Dead Alive [Braindead] (1992). Credits. This is one of those one-trick cult things that is pointless to describe. It's certainly absurd to get into any of the details, but even to relate the plot seems silly. Because this sort of film is nothing other than, whether you're into it or not, a gross-out game. It's just a filmed ceremony of that thing where one person tries to top the other in being disgusting or grotesque. The other notable thing about so many of the films of this genre is that usually they're not as clever as people can be in those games. And besides that, the conversation has the power of suggestion. In the film, it's all latex and goop, which can be suggestive in its way, but after a while it's just mundane. And going on and on and having the same hasty pile-on aspect to any plot gives it no other dimension to really be suggestive, to really be grotesque. This is directed by Peter Jackson, who later did Heavenly Creatures, which in many places shows the same hastiness and exaggeration. [4/98]
You Only Live Once (1937). Credits. There's a nice trick with the switching of the newspaper front pages in the printing office. They have one of them ready to run and it's hanging on the wall. We see that headline as the scene starts. But it turns out the newspaper men are just in the process of preparing the alternative, and they take the other down. There's of course the famous Dewey-Truman incident, but here also Fritz Lang seems to be catching up your responsiveness to such montage information. This is the movie workout of the convict's vicious circle. Henry Fonda is warming up for Tom Joad. His performance in The Ox-Bow Incident is also much more imposing than this. Despite Lang directing, throwing in touches like the one mentioned above and adding menacing touches everywhere -- his trademark shots from abruptly distinct angle, emphasis on eyes -- there is still too much sappy good will in this. It doesn't have a peachy ending, but it's still melodramatic. Next to M, and the sort of demonstration of a social argument that makes, this looks downright corny. As an artifact, it's in part one of the earliest American fugitive couple movies (along with Hitchcock's Young and Innocent of the same year), what after Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands more recently has become not so much a genre as a ritual. [4/98]
Lost in Space (1998). Credits. This film might be worthy to examine as a social phenomenon, if it weren't so redundant, dumb and boring. The gist of it would be something like the moviemakers of the 90s turning to stage-bound TV of the 50s, and all that suggests about the projection of "family" there and back again (Back to the Future?), but this sort of crap is all over the place, in any TV commercial, and there's nothing even interesting about this sample. This film was so rank that even the Los Angeles Cinedome audience that piled up on opening day to see it hissed and booed at it. It amounts to nothing special in today's context. But it nonetheless demonstrates the extent this sort of pandering has gone to. As if preening hadn't already reached such a grandiose scale, the aspiration here is to be perfectly analogous with the suburbomorphism of the 50s. In this souped-up 90s version, you get the most annoying plays at this, especially in the stuff with the teenage daughter taking pixel photos of herself. It's such a ghastly eager pandering job, you can't even have the satisfaction of calling it. Like Disney, it has an anti-graffiti sheen: it defies camp. [4/98]
La Collectionneuse (1967). Credits. A tale of amourous manipulations, like a French epistolary novel of the 1700s or even earlier Florentine tales which were the object of a Cervantes mock-up in Don Quixote, is re-"staged" in the present of the 60s, the irony of that expression being the attempted artlessness of Eric Rohmer's cinema. The further wrinkle is that this film is so slack and walk-through that it's artlessness becomes artificial, or at least artificially at odds with the point of the moral tale narration. The contrast is made all the more apparent by a voiceover, which has the effect of giving you the book to like better than the movie. It offers the literary expression of the intrigue, and the feelings of the protagonist, that shows up the indiscriminate quality of the depiction. There's a nice cumulative effect to all the scenic meandering and low-key acting, and Nestor Almendros's location photography, but it just doesn't make the points of the story dramatically. It's not pointed, not even a pointed artlessness or anti-virtuosity. And even the voiceover narration is rushed through so that the fickle turns of the protagonist are sometimes just jumps, even hard to keep up with. It bears out a contrast between film and literature in general which may be often overlooked: that watching the various people in a drama is not the same thing as having an explicit narration of their feelings and reactions. Faces do not simply reveal what people are thinking, not even as a complement or counterpart of writing. A further analysis of this involves a complication of the empathy and representation we even necessarily take for granted to routinely view or read. One side of the paradox is that it sometimes takes good actors to look like they're not acting. Another side is that it may take good direction to get effects from non-acting. Rohmer seems to rely too much on a notion of a simple dramatic register, a walk-through pretending put on film, and in this case that such cinema verité principles can translate another form or style or even period. It's a grounding notion of translation: wanting to show this material to be cinema verité. But of course in taking on this literature, it works both ways. In the exchange, both sides act on each other. And in translation, there's always what doesn't go, what doesn't correspond. [3/98]
