Niagara (1953). Credits. Attraction vehicle, the whole movie is nothing more than a set piece, to cash in on Niagara Falls. What makes it characteristically 50ish, gives it that pasteboard primness, is the showcasing by plot. You've got a big vista, a natural spectacle, and it'd be really great to get on film, but there needs to be a dramatic line of action for feature length. There's sort of one here. And of course, it's got to involve marriage. The spareness of the plot is apt in some ways, close, suits the banality of a holiday cottage scene, with gossip and unwitting involvement and all that, strangers as neighbors. There are some flushes of fresh banality, too, such as Joseph Cotton working on the model of the old car, and Marilyn Monroe fed up at one point tells him to go finish it. The falls as a symbol is so obvious and, well, gushing. You can see the cover of some romance novel of that period, with the word "torrent" somewhere. It falls somewhere between the intentness of a thriller, the testimonial of realism, and some operatic profuseness of that might have made it entertaining. There's one stretch of it when it really looks good: the scene in which Cotton murders Monroe. (Is that telling in some way? Of me?) The building they're in, the shadows and the color are really great in this one scene. [8/96]
Hobson's Choice (1954). Credits. Great blustering performance by Charles Laughton as an easy target for criticism. While there's a patness and predictability to the storyline, a working class social comedy, since there isn't really an antagonist, the film is interesting because of the social situations, the portrait from the acting and direction. The real lead is Brenda De Banzie, who plays a woman industrious enough to forge her own situation, even her own man, when the patriarchy gets in the way. John Mills is good as the painfully humble object of De Banzie's affection, if it can be called that. The ensemble is good at bringing off this northern English petit bourgeois, their pretensions and aspirations along with their accent (Manchester-like, and the town is supposed to be near there; there are references to Manchester and even, at one point, the Manchester Guardian). And on the way through the plot, which has a peculiar shiftiness, even if its results are anticipated, Lean elaborates cinematically. There's a couple of great sequences with Laughton: one when he leaves the pub very drunk, follows the moonlight from puddle to puddle and ends up falling through a basement access shaft; the other when he awakes in his bed with an apparent case of the DTs and sees a swarm of insects (with one enlarging on approach) and a giant mouse. These moments are cinematic flourishes like curious perceptions -- the hallucinations of the Laughton character -- similar to the moment in The Lavendar Hill Mob when the men are running down the spiral staircase of the Eiffel Tower, begin to laugh from the sensation, then the shot follows a hat flying off on the wind, like a wild, sudden tangent, a break from the logic. They have a psychological sense, but they also produce this figure of the break, opening up as if on some other realization.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987). Credits. Uses Barbie dolls for mock docudrama of Karen Carpenter's life story, mostly about her anorexia. Todd Haynes was sued over the story, by Matel Toys and the Carpenters' record companies alike for unauthorized use of actors and music. Offscreen manipulation of the dolls provides most of the motion and emotion. There is clever intercutting of real human parts, such as hands, to stand in for the dolls, and some funny montage effects, including a shot of a bare bottom spanking done doll on doll. At one point, drive-by shot of roadside has cutaways to doll looking out the window. Other reference material is collaged in: the rise of the Carpenters as stars; their visit to the Nixon White House; man-on-the-street and talking head mockups with full-size, self-animated types discussing anorexia nervosa. Best part is the set, clever detail for two-bit suggestion of lavish: the stage lights on Karen-doll singing, the decor of the 70s disco pad during a party scene. A perhaps inadvertent effect, however, is the collision of the parody with the anorexia material. There's a clever playing out of the correlation between anorexia and the body image provided by Barbie doll, and even some cross-implications of the problem of mastery and control of the body that is part of anorexia, presented explicitly by the film itself. But the effect of the doll drag is a mockery of superciliousness, of TV dramas and similar protrayals of already sensationalized lives, but also of these "lives" themselves, the sensationalism of the famous. The discourse on anorexia is thus framed in the same way, as part of the object of the parody. Not that analysis or discourse on anorexia can't be supercilious, as well, or part of some pathetic indulgence. Not that anorexia itself can't be seen as supercilious. But the information that is used and the way it's presented don't seem to distinguish this in any way. Haynes's later film, Safe seems to have inverted this whole problem. The effects of the "illness" are portrayed as the very anchor of the testament, their causes left mysterious and every discourse thrown into limbo. Here, the direct information of anorexia has no other coordinates: it's too flatfooted to be part of the parody, but has no other curve. [8/96]
Prick Up Your Ears (1987). Credits. Story of gay playwright Joe Orton, told through the frame of the writer who researched for a biography (played by Wallace Shawn) listening to anecdotes, primarily from Orton's agent (Vanessa Redgrave) and sister. The moves back and forth between tellers and the events they tell is flighty. It's best when these cutaways provide reactions to the Orton material, as when the sister's husband runs his kid off to bed as the biographer begins to talk about risqué matters, then returns to speak up about his own objections. There are incidental comments, as when the biographer's marriage seems to be taking a back seat to the Orton story and the story itself is bringing this out. All this is done in a slack way. The offhandedness is both good and bad. There's good material, but it's not extraordinary. Oldman's performance is good, from the days when he didn't act over the top and directors didn't let him. It seems the movie was meant to have the same character, that perceived of Orton, because Oldman's ease and confidence, his unbothered demeanor, is the temper of the whole thing, against which of course the lover, played by Alfred Molina, flails. The charting of the relationship is good, the banality of their tiny London apartment and that vantage of Orton's becoming famous. There's also nice sarcastic swipes at the Beatles, Orton's libertinism exceeding their own pretensions. [8/96]
Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Credits. Alfred Hitchcock is supposed to have said this was his favorite of his films. It's more subtle, at least on the broad scale, the plan, not as fanciful as more famous Hitchcocks, not as lurid as Suspicion, which its plot resembles. It's a strange combination of Thornton Wilder and Hitchcock. There's something stodgy about it, crisp, the camera well-planted, very '40s, in this respect, with clean, bland images, the Hollywood fixing into polished sterility. And also the squeaky primness of the people, the characters, but the actors who play them, as well. Joseph Cotton was a good choice for the lead role, but Teresa Wright is an exemplary 40s sweetheart, with personality like a starched shirt. Doesn't have the charm, the perverse twists, of the other Hitchcocks, and there's not really even the same fun with subtexts. Even in his other works, Hitchcock stays inside the Hollywood lines, where even surrealistic sequences have to be clearly distinguished, as dream, for example, in Spellbound. Here, the Cotton character is signaled, the way he responds to certain things, and with the music (the music is the most terrible thing about the film), but only in the most wooden way, psychologistic. There's nothing subtle about that, and nothing that really disturbs the border. [8/96]
La Jetée (1962). Credits. Ostensibly a science fiction movie, the extended trope of a moving picture made of still photographs lifts the story from the literal into allegory in an almost effortless way, without literary or dramatic exertion. The still photographs come "naturally," that is, serve other purposes in the plot. The plot is about travelling in time by memory itself so there's hardly any distance for the allegory to have to cover. The only fancy is the futuristic science that allows them to manipulate the protagonist's use of his memory, to "send" him. The still photos emphasize the memory theme, the tension and ambiguity of it, but especially the remoteness. He's remembering his own life like nothing but screen-memories, and that's all the "reality" we're given, as well. This has affinity with the récit, Maurice Blanchot and Marguerite Duras, and a whole French line of work between the symbolic and the real. [8/96]
Mighty Aphrodite (1995). Credits. Greek chorus starts in ruined ancient theater (actually in Italy), in high style with choreographed movements, then begins to speak of modern events in contemporary expressions. This is the main gimmick of the movie, Woody Allen's fancy, here. His films since Manhattan, with some exceptions, have been caprices. The exceptions are usally not the better for that. His playing around, inventiveness, trying on new costumes, are what keep his tics from getting humdrum. There's a monotony to even that, since he's anchoring himself, his own characteristics, playing out the same joke of incongruity with himself and the trappings. But there's so much inventiveness besides, so much play with form, making jokes on different levels, that even when it doesn't come off well, it's interesting. He's a singular American movie thread, a tradition almost by himself. Each year goes by on the American movie scene and then the Woody Allen picture comes out and you say, oh, yeah, there's Woody Allen. This one is Allen at his best and worst. Like the chorus doing vernacular declamation, most of the situations are enough for a skit, or a short comic essay, so dragging them on through a feature length plot forces the humor to be sustained. [7/96]
Scarlet Street (1945). Credits. Edward G. Robinson plays modest clerk who seeks refuge in painting and then in a young woman he thinks he's rescued from a mugging. The woman and her boyfriend/pimp (Duryea) exploit the old man. Similar to M in the way it's a rather straightforward depiction, then a quickening plot to play out implications of the action. Here, the action involves doubling and fake identity, and weaves together a misrepresentation in painting with one in murder (Robinson's character's name is Christopher Cross and the girl at one point notes the "Chris Cross"). The devious couple pass off the old man's art as the woman's when they find out the art world is interested, but get the tables turned on them, the pimp being trapped in the circumstantial evidence he builds for his scheme. The mixture of the prosaic, the blunt, untailored discussion even of famous painters, and then the thriller plotting and later psycho-drama theatrics, make this interesting, but sometimes strange. It's frankness makes it more akin to '30s movies than '40s, but that's also because it's Fritz Lang. For about the first third of the film it's a good portrait of the mundane, of the poor clerk and his office cronies (whom he seems to barely know) and his meager home life with a shrewish woman he married simply because he didn't like being alone, reminiscent of W.C. Fields and his suburban portrait in It's a Gift. But when the plot thickens because of the paintings, the film takes on a much more 40ish thriller air and becomes less interesting for that. The ending, with the voiceover haunting of Robinson, is too heavy, almost jarring, and not the most apt lines being repeated. Robinson's performance is great, here, a more pathetic figure than even Humbert Humbert of Lolita. [7/96]
