out being her, wearing a shirt Anna gave her, and even once donning a brown wig. These sisterly entanglements are all basically variations on a theme, and though they may end up in different places, the Sternwood girls in The Big Sleep and the Roman girls in You Have Killed Me are all part of the same sorority.

The difference may be that in L'avventura, neither Anna nor Claudia is aggressor or victim, there is no crime or jealousy that passes between them, except for maybe a little early jealousy on Claudia's part. I suppose some argue that Anna gets out of Claudia's way and makes room for the romance, but Claudia might do better to interpret Anna's actions as a warning rather than opening any doors (the ones you keep closing, Claudia! Yeesh!). Once Sandro and Claudia fully embrace their passion, Claudia starts to regret it, starts to see that Sandro is just a man who goes through the motions. He laments that modern buildings aren't built to last--another case of where modern ideas are fleeting compared to the solid structures of yore--yet refuses to be an architect and design his own; instead, he prices out the ones others design. So, when Claudia wants to retreat to a new life, to stay indoors and avoid social obligation, Sandro returns to it, he doesn't change at all. Now that he changes his tactic and tells her he loves her, he's pretty much said the romance is dead. Claudia can choose to crawl in the casket with him, to accept the ennui and sadness, or she can follow Anna.

I made mention of how Howard Hawks and his editor used their cutting technique to tease out the information, to make scenes more exciting and heighten the mystery. Given that this is an article that is also comparing comics to film, I'd be remiss not to note that both directors would be nothing without their cinematographers, just as a comics writer would be nothing without his artist. In The Big Sleep, Hawks uses Sid Hickox's sense of shadow and his expert maneuvering of a confined place to create sinister scenes where the room often seemed to close in on the two people trapped inside it, leaving them alone with their secrets. On the flip, Aldo Scavarda creates a world for Antonioni that is expansive and alienating, gritty with its own detritus. The hallways of the estate at the end of L'avventura dwarf Claudia, and her smallness emphasizes her shame (compare the hotel hallways and spatial grounds Sacha Vierny shot for Alain Resnais a year later in Last Year at Marienbad; last year at Antonioni's?); when Scavarda moves away from these wide shots and in for a close-up, the effect is that the subject appears to be giant, once again emphasizing their singularity in a world that does not fit them. Both understand the variables of black-and-white, even if Hickox is more starkly defined and Scavarda is trying to smudge the very air into gray.

Joëlle Jones is my cinematographer for You Have Killed Me, and though I am fairly certain that she has never seen either The Big Sleep or L'avventura, she might find kindred spirits in both of their cameramen. Like them, she carves out space with an expert eye, whether it be the cramped basement where Mercer gets the daylights beat out of him or the wide shots of cliffside houses and racetracks, the scary hallways of abandoned hotels or the glitz of a jazz club. Her main tool is pure ink, and so she has more in common with Hickox's clearly defined shadows, but her use of tones gives her some of the ambiguity of Scavarda. The pattern on a man's suit, the sparkle of a woman's dress--these things smudge the lines between good and bad, ugly and beautiful, moral and immoral. That's why the auteur theory always breaks down, be it comics or cinema--unless you do it all exactly yourself, there is a shared vision at work. From the novel to the screen, through a director's suggestion and out a camera lens, off my script page to Joëlle's bristol board--it's all interconnected.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 07/09

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:10:00 +0000

IN THEATRES...

* Departures, the Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language movie this year is good, but not great.

* Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Pirnce, an uneven bridge between films 5 and 7. Spirited direction can't save the slow-moving icky bits. Kissing is gross!

* The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's down and dirty drama about members of the bomb squad in the Iraq War. No politics, just soldiers doing a job. Prepare to spend two hours fully clenched.

* Moon, Duncan Jones sends Sam Rockwell to our orbiting satellite, and oh, what he finds there!

* Tetro, the new Francis Ford Coppola effort is written and directed by the maestro. Gorgeous to look at, but overambitious and frustratingly empty.

* Whatever Works confirms that Larry David and Woody Allen belong together. A light comedy from a master of light comedies.

ON DVD...

* The 10th Victim, a 1960s Italian mod sci-fi grandpappy to Running Man and reality TV. With Marcello Mastroianni reading comic books and Ursula Andress watching him.