Ulee's Gold (1997). Credits. Its charms are less forced than, say, Slingblade, but the plot is more thriller than Heavy. Like both of those films, this is an attempt at a more modest portrait of modest people, but which has a certain contrivance at just that. In this case, we see the life of a proud, independent, war veteran beekeeper, played by Peter Fonda, sticking to his artisan scruples to get his choice honey ready in high season. But it so happens that this life also involves raising his two grand-daughters, then paying an unusual visit to their incarcerated father, the beekeeper's son, who pleads for the rescue of his drug-ridden wife from his two former crime partners. The sleazy cronies' caretaking of the wife seems suspicious (even, for a bit, implausible), and it is. They're out to shake down the old man for some leftover robbery loot they've learned of from the wife. So now Ulee, as Peter Fonda's character is called, short for Ulysees, has got this to deal with, on top of the honey and bringing his drugged-up daughter-in-law back home to treat. All this plot alongside scenes of the beekeeper at work sounds like literary conceit, or better screenplay conceit. And it is. Even if you get past the crime drama part, there's the business of reuniting a family broken up by prison, drugs, allusive hardening of the heart after war and death and all, and also the crime drama. But despite that, the film manages it all well, for the most part, and it's explication of all this involves finer perceptions. The crime drama itself is played out against expectations, precisely of crime drama. Fonda's character demonstrates a more realistic assessment of the perpetrators, being conciliatory instead of confrontational at crucial moments. There's a gun which never goes off. The confrontation that never falls into the mano à mano ritual. There's a calculated risk to diminish the danger but which provokes the stupid, cowardly pride of the unclever extortionists, and this playing right against your expectations. While the beekeeping business is a kind of exotic provincial setting for all this, there's a similar patient evocation of it, a narration which involves it as the matter of the characters' lives. There's even a nice symbolic linking of it when the daughter draws an analogy between the care of the bees and the care for her mother, and then this is left without further comment to play on the later dealing with the bad guys. There's often a hastiness, an expedience, to the explication, especially in the beginning, that comes off as too earnest and pronounced, mere dramatic stipulation rather than development. But then there are lots of nice details: the daughters lingering in the house, Fonda lying down on the floor because of his back (and at one point a point-of-view shot of the table and the ceiling beyond it), the dialogue between Fonda and the two rogues. It's a good role for Fonda, which neither asks too much of him nor too little of the viewer, meaning that, despite the script's almost naive patness in places, the direction never pushes the acting, doesn't try to signal more out of them (the way, for just one example, On Golden Pond did with Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda and everyone else). Fonda resembles his father in aging. There are instants when he looks much like the older Henry, here, and even sounds like him. [3/98]
Odd Obsession (1959). Credits. In a somewhat stilted formalized introduction, a man tells us about inexorable senility, then enters the frame of the story as the doctor tending an old man. The old man goes home, but his wife turns up to see the doctors, to ask about him. In some of these early scenes, we get freezes of people in transit, the old man walking to the door or a woman stepping off a street car. The young doctor from the beginning turns out to be the old man's prospective son-in-law, but no sooner does he pay the man a visit than the plot embarks on the old man's odd obsession: he finds that jealousy over his young wife makes him feel younger. So he contrives situations which appear to be opportune for at least enticement for the doctor and the old man's wife, but with himself present so he can derive the proper effect. As the ambiguity of the other players mounts, the premise becomes not only similar to but seems headed in the direction of the Florentine tales of romantic manipulation, which Cervantes mocked in Don Quixote. But it then shifts into a story of all the mutual intrigues, of the doctor, the wife, the daughter who is to marry the doctor, and finally the schemes of the housekeeper are thrown in for good measure. All this, however, has a capricious effect. The plot is unbalanced, producing the sense of the shift. It doesn't build each of the intrigues, layer them or reveal them progressively. It leaves behind even the theme of the husband's senility and the formal effects at the beginning. The broader premise, with all its lines, is compressed into the last half, if not less, of the film. There's a vaguely comic sense to the events near the end, the dinner with the fateful salad, but it crops up as whimsically as the other elements. It's not that any of the characters would have to be sympathetic, but there's no particular interest built up for any of them, the film thus falling victim to its own intrigues. [2/98]