The Usual Suspects (1995). Credits. Posey crime thriller wastes a good idea with cheap execution. The reflexive ending holds a trick for all police stories, but long before that payoff, the thing is too thin to hold up. The conception is too awed, impressionable. The writer and the director are pulled in several directions trying to keep up with aspirations. It wants to be allegorical, even cheats toward its own twist, the way The Crying Game did. You know something's amiss, even if you don't know what. But it also wants to be naturalistic, slang, "real." Kevin Spacey, who received acclaim for his performance, is actually the one most taxed by the execution. He does the voiceover and his reading is awkward, especially when he's supposed to be colloquial, wise or tough. Early scene of the usual suspects in the jail cell is lathered up, self-conscious, a bad theater scene. The elision is bad, relying on pure stipulation of the characters' traits and almost no development. The result is sometimes inadvertently comical, but still too heavy-handed, or at least sleek, for parodic effect. The other result of this kind of television plotting and direction is that the big twist, the payoff sequence when Chaz Palminteri sees the bulletin board, is rushed in the same pacing, the same rhythm, the same glossy indistinctness. [7/96]
Hoffa (1992). Credits. Bits of good stuff. David Mamet is better when he doesn't direct his own material. He gets his often mannered attempt at punchy vernacular presented well by these actors and Danny DeVito's direction. DeVito is capable as a director, but he's heavy on textbook aesthetics, particularly match cuts. There is good cut that's "match" in another way, cutting from DeVito striking a match to an explosion. Odd use of backgrounds and studios on some occasions, then location shots jutting in. Might have been better to do just one or the other. As it is, has a wandering aspect. The whole ends up seeming spineless and impressionable. DeVito tries for grandeur, his own reverance of these historically and physically imposing figures. He's got the trimmings, but he's not particularly good at putting them all together. Nicholson gives a relatively good performance, for recent years. Most of the time he's so hammy and his directors allow it or just want it. But perhaps it's that this hamminess is apt for Hoffa, for the era, the ethos. It's a headline version of Hoffa and there's no special insight, nothing really new, just Mamet and Nicholson and DeVito, etc., dramatizing the received knowledge. [7/96]
Blue in the Face (1995). Credits. Starts off as intolerable, smug candid-making, but settles down into less annoying hang-out style movie. What makes it most annoying is playing in a no-man's land between fiction and documentary. If we're going to enjoy Jim Jarmusch telling us cute-wry anecdotes about cigarettes, then why pretend we're hanging out but the camera isn't there? The information and the testimonials on Brooklyn are much more fun, but everything in this is half-baked. This is sometimes it's virtue, like hanging around with friends and making things up without having to do any work to actually bring them off. A companion piece to Smoke, this has the same setting and anchor character, the tobacco store and its manager, Augie Wren. It's the subject matter that does any winning over. [7/96]
Heat (1995). Credits. Like To Live and Die in L.A., this is compelling and silly at once. It would be an epic vision gone awry, if you could call it an epic vision in the first place. It's Michael Mann's attempt to be epic. Identification of cops and robbers drawn to soupy, elegiac heights. You can see the lipsmacking in the preconception and the scenes play it out, right up to the one where cop Al Pacino invites superthief Robert DeNiro for a cup of coffee, their conversation a clutter of bad plain talk and false profundity. The whole thing has a kind of operatic lingering realism: Sergio Leone doing The French Connection. The guys-and-their-gal-problems thing is so motif-ed in it's parodic, like a Saturday Night Live skit. Then you reach for more 'cause it's your chance for the big one, so why not go for that stepdaughter slitting her wrists. The old alibi problem: lives aren't significant enough, tragic enough, unless there's something abject, usually death, and here it's as if all the crime drama weren't enough. [7/96]
Cry the Beloved Country (1995). Credits. Interesting subject, but very bland, reverant treatment from both the script and the direction. Paths of a black priest and a wealthy white man intersect -- and you can see it coming -- when they discover that the former's son has killed the latter. There's an inherent problem because the portrait, its conception, can make things look contrived rather than simply related, even if reflection would bear out the same relationships. So it's not so bad, bearing in mind this problem, but other coincidences and the earnestness of it all come off very sculpted, almost pedagogical. James Earl Jones is good, Richard Harris particularly interesting, especially in the scene where he learns of his son's death and then when he confronts Jones for the first time. [7/96]
Safe (1995). Credits. From the director of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Poison. Big improvement over the latter, a much better project, better conception, but still heavy handed. It actually parallels The Incredible Shrinking Man. Vapid suburbanite starts having strange physical reactions and gets on a diagnostic track toward wholistic allergic reaction -- she's allergic to the whole environment. Empathetically portrays all her real suffering, loads up all the psychological clues, but then traces her progress through all the various responses and treatments: she never gets well. After the medical establishment fails, the new age camps manage to make her feel better but she noticeably doesn't improve, right up to a final shot that leaves her more pathetic and withdrawn and without promise of cure. [6/96]
Cabaret (1972). Credits. Good bedfellows: Fosse's musical treatment and Isherwood's journalistic story. They pervert each other well, draw each other away from their own excesses. The musical treatment gives an irony and playfulness that's better as a remote comment. It's more mischievous than a straightforward narrative commentary. Conversely, the naturalistic attention of the book not only counters the showbiz, but ironicizes it. The formula is one of the shrewdest uses of the musical vehicle, depicting the rise of fascism against the cabaret society of 30s Germany. Liza Minelli's character is the key, a showbiz naive whose giddy decadence is as blind to some things as it is open to others. The cabaret style is respected. Some schmaltz shows through, most notably the title song at the end that seems tacked on straight from Broadway. Mostly Fosse keeps it close, more mundane and bawdy, the latter being his specialty. Shots of extras crossing in front of the camera in the cabaret scenes, for example. Shrewd twist is the scene of the Nazi youth breaking into song at the beer garden, especially in the musical line. It's a chilling scene. [6/96]
Tokyo Story (1953). Credits. Old couple takes a trip to Tokyo to visit their family. Grown-up children are too busy to entertain them, even scheme to send them to a spa to get them out of the way. Daughter-in-law, who was married to son who died in war, is more considerate than the real children, and ends up helping the old man out when all the rest have left -- a typical Ozu situation, old man with doting daughter or daughter figure. Mundane situations told in blunt, minimal style, but overall there's a cleverness to it and it has a cumulative effect. Ozu uses facing shots, the point of view of an interlocuter, like Passolini, and it has a naive effect: wanting to put you there facing the character. The modest style stresses the virtues of an everyday concern, along with the intrigues. Dramatically, this one's packed. Great cast plays this ensemble relation, the story wanders on various daily tangents, even going on after the trip to cover the event of the mother's death. It feels run-on as each new little path is taken (as when the grandparents have to find different accommodations one night) but then it clumps back together, with different thematic aspects stitching it. There's a skimming effect, the focal point jumping around in a way that seems almost off-center. With Ozu, it's stylistic, the way the drama is often indirect. Even the setting comes off that way. In Tokyo, we get just a few off-center shots of smokestacks and then the sky. In one sequence, the grandparents and daughter-in-law are on a bus tour, with a voiceover of the guide telling them about the sights. There is one shot out the bus windows of a palace, but most of the shots are of the characters looking, bouncing along. We're looking at the characters looking, which gives a kind of closeness to them, a proximity, as if you were next to them on the trip. [6/96]
Institute Benjamenta (1995). Credits. Animators try live action, possibly to get similar effects, but here it's all artific. The quasi-story starts out o.k. Wraith protagonist arrives at school for servants, receives cold introduction. But very quickly, the skew of this dreamworld gets swampy. It's a sort of Victorian netherworld, unfortunately too much like the cliché of some contemporary interior design, and it has grasping, indulgent execution. It loses any sharpness. One reviewer compared it to Eraserhead, and it's an unfortunate comparison, because what so many of these oblique, nightmare-world movies lack from that film is the way it kept itself tacked down. There was a measure to the skew. You could recognize mundane things behind the exaggeration, the way your dreams work by throwing familiar things into an uncanny logic. This film, like others (Begotten, for instance, cf.) that seem to be attempting the same thing, start from the wrong end, too infatuated with creating the effect. The Brothers Quay animation (of which there are only too few bits in this film) is a fascination with material: found-object pixilation, mechanistic movement, the mystique of detached objects, an occulted intent. In live action, this is not what comes off. Instead, it's a sappy surrealism, effusive in a way that may betray their interest in Street of Crocodiles, the subject of one of their animations. [6/96]
Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). Credits. Portrait of 12-year-old girl, her tribulations as the laughing stock of her school. Diverting tone keeps this from being self-indulgent, the way so much is in current autobiographical style. But the drama, the theatrical turns, tend to attenuate the pertinence of it. It's not quite camp. The turns are of demystifying kind, but it still has the kind of action of an afternoon TV special. Realist subtleties, such as the way Brandon changes his tactic with the girl after she calls him "retard" and the way you find out just why the dreamy Steve has anything to do with computer nerd brother's band. The boy who plays the brother is perfect, with his peremptory tone. Best moment: "You're being a total facist," said by cool guy Steve when brother tells sister to get out of his room. [5/96]