* The Diary of Anne Frank: 50th Anniversary Edition proves that just because something is a classic, doesn't mean it's great.

* Grey Gardens (2009), the dramatic adaptation of the 1970s documentary is pretty good and definitely better than expected. Starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, both turning in exceptional performances.

* Mad Men: Season 2, in which the much-hyped show finally rises to its reputation. Brilliant.

EQUINOX - #338

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:50:00 +0000

I'm off to Comic Con International in San Diego, CA, where Joëlle Jones and I will be hanging out at the Oni Press booth to celebrate the debut of our new comic book, a little crime novel called You Have Killed Me. Two years in the making, an indie effort from our two pairs of hands, and I couldn't be more proud. (See more here and here.)

In honor of that, I thought I'd review another indie effort, though this one in a different field and a different genre. The low-budget, self-made Equinox is perhaps another of those cult classics with a back story that is more interesting than the film itself. (But then, if you stop and think about the term, we usually associate the term "cult" with blind believers that have been duped, don't we?) In this case, Equinox, or as the original version was called The Equinox…A Journey Into the Supernatural, is a late '60s monster movie put together by a group of guys who loved monster movies. The effort was spearheaded by Dennis Muren, who would later go on to work on Star Wars and change the way special effects were done at Industrial Light and Magic. This 1967 picture, written and codirected by Mark McGee, was more in line with old school effects as pioneered by Ray Harryhausen, far from the more refined tricks Muren would later develop. So, a heaping amount of the love for Equinox comes from the fact that the monster effects were done in stop-motion using clay figurines designed by Muren and largely animated by David Allen. And indeed, these make for the best parts of the movie, my favorite effect being the tentacled monster that destroys the house of Dr. Waterman (Fritz Leiber). Colorful and malleable, it's exciting in its almost innocent primitivism. The very fakeness of it suggests a world beyond our imagination.

Though, truth be told, the animation is where most of the imagination went. The Equinox borrows heavily from monster flicks of drive-ins past, but most obviously from Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon. (Good choice. Tourneur's film noir past also influenced me when writing You Have Killed Me, and eagle-eyed readers will note he gets a shout-out in the book.) The main version here, its title truncated to Equinox and released theatrically in 1970, actually beefs up the story some (if you can believe it), with producer Jack H. Harris (The Blob) hiring director Jack Woods (writer of Son of the Blob) to shoot a new version with the same actors and working around Duren's stop-motion sequences.

The Equinox story focuses on four college kids who go into the woods for a picnic and to meet Dr. Waterman, the professor of David Fielding (Edward Connell a.k.a. Skip Shimer), ostensibly the hero of this piece. They arrive to find Waterman's house destroyed, a strange cop named Asmodeus (Woods doubling as an actor), and an old man hiding in a cave (Louis Clayton). The old man gives them a demonic tome that is then stolen by Waterman, and all kinds of weird monsters start showing up--a kind of half lizard/half ape, a flying devil, a green Neanderthal. Orchestrated by Asmodeus (like his name wasn't a tip-off!), the gang manage to hold off this hellish army with crucifixes, rocks, and sticks for a while, but soon their numbers start dwindling. David escapes, but only just--and he takes a terrible death curse with him.

Equinox isn't very scary, nor is it even all that exciting. The closest we get to a real fright are the close-ups of Asmodeus attempting some malformed version of a French kiss when he tries to force himself on David's date for the day, the hot blonde Susan (Barbara Hewitt). Woods, being either an egomaniac or a genius, seemed to know this shot was gold, because he keeps going back to it, the horrifying memory of her near defilement haunting Susan. Given the breakneck pace of the movie (it's practically in real time), no other romantic subplot develops, so don't expect exploitative sexiness either. The closest we get is Dave pulling a crucifix out the front of Susan's pants. I guess she doesn't have any pockets…so to speak.

From a script standpoint, you pretty much get what you might expect from an amateur movie with a bunch of kids running around in the forest talking about a milquetoast devil and screaming. If that's your idea of fun, then you will probably dig Equinox. Its backyard vibe has a certain infectious charm. There are no hidden layers to it, however, no deep message, nothing to offset the fact that it's not too frightening or, really, very good at all. I mean, when your best actor is Frank Bonner, he who would be Herb Tarlek of WKRP, I guess you take what you can get.