Quatermass II [Enemy from Space] (1957). Credits. A film so rushed it's nondescript. The follow-up to The Quatermass Experiment has an expedience which, among other things, seems to presume familiarity with its title character and general premise. Quatermass is the high-connected but scrupulously independent scientist, the very figure of the good scientist expert and citizen, played for some reason by American Brian Donlevy in England. He's come to his own labs fresh from another dispute with the bureacrats, who as ever cannot see progress. But he's had a little run-in along the way, fatefully enough linked to something his trusty team is checking on just now. Brilliant scientifico-deductions are ripped off in seconds, and we're on our way. A partner of his falls prey to the instant peculiar phenomenon: in what must've been an inspiration for Alien, a tiny space receptacle bursts in his face and some small living thing glimpsed by Quatermass for an instant leaves a mark on him. This just outside a strange plant, and then strange guards arrive to confiscate Quatermass's friend. It turns out strange methane and amonia gas-breathing creatures are infecting and controlling humans to help rig this hostile oxygen planet their way. This film starts where Invasion of the Body Snatchers left off, with the aliens insinuated well into the government, but with other high-ups now investigating, including a spirited whistle-blower of an MP. The film is reduced to frenetic hide and seek and shootouts in a big plant, which might've been an interesting setting, if the plot had ever slowed down for effect. The little noxious creatures, which then can amalgamate to produce towering giant masses acting in unison, are a great suggestive scare, but they too are treated slightly by the film. Donlevy gets his first glimpse of the larger clump, but it's confusingly quick, and the climax of the walking tower swarms, which prefigure the smog monster of Godzilla fare, is no more satisfying by duration of shot or by the effects used to wreak them (which appears to be the trusty rubber suit). All this is done so quickly, that rather than some dramatic urgency, the actors give the sense that they're going somewhere more important or fun as soon as it's over. As with the other Quatermass films, there's a bit more thinking in the logistics of the plot than the run-of-the-mill American sci-fi feature of the 50s, but in this case no more effort in the execution. [2/98]
Career Girls (1997). Credits. Parallax view of a woman visiting her friend in London and their earlier college days together as roommates. Well played and detailed nicely, even though the flashback sequences are laid on too thick. A snatch of life which hits the evocative points and, on the one hand, avoids the improvisational airiness of Mike Leigh's work like Who's Who and whole portions of many of his films (Naked being a prime example), and on the other hand, the messagey airs of the broader drama attempt of Secrets and Lies. In common with the other films are convergences in the plot for realist effect which nonetheless come off as contrived, despite the comments in the frame ("isn't that a coincidence," or something to that effect). In this film the example is the two women bumping into three different people from their past. Even though the first is only remembered after the later encounter, it spoils the effect of the final coincidence, one that's supposed to have particular dramatic effect. It's not that such coincidences are implausible, it's the way they're contrived. If, for instance, the real estate agent had been someone that reminded the two women of a man they were involved with, producing the same flashbacks, the same discussion at their later dinner, the same realizations, then the coincidence of running into Ricky later -- who's sitting right in front of their old apartment -- would've had greater effect. As it is, you're distracted by thinking it's too much, too coincidental, especially now as the intersecting paths of characters is such a cliche in movies. The middle of these incidents where they recognize a woman jogging, then just after talk about what the chances are of two such coincidences, seems precisely contrived as a patchover for the contrivance, a compensatory maneuver. Also in common with Leigh's other films is the fact that despite this, the business is still great. The encounter with Ricky is still played well by the actors and brought off well by Leigh. The line of action of the whole film is probably the least anxious of all Leigh's work, which in a lot of ways is best. It's in the flashback sequences, when the women are young, that you get the expressionist dosage of real life awkwardness. Fortunately, this works with the other strand as a contrast of the characters, makes the aging of the women work better. The sequence with the man in his bath robe, when they are pretending to shop for an apartment just to see it, is Leigh's blithe side. It's deftly acted and staged, and its little climax (or lack of one) with the women laughing at the man, is the key demonstration of their rapport, both as friends and as women. It's the kind of glancing remark that is the strong point of this kind of realism. The material with the women as older, this whole line of the film, is neither too demonstrative nor too indirect. It gives the women in the poignance of their circumstance and the characters are neither unaware of it, nor does their dialogue wax dramatic about it. For example, there's the nice touch of intercutting between the two women after they've gone to bed in separate rooms of the hostess's apartment, each one lying awake, the memory scenes of that part thus suspended nicely between them. There are other little creative ambiguities, such as Hannah's last line from the Wuthering Heights fortune-telling bit, when you're not sure whether she's read a word from the book or it's just part of her comment. The relationship of these women is not fraught with their conflicts and it's not their basking in affinity, "identifying." How they do identify is by their difference, each seeing in the other an idealization of something she lacks, and the revelation of this is more like an articulation, making it express, and more a revelation for the other: each one is surprised at the other's perception of her. It's one of the more affecting of Leigh's films, as a whole argument, a subtler, passing evocation of passing lives.