Twister (1996). Credits. Preposterous. Souped up, dumb, preconceived -- the story of people chasing tornadoes couldn't be enough. What making it sell means is predigestion, compression, formula elements, spelled out all the more as if the formula audience wouldn't get it already. The experience of a tornado is not the same thing as an action film, so they've tried to make it that way, twisting the pressures of that situation into serial narrow escapes. You have to be into this kind of hyperbole and throw the rest out the window. There's nothing else to the experience and any interest in tornadoes has to be just so much clamorous product identification, like dinosaurs with Jurassic Park. It's the kind of frolic that throws down stipulations, then drops them just as conveniently, all the ostensive expertise of the central characters grossly contradicted by the implausibility of the plot. The unnecessary business with the new fiancé and the gimcrack strawmen (who get punished in the most overdetermined but capricious way) are the most fatuous extent of Spielbergish pandering. [5/96]
Gate of Hell (1953). Credits. Feudal Japanese warlord promises rewards to those who helped him put down a rebellion. One fiercely loyal samurai asks for a woman who's already married. He won't quit. Has some interesting shots, some for color but also done well dramatically. Kind of stodgy production, in which ceremoniousness of the portrayed is made bland by the portrait, not expressed strongly, the way it can be in Kurosawa films (or even Ozu). The drama is in the extent to which the man presses all the rules, and possibly the ambiguity about the woman's feelings. But there is something so muted and respectable about the production that any ambiguity seems inadvertent, clumsy and not dramatic. [5/96]
Tokyo Decadence (1992). Credits. Not the glossy sex show the video cover suggests, but a realist exposé of a prostitute's life in Japan. Quiet, minimal, not exactly clinical, the drama is of the banality, sometimes tedium, of this sex work, with frequent ironic bursts (dominatrix while fastening up her client asks him how the business is doing, in apparent out-of-role candor, but he replies in submissive form). The main character is a mousy thing, and if there's exaggeration, it's of an unromantic sort. She does sign language to herself, consults a fortune teller, and turns tricks. All this is portrayed in a slack composition that's empathetic. Once or twice there are scenes that strike a hard note of the emptiness of modern life, which makes the whole thing turn naive, earnest, and the ending reaches too much for profound surrealism (even corny), then has a sudden last shot that's formally decisive, but not dramatically. It seems like some turn for the main character but it's too hasty. Best stretch is the dominatrix sequence, which has the best erotic moments, but mixed in with a masochist and his wiles, nice touches like the masochist's eye view of the two women making out, and then the aftermath when the two women go to the mistress's apartment, where despite their contrast they have a good time together (the mistress shooting crack all the while). There's a turn to this, too, showing up the main character's credulity, when her dominatrix friend gives her a drug promising to make her superhuman. [5/18]
Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey (1993). Credits. Documentary with interesting subject (the electronic instrument of many 50s sci-fi soundtracks) and so many great angles flounders around in giddy verité awe, including letting Brian Wilson stammer off in flipped-out digression. [5/96]
301, 302 (1995). Credits. Korean film about women, with creepy parable conception (suggesting Greenaway) but gawky execution. Two women live across the hall from each other. Both have eating disorders linked to their relationships with men. Despite the sympathetic appeal, it wavers between abreactive heaviness and vague glibness, with background material stated didactically, which adds up to overall flatness. [5/96]
Trauma (1993). Credits. Starts off as much more promising oblique narrative, then just as quickly becomes specious hokum like other Argento stuff. Retread pyscho-killer idea, with occult and pyscho mother stuff, complete with flashback history snatched out of the air. Argento is keeping it in the family, as Asia takes on the role of the pitiful ingenue. But this carries Signor Argento's teen-girl horrific romantic fetish to a new extreme (Asia even takes off her shirt). Throwaway developments (including m.o. information) and make-it-up-as-you-go-along scare effects. [2/96]
Suspiria (1977). Credits. Nice set, images and music keep compelling you, put you in trance, but you keep remembering how pointless and gimcrack the whole thing is. Jessica Harper wanders down a hall, suspense effects build up and nothing happens. Could have been a great play on horror films, if turned a notch in that direction, a spoof in which daily humdrum is psyched out with suspenseful effects, the soundtrack and wide-eyed stares. The scene in which the blind man is finally attacked by his dog is the exemplar of this two-bit suspense: it's an interminable scene stacking up all these shots and angles in an open square, dragged on and on, a swooping bird's eye view amounts to nothing else, then the dog attacks his master. Great score gets cheaply strung out. The editing is shoddy, often canceling effect, often inadvertently creating other effects. [2/96]
Phenomena [Creepers] (1984). Credits. Thorough hokum, worth the silliness. Contains all the elements of Argento's fetish: besieged ingenue at creepy institution, which in turn is besieged by maniac psycho killer, psycho mother with background snatched in at last minute, silly, convenient subplots. But, those subplots, here, as if the rest weren't enough: Scottish entomologist Pleasence helps police with dead bodies because of flesh-eating insects; he's in a wheel chair and is cared for by a monkey; the ingenue, as part of her pathetic/romantic conception, can communicate with insects. Once when she calls great swarms of some buzzing bugs, she lights up and a strange indoor wind blows on her. Despite her power, she's still jumped out at in requisite not-dead-yet scenes, and the monkey provides the final rescue kill, with a straight razor. Not to fear total shoddiness: Argento does set up the monkey payoff with an earlier scene in which the monkey finds the straight razor in a garbage can. You think I'm making this up. [2/96]
Andrei Rublev (1969). Credits. Andrei Tarkosvsky is compelling and pretentious, much like Bergman, not only in that, but in the material and the style. The example here is the segment about the boy bellmaker. Tarkovsky's slow, meditative style emphasizes movement, by contrast to more dynamic, or at least rapid, movies as much as to anything in his shots. This provides fascination with more tranquil movement going on all the time, things like running water and even burning flames. In this film, it produces a startling, eerie effect in portraying medieval life, particularly the violence of Tartar invasions. But Tarkovsky dwells in this, he wallows in it. He uses water as a reverent artsy motif, even in the surrealistic turns of other films, a kind of symbolist pretense with or without blatant metaphysical groping in the dialogue. So the scenes with the bellmaker are reverent to the point of identification. They have a religious awe for the situation of the artist that is not so much a portrait of the medieval icon maker as a projection by Tarkovsky into that role. As with Solaris and Stalker, this film has enough of a plot to keep Tarkovsky from wandering off completely into mopey abstractions, as in his worst stuff, Nostalgia and The Mirror. But the high tone is still there, and the subject matter doesn't give as much to counter it as in the two sci-fi films, which are great works by the accident of this clash. [1/96]
Greed (1925). Credits. Early important realist film work, an attempt to transfer Frank Norris's book to the field of the movies. Eric von Stroheim was not the only one trying to go against the grain of the spectacle movies had already become, and there was even a kind of Victorian conceit of the humble that was itself spectacular or sensational. It was the extent Von Stroheim took this, what Andre Bazin called "cinema of cruelty." It's remarkable still for its depiction, for shots that seem right out of some later era (McTeague coming down stairs, close-up, angle up to the wife in background, like Welles). The date on the sewage pier and the morbid honeymoon night -- the dread of the wife, her ghostlike in the hallway at the top of the stairs -- are the muckraking extent and fabulous scenes, the former, for example, as much for the documentary aspect, as Von Stroheim used locations. There's still a movie melodrama push of the book. The titles are written in that florid Victorian prose and the acting is, relative to today, still broad. [1/96]
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936). Credits. Before Fellini and Altman, there was Jean Renoir, but no one has quite matched his effortless scrappy style, the way he brings off groups without seeming too orchestrated or slack. This is one of the best examples, rambling from one little banal incident to the next, but all very fluid, the jumble of the publishing house, all the interaction, the flirting. The publisher (who perhaps overacts his weasely indefiniteness) has some of The Rules of the Game. Renoir is best at this sort of portrait, life spilling into tableau, no less awkward and silly for being beautiful. [1/96]
Seconds (1966). Credits. This is one of the most devious nightmares ever brought off in the movies. A sparse production with lurid effects makes us as desolate and detached as the protagonist we scarcely encounter, whom we then follow into a no less alienating affair, an arrangement with some mysterious organization for redemption. Is it a religion, a cult? Our man goes to make his connection at a big meat-packing facility, which is foreboding even before it's metaphorical. As our man sweats, and we wonder, an interviewer blithely talks about the way they cook his chicken. There is subversion of the grandfatherly figure (cf. the McCarthyesque figure in Manchurian Candidate and the way he is tied to the communists, the twists of paranoid logic there), Will Geer's soothing assurances incongruous with the blank rooms, and unsettling without knowing the whole plan. The oppression and claustrophobia, the minimizing aspect (as opposed to Manchurian Candidate), have the dread of hospitals and the care of strangers. Then comes Rock Hudson. It's a great role for him, troping his iconography, and to have him deliver in a chilling performance suggests he's been trapped in that figure of his, himself. The camerawork, direction: John Frankheimer mounts the camera with the actor, the movement of background relative to actor's head of actor, wide-angle shots (dream sequence most extreme, in fisheye). The remoteness and emptiness are carried over into the new life, fulfillment still seems a platitude offered by another lonely soul, or a Bacchanalian orgy the transformed is still not prepared for. The paranoid fantasy of Manchurian Candidate suffers from being played too straight. It's still just a melodrama. But even as subjective paranoia, Seconds is a nightmare expression of desperation, credulity and exploitation. [1/96]