Still, even more than 40 years later, it's plain to see Duren's skill at stop motion, and his enthusiasm lights up the screen whenever the effects shots take over. His creatures, especially the big simian known as Taurus, have cool designs, and the ambition of putting these clay creations in with real humans is pretty impressive. The lack of sophistication just reminds you that some guy made this, he carved it and made it move with his own two hands, and he did it back when hardly anyone else could. Equinox survives by and large because of that, because it's a quality you just can't get in the digital age. Even when people go old school, it's a gimmick, a conceit, no matter how genuine; it can never be the same kind of genuine.

Included here, and serving as an even bigger testimony to Duren and McGee's DIY ethos, is the original The Equinox…A Journey Into the Supernatural. Shot on a cheap camera and with a skeleton crew, the difference between the productions is immediately obvious. The 16 mm Bolex camera they used only allowed for 30 second shots, and so there is a faster pace to it, even as the amateur acting slows the movie down. (It's interesting how much younger the cast looks despite not that much time really having passed). In a way, it adds to the verite feeling of the production (the disc's liner notes make a point out of quoting New Wave directors in relation to their praise of amateurs). There is a natural, unmannered look to the cinematography that I think actually helps the action scenes to be a little scarier. The short shots don't allow for any lingering. Likewise, despite the more labored set-up--the explanation that gets Susan along on the trip is totally unnecessary--we get our first glimpse of the Lovecraftian monster destroying Waterman's house before we even reach the 20-minute mark.

Aw, who am I kidding. The Equinox…A Journey Into the Supernatural is pretty much unwatchable. Every time a conversation comes along, the movie stops dead. Without the Asmodeus character, there is also a lot less drive to the plot, less of a presence of an immediate threat; the expedition into the woods is more meandering, more random. Despite his own hammy performance, at least Jack Woods also had a better sense of how to work with his actors. If you're watching this DVD for the effects, you might as well stick to Woods' redo, as the picture is better preserved and the image more clear.

I realize that in these kind of situations, it can be rather dreary to have an old fart like me hanging about complaining about the quality of the production. Kind of like were someone to unearth new high school-era skiffle recordings of the Beatles and I spent more time complaining about the audio quality and their inability to play rather than fully appreciating that I am listening to/looking at where so many things started. The spirit of how Equinox came together is probably best exemplified by the eight-minute short included on disc 2 here, Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast from Hell. A lot of the same folks who worked on the main feature reteamed in 1972 for this goofy little movie, covering a lot of the same territory, proving that monster movies are in their blood--and apparently that they'd been watching a lot of Scooby-Doo. The closing shots of all the folks who took part, standing together and mugging for the camera, shows off the kind of heart that goes into these sorts of things.

Also buried on disc 2 is the real surprise of this set: The Magic Treasure, a 20-minute solo film by effects animator David Allen. This claymation short is a lovingly realized fairy tale about a giant, an evil magician, and a much coveted treasure chest that is said to hold the secret of humanity's true specialness. Allen has created an entire storybook world, and though the message is simple, it still has meaning. This is a child's fable, after all, without the pretensions of adulthood, without the need for long explanations that go on for pages.

The Magic Treasure is interesting in comparison to Equinox, as both involve secrets that can change man's life and the giants who protect them. It's just a topsy-turvy version, where here the secret is positive and the giant is good. The scenes where the giant confronts the evil magician who steals the box--a kind of Asmodeus, if you will, and just in like the bigger movie, his actions suggest that man brings ill upon himself when he only desires selfish gain--are not dissimilar to some of the scenes we've seen in Equinox. Compare the still below to the one above where Skip Shimer is being chased by the shade.

SIDELINE: AN INTERVIEW WITH YOURS TRULY

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:46:00 +0000

Mark Coale, proprietor of Odessa Steps Magazine has posted an older interview he did with me over on his Earth Three blog. The occasion is this week's release of my new comic book with Joëlle Jones, the hardboiled noir-homage You Have Killed Me, as well as San Diego Comic Con International, which Joëlle and I will be attending. You can see our signing schedule here. The above In the Mood for Love inspired drawing was done for Mark's publication, and the line art is being used as a con-exclusive bookplate, as well.