Fallen Angels (1998). Credits. The most frivolous of Wong Kar-Wai's films, this leftover fragment of Chungking Express is a variation of that previous one, with much the same trappings, for example a fake blonde, a woman cleaning a man's apartment when he's not there, counter jobs, but worked up into something more episodic, fanciful and affected. In the former film, the meditation on memory, forgetting, passing and the chance of meeting, even as the generality of being lovelorn, is more the statement of the characters, while the fact they're cops, crooks or just countergirls is more incidental. In this one, all the swoozy formality does not establish anything quite as well, and certainly not the musings more than the happenings, the result being that a hit man shoots people, his female contact pines and masturbates over him, a dubious mute plays a quirky pirate retail shtick, and a couple of eccentric women loop in -- and more incidentally they're all lovesick. There's lots of humor, but the whole is not as sharp, not threaded the way "Chungking Express is, and its kitschy action stuff certainly keeps it from the mundane frame of Happy Together, which is as much to say, restricts its pertinence. The allegorical play is narrowed by two-fisted gunslinging and showers of bullets. Despite a nice existential punchline -- the kind of poetic convergence that Wong gets at his best, only more consistently in the other films -- it's hard to reconcile the killer subplot with the more ordinary lyricism of kidding around with and video-taping your dad. Wong's skimming style, a development of the jump cut which he uses so well as narrative in Chungking and Happy, is more decorous, here, more a matter of flair, like the hand-held shots. With the exception of the mute guy, the acting is not as good as that in Chungking, the actress who plays the hitman's contact most conspicuously. [2/98]
Le Rayon vert (1986). Credits. The documentarist realism makes the paradox of dramatization more conspicuous. The plot and the theme is a woman's spiral of loneliness, but the thematic compression and the persistent conversations with her and about her exaggerate the presentation and the third-person perspective at the same time as it's all supposed to be so candid. The more persistently the work pursues the topic of the woman's loneliness, the more apparent it becomes that it's a work. This is not necessarily a criticism, because it's unavoidable up to a point. It's a cost, or risk, of this kind of realism. But the film is at its worst for this when it follows the main character off by herself. It cheats because it gives a second-person perspective passing as omniscient corroboration of her solitude: we get to steal in and find out that she really is lonely, sad, etc. One of the best scenes is early on at the outdoor luncheon, when she's talking to the other women and one of them tries to goad her into doing something and the two of them get touchy with each other. In that kind of material, where other people are walking the thin line between concern and imposition, we get an observer's position, which would mean we wouldn't really know how she felt. That would be a more dramatic ambiguity. The scene at the table, however, makes express the paradox of dramatizing this: the more realistic it becomes as conversation, the more unrealistic the third-person perspective, watching this not as a present party, but through the camera, the actors ignoring the camera, etc. At a point like this, the question arises, and hovers like an angel or a devil, why be like a documentary, why not be a documentary? Why not have them acknowledge we're at the table, too? The most uncomfortable aspect of this is how it indulges in her psychology. It's a sympathetic portrait, but from a sort of presumptuous second position, which presses the point that it's a contrivance. It actually is imposing, even in its compassion. Its "reality" is a demonstration that all these sympathetic observers, including the film itself, are justified because this woman really is lonely and really does want someone to break through. This leaves out the problem of a presumptuous sympathy that doesn't correspond to its object. Not only that, but the effect of the whole sympathetic portrait is to ensure the indulgence of the main character, even to its fairy tale extent. The allusion to and incorporation of the fairy tale, Jules Verne's work of the same title as the film, makes an interesting contrast and a statement about the existence of fairy tales, romantic idealism and fate, and superstition, in "real" life, everyday or banal existence. The chance occurrence of a group of strangers discussing the Jules Verne work, coincidental with the protagonist's own experience of the color green, is as much a mundane enchantment as seeing the green light in the sunset. But at the end, the circle of the woman's logic closes perfectly -- the very green ray -- and there's no outside to the terms of her predicament. [1/98]