Shanghai Triad (1995). Credits. Zhang Yimou opts for more cliché set and image devices, like light through smoke. There's a smoke-filled nightclub, a more apt setting than the warehouse at the beginning, except no one is smoking cigarettes. The film sets up the spectacle of Shanghai in the 20s with gangsters and all, but then tells the story from the wings, from the perspective of a boy servant and a moll. Even the nightclub scenes, the most spectacular, are muted, undercut, almost indirect. They're localized: the songs come over a weak amplifier, Gong Li's voice wavering louder and quieter, even tinny, to emphasize the space of the club. There is Zhang's deliberateness, irony, ambivalence, the steady accretion of the images and even the way in which they're beautiful, patient, attentive. It's a dissembling aesthetic, dramatically as well as visually. Best example, here: when the henchman feeds the little girl the food prepared for his boss -- nothing is said directly, he asks the little girl how she is, comments on how pretty she is, we see her smiling face, all of this the demonstration of what is actually quite sinister. What's more, I don't think there was any confusion about what this meant. The method, the presumption, is precisely opposite of so much American cinema, which is demonstrative, hyperbolic, spoonfeeding (this scene makes a marvelous pun for it). May be the juiciest role of all for Gong Li. At least the floozy character is a nice trope of all the ga-ga press she's gotten in the West. [12/95]
Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker (1994). Credits. This film is worthy of most of the criticisms of the "Fifth Generation," mostly so far of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, as if they were a class. This is a drawn-out melodrama, becoming inadvertently comic when, after the plot has long since played out the obvious, the two lovers finally touch, but still we are treated to the feinting and resistance and persistence, even kiss by kiss. In almost a parody of the shift of detail in these Chinese films, when Niu Ban seduces the "Master" he begins by disrobing her ears, passionately removing her ear muffs! A good example of how the Chinese style of ellipsis can be much less efficient, if not simply poorly done. To an even greater degree than The Blue Kite, the narrative is often just confusing. And while the spare expository style, the austere enunciation and the dry scenic juxtaposition are supposed to be economic, simplicity as a distinctly Chinese sophistication, here, as in Farewell, My Concubine, they go hand-in-hand with florid drama. The title in English is pretentious, inadvertently silly. I wonder if it sounds the same in Chinese. [12/95]
Les Belles de nuit (1952). Credits. A composer, hounded by street noise, neighbors and creditors, has dreams of encounters with beautiful women and wants to escape there. The additional device is the comment by an old man that the good old days are gone, which is quickly given the trick when he turns up in the dream of those old days to say the same thing again, prompting a dream-within-dream regress. René Claire's comic version of Intolerance, and a parodic comment on that nostalgic platitude. It has the same tone of his other works, mostly Sous les toits de Paris, but like A nous la liberté, is an often flat production. It has moments of the charm and deftness of Le Million, but doesn't sustain it. The chase through time near the end is a like source text, just as he established the mixed footage chase joke in Entre'acte, with stock footage of stampeding elephants, etc., cut into his absurd funeral procession. [12/95]
Search and Destroy (1995). Credits. Quirky shtick with lots of good moments but not much of a whole. The angle is the pretensions of a midcult world, the interaction of flaky overarching types. Griffin Dunne does the nervous, self-checking bit well, but the plot keeps going for more of his character. Ileanna Douglas comes off really well, as does Christopher Walken. The offbeat is now such a beaten path that it's hard not to be wary of this kind of stuff. There's a trope of Walken in other indie darlings, since, with Dunne's character, we're set up to think Walken's some kind of gangster, and then he turns out to be a businessman who wants to be a gangster. Douglas delivers in her big shtick scene: telling Dunne her slasher/alien movie idea. The conception and execution are wringing it, calling for too much, but she does a good job. It's also elsewhere, in the more oblique moments that Douglas is good. Like when Dunne goes to pick her up for her birthday and she shows her new dress and says, "I'd like to kiss you but I just washed my hair." She has a great nonchalant inflection, makes the Davis camp nicely mundane. It's actually Douglas that makes the conception of the movie more gawkish by contrast to her. When Dunne goes to visit her at the airplane hangar the second time and ends up asking her to go to New York, you realize, even because her acting is a taste of less smug realism, that there's really no banality to these characters. Without that, the whole thing is not the payoff it's supposed to be, as for instance with Walken's character, who, no sooner than we learn he's not a gangster, is wanting to shuck his drab world. What drab world? We don't get any of that. The movie's an acting exercise, some good parody, but no frame. [12/95]
Phantom of the Opera (1925). Credits. Diorama style of the silent prestige movies, little to break the proscenium (except perhaps at the end). But good pictorial effects sometimes result, mainly the old shadows on the wall number. Broad melodrama on thin plot. Doesn't wander off too much in airy detail, stays pretty tight. The premise itself is sheer melodrama, this early version little more than the Broadway/road show blockbuster of its day. The music is actually pretty good, for its time, but falls into operetta repetitiveness, four themes in rotation through the plot. For all of the hullabaloo over Lon Chaney, it's hard to see what this film really did for his reputation as an actor, at least by today's standards. Half the time the phantom is under a "mask," and the other half we get the phantom mask itself. It's impressive and gruesome in its way, skeletal, but doesn't leave much room for other expressiveness. Chaney resorts to Victorian bogeyman gesturing for the rest. Perhaps he got his reputation from 1000 faces of make-up, put on. Tinting and a colored segment, which looks like a tinting process, are part of a restored version on video. There are kooky silent era aspects, such as when the secret policeman tells the other man to keep his hand raised, since you never know when the strangler may strike and drop his noose around your neck from above. The two of them walk around in the catacombs with one hand held next to their head, presented nicely in shadow, as well. It calls to mind Alphaville, when the denizens are winding down. It's the twitty aspect Guy Madden camps. [12/95]
Go Fish (1994). Credits. Preening, civic-pride, naively hip lesbianism, a fishbowl of uplift. Supposed to be a feel-good fable about finding the right girl. Embarrassing, with few sparks of any un-self-conscious, offhand humor. The kind of amateur feel that comes from having a non-actor cast in slouching realism quote overworked, hortatory prose. Certainly no less mincing than She's Gotta Have It or Clerks, if you're looking for prejudicial equivalence, but more so than either. [12/95]
Oliver Twist (1948). Credits. Great transcription of the book into movie narrative. Example of cinematic narrative at its finest, using lapses, elision, compression to its advantage instead of idealizing them away. The suggestion and indirection are in scenes as well as the editing. "God is good" signs in the workhouse mess hall: even the set carries along comments, without otherwise making them conspicuous. The whole thing is proficient, flowing, deft. You don't get that uneven feeling of other long story translations to two-hour movies, as you do even in other David Lean works. There's no gaps or sags, it's all compressed and then worked up in its own right, with a great tone all its own, as well as translating the book. It's busy and intent, as if you were just slipping in on the characters caught up in their events. The acting is great in this way, hard to tell whether the cast is deft so that it brings this off, or whether the general deftness makes the acting so good. The brick sets give a sense of the era, not quaint like Hollywood Mother Goose sets. The cinematography is great. There's even a use of tilt in a subtle way, the camera rocking slowly in an arch, at the beginning when Oliver's mother is out in the storm, then as a reaction shot when Bill Sykes approaches the prostrate Dodger to hear the news of Nancy's betrayal. When Oliver slips away to run off to London, there's a great shot of him coming out of the house in early dawn, lit as if from just a street light. It looks like an Atget photo. Even titles are done well, as the one that follows that shot: there are only a few and they occur when they trail off a previous effect, using Dickens's text itself which adds ironic or descriptive flourish to the exposition. The style of the lettering and the timing of the title when Oliver sets off for London blends in the storybook link, and makes the shot subtly, ironically poignant. The virtue of dramatization, of showing over telling, is made evident by the film, the way, for example, we see Oliver laugh for the first time when he's being taught how to steal. Sergei Eisenstein thought Charles Dickens's narrative structure was proto-cinematic, and the example Eisenstein used was from Oliver Twist, when Oliver is sent to return the books and the story "cuts" between that action and the men awaiting his return. Perhaps it's only a matter of the story, then, but David Lean bears it out in the most beautiful way. Even the moments of terror in the story are brought off with beautiful indirection: Sykes's terrified dog, the shadow of the blowing curtains. [12/95]
Sabotage (1936). Credits. In the scene when, following her child's death, Sylvia Sydney watches a cartoon in the movie theater, has a citational style not essentially different from any today. This is part of a larger segment that leads into her thinking about stabbing her husband (Oscar Homolka, the saboteur). Defining Hitchcock, in that suspense comes from the drama of thoughts, of her trembling, then being caught at it, the silent duel of each character's feelings that goes on. When the opportunity comes, she stabs him anyway, the knife ends up in the imagined destination. In the cartoon, the arrow finds its mark, "Who killed Cock Robin?" (amazing link and transition, by the way, between the response to the child's death, an apparent distraction in the laughter, but then the murderous theme brought in by the cartoon). An earlier scene, with the little boy on the bus, ingeniously built suspense leads to the unusual result: the bomb goes off! The suspense toys with expectation of some rescue, some unwitting escape, already a well-established event in cinema. The particular Hitchcock stroke is the complicity of the viewer in this, the tragic aspect of knowing what the character does not. [11/95]
To Die For (1995). Credits. Black comedy account of actual events: New Jersey WASP pretty girl marries suburban Italian boy but also has rather ditsy obsession with "media" and wants to be a celebrity journalist. When her situation stalls out and her husband starts pulling on the reins, she proves resourceful in interesting way. She lures a teenager into her bidding by having an affair with him, eventually persuading him to shoot her husband. Mockumentary elements are part of the flourish. Nicole Kidman's shots are the best because her character is playing to the camera, while some of the others become strained and disingenuous. The less affected manner of the other characters was necessary, up to a point, works for contrast, for example when the station boss's view of her documentary project cuts in after the scenes are introduced (he says something like "100 hours of three teenage dorks"). Director Gus van Sant has sharper material, here, to work with than in some of his other films. And this script is much sharper for Buck Henry than The Graduate. Van Sant drags scenes, he languishes, likes to dwell on them longer than others might. Sometimes it's a good trait, as scenes benefit slower development: the fireside scene between River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho, and here the scene between Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix when she is persuading him to do the deed. Drugstore Cowboy is Van Sant's best film and the three teenage kids, here, have a similar tone. It's close and quiet, hanging out, showing also their aimlessness. [10/95]