You can read the piece in its entirety on Mark's blog. He and I share a magnificent Criterion obsession, and he asks me a few question about that, as well.

Q: As of this writing [Summer 2008], what's the best Criterion you've watched lately?

A: I had a weekend where I watched Yukio Mishima's Patriotism and then Mishima, Paul Schrader's biopic of the Japanese author, back to back. In terms of packaging and content, both were excellent, and though I'd had some limited contact with Mishima in years past, these films made me realize I probably should delve deeper into his library. As a person and as a writer, he had a lot of similar concerns to what shows up in my work, including a romantic yearning to stand against the tide and to, essentially, stand for something rather than caving in to modernity. He was also preoccupied with suicide, as are many of my characters. If you watch Patriotism, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, and you see him playing a Japanese solider disemboweling himself, it's quite powerful, particularly when you chase it with the Schrader picture and all the extras that come with it and hear about how he ended his own life the same way. It's easy to see why his widow demanded the movie be buried while she was alive. The scene in Patriotism where he slices his belly open is gruesome, and not just by 1960s standards, but any standards.

Q: Here's the obligatory Desert Island question. What five Criterions would you take with you? Feel free to cheat and name box sets as one entry.

A: In the Mood For Love, dir. Wong Kar-Wai
The Cranes are Flying, dir. Mikhail Kalatozov
Days of Heaven, dir. Terrence Malick
Contempt, dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Sullivan's Travels, dir. Preston Sturges

The first three are pretty rock solid. Godard would also always take
the fourth slot, though there are a couple of others I might debate
over. I'd also be able to change the last slot a million times before
walking out the door, but I figure I needed a comedy in there.

I can't believe I've only reviewed one of those five. I'll have to do something about that!

Read a large preview of You Have Killed Me.

2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER - #482

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 05:24:00 +0000

"Language is the house man lives in."

This is the second time I've seen Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and I still am not entirely sure what to do with it. It's a complicated movie, obtusely structured, full of ideas and jarring storytelling conceits, but also aesthetically pleasing, glowing with bright colors and full of beautiful girls. At the end of the film Godard shot alongside this one, the (by comparison) more conventional Made in U.S.A., he made a declaration with a double meaning, "Left, Year Zero." Being as Anna Karina and Philippe Labro were discussing politics, it leads one to believe that it's a call to the radical thinkers to get back to basics, but since they are also in a car, it's a direction, turn left to get back to square one.

That declaration is also tied to the belief that language is dead, we need to redefine how we classify and communicate. These were ideas that were very much on Godard's mind as he headed for the death of cinema that was his kiss-off to the 1960s, Weekend. He was looking for a way to put cinema back at its reset point, to understand further how language transcends image, how both can push ideas across. In 2 or 3 Things, comic strips are mentioned as a prime example of the disparity between what is written and what is seen, between explanation and perception, form and function.

Though this twitchy film rarely sits still for long, we could break it down to two narrative lines. In one, Godard shows us construction and the changing Parisian landscape, as he speaks to us in hushed voiceover about progress, capitalism, and the way modern man being pushed to constantly go forward becomes a means for holding him back. In the other, he follows Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady) through her day, from doting mother and wife to prostitute and back home again. This idea came from a newspaper article Godard had read that detailed how life in newfangled high-rise projects demanded more money than most families could afford, and so women were turning tricks to make ends meet. Intrigued by this idea, how having a less personal space ended up costing people more money and encouraged drastic solutions, Godard made it the subject of this picture.

Juliette--or, as it were, Marina, since our introductions to the actress and the character are presented back to back, with little change to the description--is not the only working girl Godard's camera settles on. He and his regular cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, shoot 2 or 3 Things like a documentary, and each woman they meet speaks directly to the camera and the unseen maestro conducting her interview. In reality, Godard was speaking to these actresses through an ear piece, so that they could hear his questions and respond, or even parrot the lines he fed them. This is why they are often looking at the camera expectantly, not entirely in the moment. They are actually more present than most actresses, the façade having been wiped away, waiting for their prompt.