L'Enfer (1994). Credits. A man descends into jealous madness, but the concentration of the film on the last sequence weighs against the rest of it, makes it seem like exposition for an overawed climax, and the descent is away from allegory, from the empathetic to the pathetic. Early on, the quick pace seems other than expedient. In a dreamy montage way, the regular course of a marriage is elided. It's lyrical and matter of fact at the same time. The rolling style, which includes a slight rolling of the camera, a subtle tracking around the actors, carries over to the first signs of trouble in the man, a restlessness and agitation that occur when the crying baby interrupts the couple (the film does nicely by not commenting this otherwise), and then just as well creates an apprehension, a sort of slow suspense. This obliqueness frees the film from dry exposition, makes its obsessiveness more suggestive, and that for a while makes this exercise more affecting than many Hitchcock films, which tend to pose their obsessions in a fairly stagey, literal way. But then the plot takes a pretty big leap, straight to the more obvious jealousy, doesn't continue to build up the subtler stages. You can see the reasoning of this plan, the marriage explaining the newborn which is the first object of jealousy, but then going on to the obsession with infidelity, but the effect of it is this uneven development. The husband finally clicks into madness, but of a very demonstrative sort, something that may be a dramatic infatuation but really isn't good drama. The husband becomes abject (the wife mutters, "he's really mad," and also because of the melodrama of this part of the portrayal, it's at that point that you leave off with the husband, too, no longer see in him self-implication). Once he's gone mad, there's really nothing left to be said, but that's the point which director Claude Chabrol apparently thought was really interesting, because he spends a long sequence on the most anticlimactic demonstration, not only of the husband's madness, but also of the torment of the woman. François Cluzet is a French Dustin Hoffman, not only in physical resemblance, but for a similar bottled-up manner. He's good at portraying disturbance by the way he seems to be not expressing it. Which is why it's a shame that Chabrol calls for more express agitation, scenes like the last one, but also along the way, such as when the character is watching the film shot by one of his hotel clients and has a delusion that his wife has been filmed with her lover. Emmanuelle Béart may have been good for the role as a type, but in the early going she's too clumsy. [1/98]
Foxy Brown (1974). Credits. Pam Grier's boyfriend is coming home with her, fresh out of plastic surgery, but her dope-pushin' brother's hidin' out there, too, 'cause she already had to save his ass with some fancy car drivin'. Despite the careful, elaborate, painstaking plans, boyfriend gets a bullet and to get revenge Pam joins a prostitution ring run by the same bad whitey dope ring. Her infiltration includes teaming up with another whore to kick an old man out of a hotel room without his clothes. Later, she gets tied up in an old shack out in the country by apparently some kind of California car mechanic rednecks. They're gonna do nasty things to her, you can tell because of all the cleavage in this scene. There's also just enough time to squeeze in some black power revolutionary get-up -- Pam looks best like that in this film, even though there's some fine 70s clingy stuff. The exploitation in the blaxploitation is the TV-drama cheapness to it, the quick-spun pitch of goods, but it's all such play-acting that there's nothing really harsh about it.
Speaking Parts (1989). Credits. This is Atom Egoyan when it doesn't come off well. A chain of desire intersecting mainly at a hotel involves a wispy pretty man, a female fellow room-cleaner who's hung up on him, a script writer, the hotel boss, a producer, and a video-store clerk who also tapes weddings. Video teleconferencing abounds and video features heavily in the scheme of voyeuristic, vicarious love. It mounts in a slow, goopy way, but it's actually glancing and slack. [1/98]
The Life of Oharu (1952). Credits. Schematic exposition of the plight of woman in early Tokugawa Japan, one woman's life tracing the spectrum of bad options, the general social blackmail in which women are used, turned aside, then blamed for their behavior. Following up Mizoguchi's work in the 30s, such as Osaka Elegy, it makes him one of the filmmakers most dedicated to women's social problems. This film is noble and appreciable for its subject matter and effort, but unfortunately flat and often didactic. Statements of the issue are put right in the lines, the characters' mouths, and almost nothing is left to the drama. It earnestly, relentlessly churns on, even though you can predict what the outcome of each scene will be and the next lowly position Oharu is going to be in. The stage formality of it -- there are no close-ups to speak of -- is a kind of plainness, not the active stroke of some Kurosawa films depicting historical periods, or something like Kwaidan. There's also an expedient theatrical acting style, low key in one sense, but artificial in another, a sort of modest expressivism. All this adds up to muted melodrama, a dramatization of textbook social themes. The few moments where the film is more glancing or the drama makes some room for implication are caught back into the syntax, a scene-by-scene punctuation which, curiously, is tidy and decisive even while it's formally "open," scenes usually ending with a lingering shot. When we return to the flashback frame, there's a sharp bit where Oharu says she's been seeing familiar faces in the temple idols, then the other outcast women try it themselves. This would have made a great finish, a nice figure with lots of play in it to close on without having to be either too upbeat or too tragic. But the film doesn't end there. It goes on with even more heaps of coal upon Oharu, and while there's a few interesting historical tidbits in these post-flashback sequences, they bury the temple scene which would've made a better ending and even at least a more circular one. The whole film, for all of this, feels much more like a 30s film than a 50s one, but without the charm. While Osaka Elegy had a plainness that was affecting, even compelling, this is weak and drab. [1/98]