Night of the Hunter (1955). Credits. Charles Laughton's direction of James Agee's script, with some fine acting performances, particularly Robert Mitchum's, produces one of the most remarkable portraits of American naiveté and horror. In a wide-eyed, picnic, boy's life America, we see the sweet, the gullible and the predatory. Unrelenting in this respect: the lynch mob at the end, the way the boy has the same physical reaction to monster/step-dad being taken down as he did to his own father. The Lillian Gish speechifying as the moral is set up by her slight daffiness, the way she talks to herself. Mitchum's scream in the river when he misses the kids in the boat is one of the most terrifying moments on film. It's an amazing stroke, as with his hyena yowls of shock and pain after he's shot. There are all kinds of evocation of rural American life like this, like the Mrs. Spoon character, who's busybody sense of decency makes her not merely lacking in discernment, but complicitous. This film is like It's a Gift before it and Badlands after as a shrewd portrait. Interesting also is the way studio is used to good effect, a story-book artifice. Rear projection shots with Mitchum at beginning seem typically clunky, but later the prison scene comes off well, sparse and claustrophobic, and then the river shots at night are expressionistic, with the spider webs, the frog, the rabbits, etc., along the river bank laying the fairy-tale air over the sinister current. The shot of Shelly Winters bound up in the car sunk at the bottom of the river is really a stroke for the 50s. Even the staginess of it makes it an eerie trope. [9/95]
[Trois couleurs:] Red (1994). Credits. Polish director's tribute to France, last of trilogy called Three Colors. This one has the most interesting premise of the three but the most overworked cinematography, the worst lead performer (actress who plays the model), and is the most explicitly quaint and sentimental. How to avoid facile psychology and symbolism with colors? Apparently that's not seen as a problem. [8/95]
Sous les toits de Paris (1930). Credits. First French sound film. René Clair's approach is to heighten the sense of sound, or emphasize, often in contrast to what is seen. There is little dialogue. But the use of music as an element is much more clever and sharp than in the theatrical assimilation done all too quickly by Hollywood (from the word go, The Jazz Singer). There is a scene that may be the precursor to a whole series of gags about the noise you hear when the lights go out: the singer and the girl in his room after he invites her to stay. He turns out the lights and we hear the commotion. Best part is at the beginning, with the cursory view of the city, even the way the characters are introduced, in this kind of random string. Introduction of song also followed as a joke about the persistence of a tune, various denizens humming it, others annoyed by this. Becomes less interesting as melodrama develops, and actually gappy and dull, though there is always the interesting Clair remoteness. In that way, it's a sort of exercise in preparation for Le Million, which repeats some of the motifs while perfecting the general plan. [8/95]
Mr. Arkadin (1955). Credits. Scurrying, grasping Welles, with all the usual themes and motifs and trinkets, especially of the whole refugee period, when he was shooting everything scrap. Looks like some of the same locations as Othello and it has that feel and that method, but not, of course, that script. Series of dialogues strung together as a metaphysical whodunit, but the Wellesian clamor comes off too contrived here. [8/95]
Queen Margot (1994). Credits. The director of those big, puffy Manon movies, here offers the French version of self-important historical dramas, most particularly The Lion in Winter. The whole thing is built on a showy cast giving looks all the time, the drama set "close," with everyone rubbing up against each other, whether friend, foe or family, a pretentious play at period pithiness and claustrophobic intimacy that if it wasn't lifted straight from that predecessor, developed the same affect. Also like Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in the same way. The grittiness -- sweat, pallor, matted hair (but what happened to the rotten teeth?) -- all dressed up in the period is nice, and the color tones of even the costumes are more sullen. There's a shot during the wedding procession with the audience in very steeply raked rafters and the colors look like a painting of the period (late 16th century), the kinds of tones and even the way they faded. But the direction is so fitful and clingy and straining that even the nice details come off pretentious, posey. It's a restless virtuosity, a pushiness to make the film more profound. [8/95]
Roger and Me (1989). Credits. Documentary-style propaganda about film-maker's failure in efforts to talk to General Motors president Roger Smith after series of factory closings in Flint, Michigan. Offhand style of Moore, now more famous due to TV Nation, expressed well in straight shoot and compilation. The ingeniousness of Moore is to let his subjects demonstrate themselves, whether they speak to him or not. Most of the film is of various failures to gain interviews. For the rest, he presents the symbolic, chin-up hokum doled out by the powers that be, from GM right up to President Ronald Reagan. He intercuts with material of people being evicted from their homes, including, near the end, one on Christmas Eve intercut with Smith's own Christmas speech. The presentation of the ideology, here, is matter of fact: that General Motors upon making a profit promptly turns to investment in foreign factories for cheaper labor, something that is never denied. The consequences are pursued with a tone that is almost giddy in its irony, a kind of sarcastic persistence that never frontally rejects or contradicts the official line but plays it out in exaggeration. Shrewd use of material about woman who raises rabbits to sell for meat as well as pets. After we hear one of the GM under-managers suggest the people of Flint simply gather up their entrepreneurial fortitude (as did, for example, the inventor of the roller lint remover), Moore pays a return visit to the rabbit woman who has been forbidden to sell her rabbits by the health department, and told in effect that she must build a slaughterhouse to code to do so legally. We are then shown her actually killing a rabbit to eat herself. Criticism of this film at the time, and still, focuses on factual accuracy, whether Moore's facts are correct. But this leaves aside what the movie really is, a demonstration of rhetoric and evasion, of a failure to account (or even confront Moore's facts). And as a resistance to supply-side, executive rule, there was nothing like this, certainly not in the mainstream media -- confrontation with humor, Moore a David Letterman with social commentary. [8/95]
Dumb and Dumber (1994). Credits. Not as dumb as might be expected, that is, no less dumb than usual comedy vehicles, for instance the SNL variety. Manages to be somewhat smarter in use of Jim Carrey since, despite expectations, his character is actually subtler. The humor of the script and the direction honors that also. Jeff Daniels, by comparison, is not anything in particular, lumpen even for a lumphead. Carey's actually a good comic if it weren't for the fact that everyone just wants him to mug. In his other vechicles to date he is the worst case of mugging for the camera since Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace. The humor here has the same premise as Laurel and Hardy, so it's hard to see what all the fuss was about when certain editorial writers bemoaned the sudden glorification of stupidity. The ironic return comes from the pretense of one dope thinking he's smarter than another, precisely the formula of Laurel and Hardy, which catches up the stupidity of the arrogance, and doesn't merely glorify the stupid. The dumber part, here, is the wooden crime plot that has to be a part of everything, at the very least of all these chug-a-lug comic vehicles (talk about shaggy dogs -- bigger than the one the characters drive in this movie). It's such a lack of comic inventiveness that melodrama must be relied on even for comedy, the equivalent of musicals in the 30s and 40s, a thin plot to string the songs up on. It's a domestication of comedy, or parody, keeping it from larger things, from allegory or commentary, always just funny business within the plot. [8/95]
Bandit Queen (1994). Credits. Plight of (a) woman in India, based on a true story of woman who becomes a famous bandit, after enduring perhaps particulary bad treatment: sold as girl to a husband, consigned to do chores and then raped by him; after leaving the husband is accused of seduction of village chief's son, from Thakur caste, and is banished; is taken by bandits who also want to rape her; until one bandit takes over the gang spurred by his revulsion to the way she is treated. Wide-eyed, somewhat political, coming-of-age story. But in this case, wide-eyed also means the will to confront the brutal. The film is not shy of the relentlessness of the opposition to this woman, and in fact works as almost an inverted melodrama, having relative moments of respite only to set you up for the next, worst fall. Not really very explicit, but no less grueling in some cases. Adopting the classic method of suggestion, leaving the violence offstage, later opts for rhetorical demonstration: the sequence in which she is raped by what is apparently an entire gang is portrayed mostly through the figure of the creaking barn door tolling the coming and going of her perpetrators. The coolness of this seems more to match the attitude of the men. It's almost like some Western movie stylization, rather pat. But then it has an effect that way. What might be the most brutally eloquent moments of the film are those when she gets to avenge her sufferings on some of the men. At one point she beats her husband who is tied to a post, at another she beats and shoots several Thakurs she and her gang have lined up at gunpoint. In this latter, there is an additional effect, where the film whites out, as if caught up in her rage, during which they gun down all these men, and the color comes back on a shot of the blood spilled from the victims. This image, the transition from the bleached, overexposed colors to the rich red, is the starkest of the film. Somewhat exhortatory, but careful to avoid heroizing the woman. Faithful to at least the spirit of a justice never realized. The scene in which the gang boss comes looking for her at the end is to the point of the relentlessness. He was the whole purpose of her attack on the Thakurs and now it has cost her the lives of her gang, her freedom such as it is, and he's still out there taunting her, apparently even a stooge of the army. Best parts are those where she is shown trying to learn entirely new behavior from the one noble man she has known: watching him sing and trying to imitate him, then trying to have affection for him through her reflex to ward him off, later the scene in the city when they go to get his leg mended (the nicest moments of the film). [8/95]