Though many of the elements Godard displays--construction, mechanics, commercials, fashion magazines, shopping, beauty parlors, Vietnam--seem disparate, in his theorizing, they are all combined. Progress demands consumption, consumption in turn has certain economic demands, and these economic demands lead to more oppressive politics, a way for the governing powers to further control the populace. In an early exchange, when Juliette's husband (Roger Montsoret) is listening to Lyndon Johnson talk about attacking North Vietnam, Juliette reads to him from a fashion magazine, wondering what stockings to buy. He can't believe she is concerned with such trivial things, she insists he has no culture. Godard wants us to see that it's in the interest of the powers that be to keep Juliette concerned about such superficialities, it keeps us from acknowledging the horrors that are occurring all around us.

Typing it out, I realize that this sounds vaguely like a crazy conspiracy theory, and there is something almost conspiratorial about this film. By whispering his narration, it's like Godard is inviting us into a huddle where he is sharing these volatile secrets. It also fits the faux documentary aesthetic, sometimes coming off like he doesn't want to disturb the characters onscreen or alert them to his presence. Some Godard theorists also think it's because he's grown less detached and more personal, that this is him confessing and telling his audience how he really feels. In Made in U.S.A., the taped confession was of a character and based on real-life political testimonies; in this case, it's all JLG.

There is an interesting line of inquiry to be followed in this film in terms of the sexual politics. It would actually be easy to paint Godard as a sexist himself. In Made in U.S.A., his last film with ex-wife Anna Karina, one interpretation sees him as portraying her as killing off his innocence. At the time of this film, Godard was nursing a broken heart and bruised ego after his new star, Marina Vlady, rejected his marriage proposal. Hence, it could be dirty editing room trickery to say she and her role are one and the same, to suggest all actresses are whores. This would mean the scene between husband and wife where Vietnam is considered less relevant by the woman than her leggings is Godard belittling women intellectually (and, indeed, the bespectacled Robert character, the mechanic who builds things while also clinging to his ideas and ideals, often looks like the director). I think this would be a false assumption, however, that it misses Godard's larger argument about capitalism vs. communism, and that all work is prostitution in its way. Robert doesn't own his own garage, after all, he toils for someone else the way a film director may toil for a producer or a studio.

If we're to accept a more positive view of the women in 2 or 3 Things, then it's a sympathetic ear Godard lends when he lets them tell their stories. He is also exposing the institutional crime that not only condones their subjugation, but perpetuates it; he prefaces many of their tales by pointing out how they are really just the same old stories we've heard before. Again, it comes down to our use of language and to communication. Near the end of the movie, he depicts two conversations in a café. One is between Robert and an unknown girl (Juliet Berto), and though it starts innocently enough, the man soon turns the topic to sex. Across the way, a student (Blandine Jeanson) talks to what is supposed to be a Nobel Prize-winning author (Jean-Pierre Laverne), but what begins as an exchange of theory turns into another chat about the banal. No one knows how to talk with one another anymore, especially not in the movies (or so says Robert).

Lip prints in my coffee...

This adds more meaning to when Juliette and the other working girls talk to the camera about the ideas in their heads, about their descartesian philosophical conundrums. Then again, if they think and therefore are, Godard gives us another troubling irony here. These girls aren't sharing their innermost thoughts, they are sharing what the writer/director tells them to share. Are we back to him saying women have no mind of their own? Let's not forget, he's also letting us ogle them, admiring their beauty with and without clothes, all for the price of a ticket (or, as it were, a DVD). Again, I don't think so, but one would hope it's not a contradiction lost on the director. The Bertold Brecht quote Juliette recites at the outset is another piece of evidence working in Godard's favor.

Godard's awareness is important becaue, ultimately, one of the main conclusions that the movie comes to, and one uttered by Juliette/Marina, is that what we see and experience and how we describe it not only effects us, but the world around us. And vice versa. When we build these cheaply made but overly priced commercial spaces that have no individual personality beyond the advertising that pushes us toward further consumption, it's no wonder we end up in an endless cycle of drudgery, unable to express ourselves, disinterested and shallow. In the final image of the film, Godard places an idyllic drawing of a loving couple in the middle of an arrangement of commercial products, a diorama of our materialistic lives. There we are, lost amongst the laundry detergent. These things take us back to zero, he moans, and we have to start over from there. Hit the button and go back to the start, or you'll end up so clean, scrubbed so sparkling white, you just might disappear.