Jackie Brown (1997). Credits. It's a good step for Quentin Tarentino, more modest, not trying to follow on the hipness that Pulp Fiction became. Also, after having to suffer Tarentino's person in various appearances, as well as a couple of acting indulgences, it's good to get a more modest statement of his abilities. There is nothing profound about Tarentino's films. They're just good movies, and that's by no means a slight, especially when that seems to be either too difficult for or simply not desired by so many people working in movies these days. The enthusiasm and fun of Pulp Fiction, a celebration of talking as much as movies, is here done in mellower tones. There's nothing like the violence of either Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs, whether reflexively shocking fun like the adrenalin in the heart of the former, or just as concertedly anguishing as the torture scene of the latter. Tarentino plots out the suggestion and suspense in similar ways, sets up the Samuel Jackson character's tendencies, but here settles for ironic abruptness and distance for the acts. The homage to Pam Grier seems especially the agent for the soft-heartedness of the film. The music he picked for this soundtrack has even more sentimental reference, and for that matter is not merely the fun collection the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction was. There's the cut-up of chronology, as in Pulp Fiction, only in this one kept to the rhetorical effect of one sequence rather than the plan of the whole. It was the really great stroke of Pulp Fiction, but here it's just as effective for it's more select use. What comes out particularly in this film is how good Tarentino is with close-ups, the timing of them, the coordination of them with the dialogue. He gets so much out of the close-up, basically, sometimes with a little or subtle movement, without having to do the grandiose swoosh-up of all the Spielberg imitators. His real life mannerisms and speaking style to the contrary, Tarentino knows how to rely on unembellished material, sort of readymade movie effects, the most wonderful example being the title sequence where he gets a great moving background shot by tracking Pam Grier as she rides on one of those human conveyer belts at an airport. Grier and Robert Forster, who's a nice understatement, both as casting and acting, build up a mundane little attraction, and have a conversation about getting old, smoking to avoid gaining weight and hair loss. The script, based on a book by Elmore Leonard, is more streamlined than Pulp Fiction, and serves to blend in more Tarentino's rhapsodic flourishes. The choice little ensemble parts are all good casting, for Bridgit Fonda and Michael Keaton, for example, and De Niro, as usual, is fun to watch doing a low key role every bit as unassuming as he is absorbed in big virtuoso parts. [12/97]
The Sweet Hereafter (1997). Credits. The tragic aspirations of this story dissolve Egoyan's earnestness and his stilted manner: the whole thing is so earnest, the story, the subject, the plot, that the the manner of it, the way it's executed, doesn't stand out like an accent. In earlier works, Family Viewing, The Adjustor, or Exotica, there's a primness that comes across mainly in the acting, even the characters, but which is also because of the writing and the direction. Sometimes this works, as if as much about the characters. In Family Viewing, for example, the muted manner is like that of one of those Sunday morning religious TV dramas, and thus works with the irony of the subject matter, the sexual and other relations the family doesn't discuss but which are being portrayed. The same thing goes for Exotica, without the explicit TV metaphor or resonance, where sex is dissembled, betrayed, shown up as at once conspicuous and undisclosed. In all these previous ones, but most expressly in The Adjustor, there's a conjectural sense, something more hypothetical about the fiction, a fictive project, as if propositions are being made by the drama. This film turns more to drama, but doesn't quite dispense with the formal play. The results are mixed. The earnestness is stirred in and evened out because the whole thing is more grave. But there's almost no relief for it. The amblings of the plot seem predicated on a reverential attitude, as if Egoyan started from that and worked the events up from it. Egoyan moves through things in an unpressured, attentive way, photographically and dramatically, which keeps his ponderousness from being just annoying. But here many of the pretensions are confusing, rhetorically when not literally. By far the worst note of the film is the introduction of the incest. It's the abject alibi problem, as if nothing else that had happened -- in this case a busload of children dying -- would have enough dramatic stature. And the pertinent scene comes off as hedging, since Egoyan wanted to drop the cover on the father and daughter, but at the same time he doesn't really state it outright, it's still an ambiguous scene. You find yourself confused as to how far the film was trying to tell you that, and then waiting for more information. So even if you haven't bought into the incest, it's caused you so much distraction anyway. And when it's made clear, there's still little enough information. It's not the kind of glancing ambiguity Egoyan wants, as with other relationships in this film and as he did better in Exotica. Its vagueness makes it more glaring and sensational, a