Olivier, Olivier (1992). Credits. As in the previous Europa, Europa, there's great droll discovery, in the best tradition of French psychological realism, but then there are gawky moments, also in French tradition. The first of the latter is the scene where, after a big momentous fight -- the mother attacking the daughter in a fit of rage over the lost boy, father coming in and then promising to leave -- the mother goes into the room where the father has exiled himself on a sofa and very brusquely initiates sex. The entire transition from the anger and disaffection to arousal seems more convenient for the timing of the plot. It might happen but it's so sudden as to seem incongruous, even as a revelation about the woman. Similarly, it's a little hard to accept that the daughter would immediately talk to the father about a pertinent detail when in fact what the detail is telling her is that she's just committed incest: again, unless we're supposed to be getting something else entirely about the family, which then would undermine the very turn that's supposed to have been made. The most difficult dramatic conceit to accept is bringing the criminal and the family of the victim to what may be the site of the victim's burial. Perhaps I don't know about French police procedure, but the scene seems entirely staged for dramatic effect and loses the subtlety and economy the film has elsewhere. Good acting in the matter-of-fact French style. As with Europa, Europa the premise, the subject matter, is interesting in itself, with all kinds of implications, but there's something almost too anecdotal or journal-like about the film. It's episodically lavish and for that too even. I wanted something to break its rhythm. It's like seeing an array of interesting objects in one swoop, one presentation (say, at a museum), all leveled to that, without getting the different senses of each of them. But all of this may make sense to anyone who also takes the supernatural incident, here, unambiguously. The climactic turn of the drama may be a comment on such credulity, but the laissez-faire approach is often so slack that the film slips from sympathetic portrayal into gullibility of its own. [8/95]
A Star Is Born (1937). Credits. Sentimentality very well acted. This was Frederic March's lot: a good actor cast in lots of melodramas. Some good cinematography: when Norman takes Ester home he follows her up to the door and there's a shot from over his shoulder with his shadow on half her face, the rest lit up as if in moonlight. Lanky realism in a Hollywood world, but so tightly cast it becomes odd: the characters have to be as snug as a family but still convey the remoteness of their lives. Dorothy Parker helped write the script. Her mark is in the wisecracking, particularly in some of the more vicious strokes, such as the scene immediately following Norman Main's cliché-pioneering death on the ocean beach, when the wise-ass publicity man wants to congratulate the Pacific Ocean. This one little scene is so peculiarly the best/worst aspect of American movies of the 30s, the punchy candor in the maudlin syrup. Little has changed, even for all the style and jargon. Right after this scene, we're back to hand-wringing of the worst sort, with the woman dedicating herself to the memory of her man, a shrewd justification of the husband's name. [7/95]
There's Nothing out There (1991). Credits. Pre-credit sequence in the video store is the most creative. The rest is a let-down. The premise of a character that has seen every horror film is a pure stipulation, almost nothing is made of it. It's a clever idea, could be ingenious, but it never even gets started. Instead, that character is a monotonous aside machine, supposed to ironicize the horror going down, but not as funny as they think. [7/95]
Sunrise (1927). Credits. Renowned silent for excellent cinematography. It's an elaboration of the dissolve: fade-in superimposition of one character over another, interposing them, one occurring dreamlike to the other. There are dissolve montage effects, cutaways following progression in characters' minds, neatly using title shots as framing devices. The city scenes, trailing the couple as besieged outsiders, are the best part of the film. If this had been the main study, the film would have been much better. But, seeking drama, the plot builds up little jokes and events and then, literally, suddenly stirs up a storm. Very melodramatic, typical of silents of the era. The main drama is right out of An American Tragedy, which was the inspiration for lots of things, even many film versions which didn't get made. The man who plans to kill his wife during an outing in a rowboat finds he can't do it, only to have her then killed in a boating accident. In this case, the last part is different, which in fact you can smell coming. It has to have a happy ending. But, while there is the dripping sentiment about the death of the beloved wife, the protagonist husband is justified in later nearly strangling the sophisticated lover. Interesting then as precursor to Fatal Attraction, showing how mores are not so different from those supposedly more primitive movie times. [6/95]
Natural Born Killers (1994). Credits. Biggest load of indulgent crap I have seen in a long time. There's one clever bit near the beginning, the mock sit-com with a dysfunctional family playing to laugh track. Apart from that, it's the profundity of a cokehead, a nasty, restless, grasping pretense, as if deepness could only be intensity and intensity means constantly moving and jostling the camera with pretentious art effects. The second half of the film is like being tied up and forced to chew the same piece of gum long after the flavor has gone out. Oliver Stone's intolerable arrogance, here, is the fugitive couple routine, already a cliché of indie films for some years, done with filmy techniques that any art film school student can do, as if this was definitive. The smug pomposity of it is in Woody Harrelson's delivery. There's no depiction, just glowering, obvious commentary. [3/95]
The Wild Bunch (1969). Credits. Lyrical violence, an innovator of traits in a whole line of 70s westerns: the title sequence, with its lit-fuse medias res interrupted by photo-process freezes; simmering incidental rather than theme music (in this case mostly drums ticking off); the expansion of the western setting (Mexico c. 1914, the time of automobiles, and the bunch is suited up in American cavalry garb of the day); cinematic elaboration of events, or violence, the paradigm of the event in American film, through devices, among which slow motion would become the most copied; a certain verité trope which simultaneously made the western more grimy and visually sharper, perhaps more photorealistic, as opposed to the grand technicolor westerns of the 50s. Violence in previous westerns was a filmed theatricalization, choreographed. Though its partly a contrivance for composition itself, there is, here, the cinematic study of time. Sam Peckinpah emphasizes simultaneity, jumping back and forth, sometimes forwards and backwards (cf. The Getaway, in which chronology is broken up, flash-forwards and flashbacks eyeblink style). Often there is a forcing of the action, such as to get two men shot at the same time so that Peckinpah can cut between the two actions for the parallel, a matched action. This is cinematic choreography. There's a fair slice of hokum, of knee-slapping and chummy swagger, but it's part of the characterization. There's an infatuation with the airs and trappings, that cinematic version of pretending with the theatrical and cinematic. The men here are much like kids, and the flourishes of bluster are part of them. [3/95]
Day of Wrath (1943). Credits. Long pans, not quite 180 degree, emphasize witnessing, participation, and the twist of guilt, in this case. When the old woman is prosecuted as a witch, before the panel of elders, there is a pan down the line of them, the shrieks of the woman are heard, then the pan continues around to the woman and the attendants just letting her down, apparently from hoisting her bound arms up behind her. Effective elision and suggestion with the shot, but also the implication of vision itself. There's another shot like it later in the home of the cleric. The attitude of the young woman once she falls in love seems too contemporary, out of the day of the film-making and not that portrayed. But much of the development is alluded to, not portrayed, and her ardor could be part of that. Still, it's a bit too Romantic, in the historical sense of the word, something from even Victorian melodrama. [3/95]
This Island Earth (1954). Credits. Aliens with towering foreheads, brussels-sprout-headed insect guards lumbering in awkward fitting suits which badly disguise arm extensions, their scariness impugned despite the spirited screams of the heroine. Assembly line progression of plot, one development at a time. Precursor, or source or object of parody, for Buckaroo Banzai in the opening sequence: Tarzan-like Rex Reason is a test pilot, flies the plane across country (with no apparent extra fuel, it must run on a uranium chip) to L.A., goes straight to experiment set up and waiting in lab, then is presented with mystery fuse (aliens using U.S. postal service -- these don't suck your brain, they commit mail faud). The diagrammatic naiveté of 50s culture is here given figure in the dramatic bit of the instruction manual, from which hero constructs console-style superintelligence gizmo, the interociter. Grownups projecting their own sense of conspicous distinction back onto children: an offical culture, a whole infatuation with diagrams and control. In the assembly line style again, as soon as Rex sees Faith Domergue we get cornball insertion of the romantic line. That also serves as the erotic charge, the fear-sex carnivalesque of the horror genre that seems so conspicuous and sublimated at once, always resolved, i.e. circumvented, as the masculine triumph in the rescue ritual. [3/95]
A Cry in the Dark (1988). Credits. Account of incidents in Australia beginning in 1980 with the disappearance of a woman's baby at a camp site, she claiming a dingo carried the child off. Although the official inquest ruled in favor of this explanation, public sentiment swelled a murder theory and Lindy Chamberlain was eventually charged and brought to trial, her husband with her on accessory charges. The story became an international news spectacle. Fred Schepisi gives a scanning, matter-of-fact anatomy, with unceremonious cutaways to strangers debating, discussing, even fighting over the issue. The muted style of this iteration gives an effortless compass to the events, as if the whole public response is being experienced. But the straying is also sometimes cleverly disjunctive, obtrusive, such as cutting to one group of gossipers whose comments drown out the opinion of the judge at the inquest. Schepisi emphasizes the interference, the obfuscation by opinion. It's a sly imitation of letting things state themselves. The roaming of public reaction has the effect of the same nosiness that it makes as its object, but it also demonstrates other factors, such as when, after a TV interview, we are shown how the reporter is taping his question shots and nodding reaction shots separately, to be edited in. This may be the best movie for Meryl Streep because she's part of the fabric. Schepisi doesn't showboat her the way her other directors do. It's definitely Sam Neill's best work. [3/95]