"If by chance you can't afford LSD, then buy a color TV."

* The first time, it was because I was prompted by writer Matt Fraction. I told him I was working on a book called 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and he replied, "Oh, like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her?" I had to check and make sure they weren't alike; happily, they are not. Not that I couldn't steal from worse, but you know what I mean....

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

MADE IN U.S.A. - #481

noreply@blogger.com (Jamie S. Rich) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:37:00 +0000

"I understood very quickly. This affair had to remain murky for everyone, and my life was on the line."

Donald Westlake's Parker is the kind of guy who can never get a break. A bad dude who cleans many a house in all corners of the underworld, he starred in twenty-three novels, but you'd almost never know he had a movie career, too. Maybe it's some strange karma that, since Westlake wrote this crook's stories under the nom de plume Richard Stark, Parker's most famous cinema adaptations have changed his name to something else. The John Boorman flick Point Blank has Lee Marvin playing Walker, whereas Brian Helgeland's Payback cast Mel Gibson as Porter. Never mind that they were both based on the same novel, The Hunter, which was the start of the series. By all reports, poor Parker is faring better now that he's branching out into comic books. Darwyn Cooke's adaptation Parker: The Hunter is due to be released any day now, and by all advance reports, it's brilliant. (Read a preview at the publisher's website.)

In 1966, Jean-Luc Godard adapted a different novel, turning The Jugger into Made in U.S.A. and Parker into a woman in the process. Such are the things you can get away with when you don't bother to get the author's permission to turn his novel into a movie. Made in U.S.A. was reportedly barred from lighting up screens on this side of the Atlantic thanks to successful litigation by Westlake. I can't say I blame him, and from the looks of things, Made in U.S.A. is so far away from its alleged source material, I am not sure why Godard didn't just pretend he came up with it on his own.

In The Jugger, Parker travels to small-town Nebraska to silence an old heistman who knows too much about his past, only to find someone else has done the silencing for him. The question is, how much had the geriatric crook talked before the end came? In Made in U.S.A., Parker's stand-in is Paula Nelson, played by Anna Karina. She is visiting Atlantic-Cité to dig up the dirt on why her ex-fiancé, Richard P… (voiced by Godard on tape, but never actually seen) was put in that selfsame dirt. Paula is some kind of sexy secret agent, a smuggler perhaps, a sort of veteran of various wars. Richard was a communist, and though everyone involved with the murder and the cover-up act like gangsters, it's all political. It's the 1960s, and when looking through Godard's dark sunglasses, politics are the new criminal activity.

As with most Godard films, "plot" is of little importance in Made in U.S.A.. Paula has come to town, she's approached by a little man named Typhus (Ernest Menzer) who claims to have worked with Richard, she beats him with a shoe, she meets his novelist nephew (Yves Afonso) and his Japanese girlfriend (Kyoko Kosaka), hangs out in a café, hears an a cappella performance of "As Tears Go By" by Marianne Faithfull, eventually gets around to asking some questions. It's all rather loose and off-the-cuff, the driving force of the story coming back around almost like an afterthought. There are plenty of messages even when there is no story--advertising is overtaking everything, war is immoral, the times they are a-changin'--but as usual, they are so entwined within the medium, sorting it all out can seem both daunting and silly. The standard modus operandi of any private detective movie is that the more the shamus explains, the more obscured the facts become; Made in U.S.A. subverts this by never bothering to explain, it's only obfuscation. There is a little bit of voiceover, but it has a meta hue. Sometimes, it's not voiceover at all, but Paula or Widmark (Laszlo Szabo) turning to the camera and describing their conversation rather than having it. Likewise, a tape recording of Richard takes over the role of "narrator" once it surfaces, and in the final switch, Paula makes her own tape.