witch-hunt stipulation without development, and which draws everything around it. Later, the Pied Piper story metaphor skews things even more. The intercutting of the girl reading this story seemed to pay off when she entered her deposition: lines finally seemed to tie in to the plaintiff lawyer, as if he were the piper. But then in the course of the deposition, the Piper is matched to the girl's father, particularly when a line about lips is matched with the father's mouth. Suddenly everything else about the poem doesn't fit, the bits about all the other children being led away (unless Piper = parent in general, which would still be poorly wrought and possibly sloppier ideology). There are shots in the film dramatically sharper and more efficient than the verbal elaboration, which thus make the latter that much more heavy-handed: the bus skidding out over the snowy plain then cracking the ice and sinking, the shot of the infant daughter next to the knife (which follows directly its exposition and directly undercuts it, makes it profuse: we don't need all the literary conceit here, the business about the baby spiders, just surmising it was a spider bite would have sufficed). There are caprices of the drama which have no effect and are thus only affect, such as when the garage owner is already mad enough to beat the lawyer, but then listens to his pitch. [12/97]
Kanal (1957). Credits. As compact a counterstatement to triumphalist war films as there is. A morbid view of hopelessness from the defeated, this film is encouraging -- as a film, a work -- because of its very refusal of uplift. From the start, the Warsaw resistance is already broken, straggling, a patchy crew regrouping in ruins, clinging to the formality of organization. The officers entertain no optimism: they talk of the inevitability of the German siege as the force moves in. In all this, a slightly vacant composer plays Chopin on an abandoned piano and wants to telephone his wife in the destroyed city; a female soldier is wide-eyed in love with a vaguely roguish officer; a beautiful blonde woman meets up with her fitful officer, who remarks that she stinks -- she has just come from the sewers. The whole crew retreat into the sewers to avoid capture. An old civilian woman left on the streets pleads with them not to leave her. The sewers, through which they hope to escape to a safe part of the city (absurd by even their own estimation of the invaders), are immediately disorienting. The group dissolves: trapped, lost, demented, misled even to capture. The man who seems finally to escape goes back in to find those who haven't followed him. There's a theatrical pitch to the acting which sometimes makes the film too expressive, detached in that direction. It makes, for example, the composer's madness less pertinent. But despite that, there's still a matter-of-factness, a dispatch to it all. [12/97]
Boogie Nights (1997). Credits. Lots of great strokes, some really great but strangely brief flashes, but too ambitious and trendy. It's good stuff without a great plan. Perfectly analagous to James Mangold's Heavy and then Cop Land, Paul Thomas Anderson's first film Hard Eight was less ambitious, less epic, and far more effective. Anderson is crashing the boards, since this, his second film, comes out the same year. Already there's a darling aspect to the project, he gets to play too much. Almost every sequence is too long, lingering from enthusiasm but usually not anything else. By the time there's a dramatic reason for the stretching, in the drug scam sequence near the end, you've already been wearied by everything else (and already beat over the head with the violence) and so the effect has no contrast (cf. The Usual Suspects). The violence is not only sought to make things more impressive, it ruins the best thing about the film. The film is novel for portraying porn makers almost as social comedy, the participants' cheapness as naiveté and not lurid evil or sensational crime. But the violence comes precisely as the result, what they reap, and even if it's inadvertent, the way its stacked up for all the characters gives it the same significance as moral retribution. That effect comes from the conceit of parallel, intersecting lives, which is contrived later, and from cheap plays at it such as showing two of the cars passing unbeknownst to those in them. Paths must diverge if their conjunction is to be significant, otherwise, you get clumsy imposition. Unless, of course, you intend the imposition. This isn't the tragic aspect of porn actors, it's Anderson going for a big bang.[10/97]
A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Credits. A British version of Hollywood, fleet and sweet. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were much more infatuated with the cinematic stuff than most stagy Hollywood was. It's a toy, and here they try all kinds of tricks. The whole is still a bit too -- um -- flighty. Like Daniel and the Devil, which its story, too, resembles, with the trial scene and all, and like Love Me Tonight, this is a Whitman's sampler, a collection of great stuff, but a sum of parts. It doesn't amount to a great stroke, doesn't have the tune. Not so hard to see why, here. Starts out great guns with bomber David Niven radioing his last words to a strange American female officer, Kim Hunter. He jumps from the plane with no chute but ends up still alive. This causes consternation in the afterworld, a place far more concerned with records and time than wings and harps. Earth is in color, heaven is in black and white. While one critic says this may be a poke at the British documentarists, closer at hand is The Wizard of Oz. The inversion of the Oz color scheme makes a nice comment that earth is preferable to eschatology, which is the point of the drama. The bomber scene rolls along right into the netherworld intro, but by the time the premise is down and Niven has learned they expect him in the afterlife, the film has gone theatrical, static. Film tricks are still sprinkled around, but there's nothing really cinematic about the story or the conception. The climax is a dialogue, a debate between Roger Livesy and Raymond Massey over the comparative ignominy of Americans and British. There's some wit in it, but it's courtroom drama. [10/97]