Spanking the Monkey (1994). Credits. Some astute material, for the most part well-acted by an unassuming cast. Conversations with the dad have good economy, quickly portray the egocentrism involved. Pithy details -- dropping ice in a drink glass next to mastubating gives the latter matter-of-factness -- develop into a drowsy exposé of the otherwise scandalous: incest. And then this more extraordinary casts its gravity over the other mundane things: when the aunt comes, the snacks she fixes, the dog, finding the dad's videos. Scenes with the boy's hometown friends offer an uncompromising slant on the uncompromising goof-off. But the film becomes more like The Graduate or Five Easy Pieces, the taboo sex theme from the former, while the ending is the same as the latter (both lead characters hitch a semi to oblivion). It's hard not to feel the film abruptly changes tone, one of those turns that seems not quite conscious of itself, as if the filmmaker is impressionable, fanciful. It makes you wonder about the way something serious can transpire, precisely because you refuse to cope, account for it , but the portrayal seems too caught up in the protagonist's response, too sympathetic, and it gets pretty weepy, tragically awed, subject-bound, which was the worst aspect of The Graduate. In comparison to that, what this movie gives up in snappy, modish form it makes up for by being closer to home, literally of course, in the premise, but also the treatment. The use of close-up is interesting -- intermingling of close-ups of face with others parts of the body -- but it's relied on too much. [2/95]
The Hunt for Red October (1990). Credits. Gripping, as they say. Though it gets fairly hokey and is too credulous with the noble officer routine, it has a rolling, rapt execution, an astute, curious style of observation. Material is elaborated technically, although later this becomes too much: the twist of getting the Americans and dissident Russians together in the same sub and getting each captain his turn at command and a guno a guno showdown and the other sub and the other ship and the other Soviet sub and the guys out in the raft boat -- everything but the hounds nipping at their heels. This infatuation with the enemy is itself an interesting phenomenon. There's a humanizing and banalizing aspect (Sam Neil telling Sean Connery how he wants to live in Montana and have a pick-up truck), a kind of gosh-shucks debunking. Of course it's really remythologizing, setting up a demonic grandeur to convert to a Capraesque everyman ideal (grown-up thrillers boil down to The Wizard of Oz). And at the end, the homosocial detente -- buddy-buddy, teacher-student, father-son -- comes on full force and I get the inadvertent message of the complicity of enemies, a kind of inherent perversion of the message, we're all just folks. [2/95]
The Madness of King George (1994). Credits. Great performance by another British stage actor, Nigel Hawthorne, who works so well on the screen, one of those underplaying overplayers, like Olivier and Paul Scofield. (Scofield, who was reluctant to do film, won an Oscar for A Man for All Seasons and in this year, 1995, he's nominated again for a supporting award while Hawthorne is now nominated for his own famous role brought to film.) Alan Bennett's play apparently changed much, though he wrote the script. The film wanders away from sharper or more explicit ironies to something almost like affection and even celebration of this King George. Bennett gets awed by the character, relishes it too much, so that George often seems sympathetic for the sake of heritage. There's a possible strategy to that, as here a good ending is somewhat subversive. The pageant at the end is not without a certain icy anxiety (like, for example, the end of The Candidate or The Graduate), as if there's a sudden collective, "hurrah, we've saved the King . . . my god, what have we done?" The show is quaint around the edges, even the famous British satire a bit cozy here. As someone commented, the British bathroom humor wears thin. The temptation to brake decorum, and wind, after a while calls too much attention to that decorum. There's a more clever version of this in the opening title segment, which begins with a door cracking open to allow us a peek at a kind of drawing-room realism of the monarchy, a lot of bustle apparently about the household awaiting the king, the pomp of it as if in a mocking rhyme. [2/95]
Little Women (1994). Credits. The Louisa May Alcott novel is given the treatment again. The story still has some pertinence, although here it comes off tailored for moderns, especially the Susan Sarandon mother, a stacked deck with strong heart, encouragement and anti-sexism cant, and even at one point bursting in to rescue her dying daughter from the doctor with good old home remedies. Overall not bad because it's not the usual pitch, Armstrong apparently content with something short of the hyperbolically sentimental. The score is good, something rare in movies of this stature, nowadays. And like it, the staging, camerawork and editing strive less for conspicuous grandeur than for the perceived warmth and emotion of the times, what comes off, in it's best moments, as Dickensian, in the good sense. When it doesn't come off, it's just not as pushy and overwrought as the usual fare. At first, it looked really bad, as we're taken from the wintry exterior straight to the warm glow of the house and the loving family of mother and four girls posing in a big hug shot, Hallmark style. Through the first quarter or so of the film, the direction is awkward, even clumsy. The narrative seems out of gear, mostly from detail browsing, the directorial crowding of shots while the scene, the dialogue, is going on (similar to the way modern editing can be thoroughly counterproductive to the dancing it's supposedly presenting). Winona Ryder doesn't cut it. She's guileless in a way suitable to Alcott's age, the bohemian streaks coming from childhood play. It has a good effect in the scenes in New York, Ryder delivering the sense of intimidated wonder as much with her person as her acting. But that's the limit. She isn't much of an actress. While this may be a great role for her, she's not the best thing for the role. Like Sarandon -- and the two of them together here brings this out -- there's a threshold to her delivery, beyond which she always seems strained, like a vocalist out of range. Sarandon even has the weak voice. By contrast, Eric Stoltz manages his caricature of the 19th century nerd comfortably, without broadness. Claire Danes as Beth, the sister who falls ill and then has to stay home while everyone else grows up and moves away, is the discovery, here. She can act, sometimes a little too well. Armstrong uses her like too much of a spice, trumping up her ability to cry, as in the big Christmas reunion scene. That scene has the best Dickens aspect, the kind of sentimentality that's easy but nonetheless pertinent. When they sing the Christmas carol it's rousing because they have come upon it in course, it's incidental. We've seen the development of what they are celebrating, the why, we haven't been served it as some ipso facto Christmas trimmings. [2/95]
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). Credits. During the depression, desperates are drawn to dance marathon in hope of prize money, torturing themselves for that end. A nice parable of capitalist manipulation, but also of mercy and the paradox of humane treatment. Jane Fonda in one of her two best roles (Klute is the other), this one an unstinting sardonic. When asked if she'd like something for her feet she responds, "You got a saw?" [2/95]
The Chess Players (1977). Credits. Plain, undemonstrative staging: two Indian landowners play chess while the British take over their kingdom, the region known as Oudh. The local general, played by Richard Attenborough, expresses the British contradictions: taking all the powers from the local raj, but blaming and scoffing at him because he does nothing but write poems and play audience to singers and dancers, such not being culture to the British. Though it's low-key in style, a walk-through, it's schematic, even didactic, mostly in a good, plain way, but sometimes in a more awkward, schoolhouse way. The conversations between Outram, the British officer, and his assistant are interesting at first, but become more dry, less dramatic, more transparently expository. At one point, there's a bad attempt to pass off the actor playing the assistant as another person. But if there was hardship for the production, for the most part they've done well with it. The best of this film is the exchange between Mir and Mirza (Saeed Jaffrey and Sanjeev Kumar), the chess players. Their acting brings all the charm and drama to the film. The actresses playing the wives are both good. The dancer for the Raj is a glimpse of a type of dance like stylized mime, with hand gestures, called "mudras," that have meanings, a kind of storytelling. [1/95]
Prêt-à-porter (1994). Credits. Material: on fashion. Is one ever on fashion, to speak of, so to speak? Or, is one ever anything but on fashion, or in fashion? Assemblage, montage, vignette meditation on fashion industry people converging on Paris for a spring opening. Like Nashville and Short Cuts, shows the mingling of a group of people, a cut-out of a society, but quite large even as ensemble casts go. Interesting and snappy, the presentation doesn't lag, as some other Altman attempts: Health, A Wedding, and even The Player. Like Short Cuts, it's brought off well by the cast but some of the conception and even Altman's direction is sappy and showy, pushy. The decision to make this fluffy is understandable: to avoid the trap of trying to be serious about something whose main fault is superciliousness. But that doesn't mean the calculated fluff isn't fluffy in its own right, sappy. The thread about the fashion couple switch, the inadvertent swingers, is silly. The best stroke of the whole film is when, from outside the hotel window, Lily Taylor is seen selecting from among her many vest coats, the apparently fashionless caught in an act of fashion. [1/95]
Osaka Elegy (1936). Credits. Dramatic simplicity of stagey 30s, that walk-through style and boiled down, main-point plotting, and murky photography, apparently intentionally underlit, makes for an odd sharpness. It's that surprise of 30s movies having keen perception, which comes after a diet of contemporary films. But perhaps also because this is pre-war Japan, it's amazing to see such a sociological drama of the plight of women. It's not restricted to that context. This is one of the best statements in the movies of the situation of women. Imperial Japanese society is not different from the other industrialized, "advanced" nations in its treatment of women, or, cutting the other way, the treatment of women serves to show how imperious any other nation is. [1/95]
Stage Door (1937). Credits. Audacious hokum. A study of a boarding house for theatrical women becomes a melodrama of doing good turn. More of that silly Victorian holdover of the melodrama of sacrifice, which often seems cruel in the way it contrives tragedy for the good ending. Taking up the plight of would-be showgirls, the drudgery and dreams, their resort to dating for a living, etc., is the audacious part. But we also get the typical character drama where those of different classes all prove their worth as good chums, this time girls. Katherine Hepburn high society type with a work ethic comes to try it out the hard way, all the house locals bristle and make jokes. The dialogue's pretty quick, especially with Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden and Lucille Ball firing the volleys, and the air of the boarding house bustle comes off. But it gets sing-songy, and there's no dramatic step between Hepburn's snootiness and her good-heartedness, making both seem more contrived. It's all rather stagey, which completely thwarts the play at the end, making it too melodramatic. The business with Adolph Menjou is a typical waste of sharp comment on comic business. Hepburn is great in the part, despite its problems, and Rogers is right for her role. [1/95]