Made in U.S.A. begins with a dedication to Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, and it's the Hollywood tradition that they represent that is more important to Godard than the Westlake novel (and also likely where the title comes from). A Walt Disney film starring Humphrey Bogart is how Paula self-reflexively describes it, suggesting it's Bogie's presence that makes it a meaningful gangster picture. The gangsters played by Jean-Pierre Leaud and Laszlo Szabo are named for the director Donald Siegel and the great film noir villain, Richard Widmark. Jean-Claude Bouillon's police inspector takes his surname from Robert Aldrich. Most of the streets mentioned are also names of famous writers and directors--Ben Hecht, Otto Preminger, etc.* Daisy Kenyon and Ruby Gentry are women paged at a spa. Leaud's tic of shaking up a puzzle as he walks is like an overly complicated version of George Raft flipping a coin in Hawks' Scarface (which Raft would parody himself a year later in Casino Royale). In this film, perhaps more than any other, Godard is placing himself in the American cinematic milieu, letting it enfold him, and then kicking the crap out of it on his way out.

Given the political bend of the film, in addition to the American criminal mythology, American politics are also going to come up. Though Godard is none too thrilled with the conservative leanings of the French government, the war in Vietnam and the new rule of Richard Nixon has already taken the mark at the center of the world stage. The director's weariness over war is transferred to two hoods who are tired of the fighting, tired of chasing Paula. They are played by Sylvain Godet and Jean-Pierre Biesse, who are christened Robert McNamara and Richard Nixon, respectively. Maintaining a course of human misery requires a certain fortitude. Leaud's Siegel can't take it, only Widmark and Paula have the intestinal mettle to see this thing through.

Anna Karina wouldn't make a very convincing tough guy, and she doesn't really try for it. Her main weapons are her beautiful, smoky eyes, which are always watching, and her killer mod wardrobe, which is regularly commented on, its practical use being to distract. Though she seems indifferent at times, that is really unflappable persistence. At one point, she is clocked on the head and wakes up in Widmark's auto garage, and she's not really affected. She gets up and begins asking her questions right where she left off. Godard dresses her in bright colors, and he and his regular cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, give the rest of Atlantic-Cité a matching neon glare. Billboards and posters are everywhere, advertising something or other, but they are also starting to crack, peel, and fade. They are interchangeable props, often being changed and/or dumped as Paula watches. American values based on commercialism don't take long to go out of date.

Perhaps this is what Paula has really come to kill off, the creeping influence of American thinking. There must have been a bitter irony for Godard that the country that gave him his beloved art was seeking to mold the world to its capitalist ways through that same art. (I am sure the global market has made that all the worse for him; I can't imagine him enjoying a Starbucks and a Big Mac.) If we choose to see Paula as a stand-in for Godard rather than one for Westlake's anti-hero, then once she has avenged Richard, there is no choice but to retreat from this strange American amalgam to something more European. Having political-minded journalist and filmmaker Philippe Labro--who himself studied and traveled in the United States before returning to France and serving in the military in the Algerian war, a path that likely inspired much of Paula's backstory--pick her up at the border in a car with the word Europe painted on the side* is the kind of deliberate agitprop symbol that was becoming increasingly attractive to Godard at the time. The film ends with them in the car discussing how the two-way thinking of right and left has become outmoded. Yet, typical of a movie that has gone out of its way to avoid clear answers, so too are no solutions offered before cutting to black. Paula asks, "How then?" and the only reply: FIN.

"About Richard…I think it had to do with revenge. But this whole business of yours is not very clear."

So, Parker may not get his due in Made in U.S.A., but maybe he couldn't have handled it, anyway. This world is not black-and-white enough for most gangsters. There is no putting it right, one must be comfortable with the imbalance remaining. Crime pictures often end with realizations that all this running around robbing and killing is pointless, but there are still clear roles being played, and the underworld remains self-contained. In Godard's version, the pointlessness has spread, and it requires a disaffected Anna Karina and her deadly shoes to make her way through it. The usual toughs are too tired and too overwhelmed to get out.

* This reminds me of current practices in the Batman comics where they name Gotham streets after famous Bat writers and artists.

** The car logo is actually for Europe 1, the radio service Labro works for in real life.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

More Parker images inspired by the new graphic novel:

* Colleen Coover

* J. Bone