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). Credits. What The Moderns warmed up for. Is it the snap of the dialogue that makes the difference? But there's a trade-off. The formal fullness doesn't deliver the same kind of debunking. Possibly more affection for these than for the Paris expatriates. A scrumptuous picture that rolls from one thing to the next. The scanning technique, carried on by Rudolph from Altman, here works well. It's like a melody compared to the earlier work. Wandering eye camera has a kind of droll and effortless grace, makes things like mirror shots and signs in the background and even intercuts of menus work. With The Moderns, Rudolph seemed to be making a comment on the use of biographical material as cultural figure, authors in portraits as their characters might be. Here, the protrayal is already written in the characters, their own sardonic citation of themselves, especially Parker. Even in a scene where Parker goes to and fro in her apartment and the camera wanders over underwear on the typewriter and dog shit, it's all a swath, an elegant slumming, like Parker's poetry, dressing up sarcasm in quaint rhymes, ransacking love poetry for a blunt turn. The difficulty is in the kind of wallow that these literate fame-seekers and sardonic romantics produced. The later anecdotal and mock documentary turn spoils the formal effect of the scenes in which Parker recites her poems to the camera, but that might have been Rudolph's intention: not to let anything stay too neat. It's also a way for him to get some other comments in, such as that produced by the scenes of Parker with the psychoanalyst. Those scenes seem awkwardly linked to the rest, but the doctor's comments tack the whole protrait down from somewhere outside the view of this circle. Rudolph sweeps even this into the tempo of the film. Really a good register that is somehow oblique while mundane and personal at the same time. The interworking of the characters is done at such a pace that even the focus of Parker is in the same tone. Like being on the fringes of this group and no more closer than that to Parker, as if she were the subject of a discussion you were having with the others (and it augments that sense, as in the scenes where the others talk about her). In that way, anyone is as much a character by implication, Benchley, for example, who is of almost equal importance though seeming no more than a supporting character in terms of Campbell Scott's screen time. Excellent effects of the cinematography that just come in stride: the way the light goes down on Parker at a play, as if to fade out but then the lingering low light shot is surprising and expressive; the iconic reversal of the status of black and white and color, which like Jennifer Jason-Leigh's mimic of Parker's accent, seems gimmicky at first, but becomes characteristic, even characteristically gimmicky; the revue segment, which following that fading shot at the theater, intercuts to produce so many productive ambiguities. When the segment begins, it seems a dream or surreal introduction, and later this is part of what conveys the ambiguity of Benchley, whether his nervousness is real or assumed. [1/95]
Jezebel (1938). Credits. Another Bette Davis role breaks up like fine spun sugar. The "controversial" actress made a career of playing headstrong or oddball creatures. But her characters most of the time have hearts of caramel: they melt from warm feelings, usually the body heat of a male. In this case it's yellow fever. Like Scarlet O'Hara (this is supposed to have been the consolation prize for Davis for Gone with the Wind), or Florence Nightingale, the character's overturning is a gush of self-sacrifice redeeming all her willfulness. O'Hara and, here, Julie could stand getting knocked off their horses, but the alternative is no better. The best drama of the film is it's first movement, which comes right away, leading to the ball scene with the red dress. The film, which is shot in black and white as opposed to the technicolor grandeur of its rival, has this color as a big dramatic issue. The sensationalism skirts the issue -- and it's not just a bad pun -- as is usual with the big, stolid pictures that William Wyler directed. Julie (Davis) mouths some pretty good arguments for bucking tradition, but all in the service of her vengeful and manipulative motive, while the message of common sense and decency in the mouths of the other characters lets us know that there's no good reason to defy the civilized custom of a white dress. After Preston (Henry Fonda) outbids her and breaks her, it's all wilted into a character drama. In the same way that the "rebels" of the 50s only offered a stylish turn, new versions of the same protagonism, so Davis before them produced little more from these challenging roles than what was considered a virtuosity. In her work as a whole, the only time her character sticks to her guns is when she's a villain: The Little Foxes, for instance. Jezebel is more efficient for being less epic than Gone with the Wind, but that also reduces the character to one thread of action -- though Scarlett turns out really no more motivated. But it's also too tidy a package, with all the research crammed into the lines. There are moments when this kind of studio production is a sophistication of its own, a kind of technical profficiency of historical theater. But in the scene where Davis gathers up all the black folk to sing with them as a kind of flouting of the Northerner, it's hard not to think of the whole project as a similar spectacle. [1/95]
To Live (1994). Credits. Even the epic aspect of this is more subdued, incidental (certainly compared to something like Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine). Gentle, coaxing, critical irony. Looking at the story, as in history, the past, with a kind of affectionate distance, like pictures of yourself in some now conspicuous other fashion. All this within the Chinese communist frame. It has the sophistication, wit and irony of some of the best 30s stuff of the Western world, tempering a neorealist sentiment. Dramatically and cinematically, Zhang uses a patient counterpoint, which is also in a tradition of Chinese art (even in the shadow puppets alluded to). The scenes on the battlefield are an excellent example. Zhang shows almost no direct violence: the action falls in the interstices, in the relations, maximizing suggestion and implication and the offscreen space. He's able to heighten discovery that way, such as in the apparent aftermath of a battle when, down in a trench, the stranded soldiers hear rumbling and as the camera rises with them the top line of the frame drops to reveal the new background with a wave of soldiers. Zhang was a cinematographer before directing his own films. This recalls some of his and Chen's shots in Yellow Earth, for example how they made the moon drop in the frame. These shots of the rushing troops have a kind of grandeur of their own, but that's the point: Zhang doesn't push it. What we get is a charging battalion in contrast: the rumble of all the feet in contrast to the lack of any other noise, including music; the force and number of the chargers contrasted, also dramatically, to the two survivors of the camp. When the father returns home from this forced excursion he recognizes his little girl in the street. A shot of her face shows her apparently unaffected by him, then a beat after he says he's her father she breaks into a smile: a nice, modest gesture that also allows for the counterpoint of a child's response (he shows children often in a silent purposefulness, neither the kind of conspicuous childishness nor the miniature adultness that you often get in overplotted American films). The whole segment of the daughter giving birth, with the doctor who eats the steamed buns, is a microcosm of Zhang's dramatic sense. The ruthlessness of the comment -- if that's how to describe it, the "macabre" aspect, as I have heard it described -- is how it encompasses. No target is singled out, it's not polemical in the narrow way. Everyone or "everything" is caught up in the incident, nonetheless unflinching. There's an obliqueness involved, a kind of laying back that catches all sorts of cross currents. In the hospital scene, Zhang meshes tragic, comic, parodic and critical aspects in a way that's difficult to pull off even in the west, where freedom of speech is supposed to allow for the sophistication of irony. [1/95]
Betty (1992). Credits. This is French matter-of-factness at its best. Director Claude Chabrol has given the whole the touch and sense of dropping in on someone's life, as when you become fascinated by some suggestion in a stranger. The coolness of it only heightens the pathetic. It's a sober view of degradation, the sordid unfolding in casual surroundings, a curious concern in the quiet of hotel rooms, bleakness in a plush elegant home. Marie Trintignant (daughter of Jean-Louis) is perfect in the title role. Her face has the right droopy abandon and she plays it so as to mask the more self-destructive aspect of the character. This is what makes her curious and appealing to the other woman who rescues her. Stephane Audran (wife of Chabrol) plays the wealthy widow, owner of the hotel, and has the offhand manner of the wealthy dispossessed. She's regal and slouching at once, a kind and wry decadent. She's neither magnanimous nor the brittle wealthy that we learn Betty has fled. But her interest in Betty is not all sagacious, either. The epilogue ending is too tidy, and the information it gives is counter to the way the rest of the film works. The conversation about Betty shows the strange dovetailing of the worlds, but a completely incongruous conversation would have produced a more striking dilemma: after finding out for ourselves about the title character, we would have seen the world of the others whose opinion of her now would seem justified. The weaving of the flashbacks is done nicely, particularly the scene where the older woman is speaking and her dwindling voiceover accompanies the images of the flashback. The close-set rooms, with close-ups in that relief, give you the sense of the dimensions of the room, by the indirection of the closeness of those conversing. [12/94]
Clerks (1994). Credits. Roguish, low-cost comedy. Of course you can spend much less money and the movie can still be interesting, since at least for just that. And what's allowed by not running the gamut of deal-maker edits can also be telling. It's more formalist than realist, spinning out neat little comedic layerings (with intermittent titles: like Frazier). May be surprising if you're expecting some gritty realist pseudo-documentary. Here a writer has taken the situation of two clerks at neighboring stores and extrapolated or contrived "real-life" incongruities: this is life-is-stranger-than-fiction fiction. Good-natured attempts: best when tracking winding dialogues between the cronies, one of them always pulling the bait and switch on the other. But forced, especially as the day wears on and they keep coming up with odd situations: the compression effects becoming giddier than a sitcom because it's running on even longer. The director needs some polish with his actors. They run their lines out, like a hurried rehearsal. Apposite evocation, cutting to shots of homeboys hanging outside the store. [12/94]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