Devi (1960). Credits. A student has a few banal moments with his young wife before he must go away back to school. The young woman is seen as a blessing to the father-in-law's household, serving him as well as holding her nephew spellbound. When the father-in-law has a dream about her, he determines she's an incarnation of Kali. The husband returns home to find that his wife is now a goddess, receiving supplicants and their sick children. As spectacular a plot as it sounds, the whole things is brought off in such a subdued, controlled, even mundane way, that it's more effective than spectacle. The closeness and economy of it are amazing: you wonder what's going on, hang on the reaction of characters, then you realize you're going through what they are, you are in the same position, and by the time they do respond with speech, you also realize that most of the drama has already been in the images. Ray does nothing complex or showy with film, but his control of all the elements, his assemblage and orchestration of them, from the script to the acting to the shooting, is as great as it is basic. [10/97]
Liar Liar (1997). Credits. Draws the lines for a premise but then colors outside them. It's hard to say the jokes are forced, since everything with Jim Carrey is forced. As if his mugging isn't enough, in this film he's got to be falling down all the time. Directors are either infatuated with him or it's the cynical use of him for box office. He was unbearable to begin with and he never does anything else to show otherwise, he doesn't get any better. He gives his effort at self-irony, as when he hosted Saturday Night Live, and then in one of the outtakes of the closing credits of this film, but then he keeps doing the jumping up and down crap. It's a have your cake and eat it too age. Everyone reincorporates their good-natured self-mocking as self-promotion. After you watch this film, the outtake shtick seems crudely disingenuous, and as if the audience wasn't supposed to get enough Jim Carrey bouncing in the movie they'd want to see him doing it "behind the scenes." In the last one, Swoosie Kurtz pulls a prank on Carey and says "overactor" in the courtroom shoot. He hugs her, then says, "they're on to me." Is the audience supposed to want to think Carrey's like that all the time, like Rodney Dangerfield, or Robin Williams, he just never turns off? As for the story in the movie, it's all rigged out in advance, cheats on itself, makes the lawyer the real good dad at heart though he's supposed to be an unscrupulous liar. That's not really established by the plot, only by a kind of sitcom shorthand. It's just the semblance of continuity for hyperbolic mugging. The utterly rank wonderment music only makes the film worse when it's playing. [10/97]
Fast, Cheap and out of Control (1997). Credits. For the circus metaphor, Errol Morris gives it all a lurid tilt. Intercut are a lion trainer, plant sculpter (topiary artist), robotics scientist, and biologist studying mole-rats. It's an anthropomorphic carousel of man, animal, plant, machine. More prosaic than, say, Christopher Marker or Trinh Min-Ha, but not for lack of sophistication. Morris languishes on shots, with the music and in a way that almost seems posh. But after a while of the circulation of circus shots and even the lingering on faces, the effect mounts up. The lion tamer seems to tell more of the practical side than any of them, while the scientists mostly speak of the thrill of their fields. The lion tamer produces some of the most technically interesting information, at once technical and emotional (the old sense of "art" in craft) especially when he talks of how frightened he is all the time. But he's also the one that gives the Beckett-like absurdity to it all when he tells how an adult told him when he was a kid that there needed to be lion tamers in the world, too. All that built up every night, nerve, experience, knowledge of the lions, then you shut yourself in a cage with them for a few minutes hoping one or more of them don't panic, as if you had to do this in the first place. And, from another angle, for all four of these people and their endeavors, is it not enough but they need some sense of necessity about what they're doing, as well, some grander justification? This aspect of the lion taming (do you suppose anyone goes to see a circus for that reason: because lion taming is necessary?) of course bleeds over to the others, as is the documentarist's not too difficult task of showing us. Morris I think understands that difficulty is not necessary for merit (after all, he's not lion-taming, for chrissakes). What's behind his documentary urge, or at least scheme, is to present the same relation he's seeing in the four subjects.
It's robotics scientist Rodney Brooks who provides the most sophisticated punch of it all, an anti-teleological, anti-immanentist check on evolution that comes from a mechanical analysis. As designers, we've inferred design as purpose from the phenomena, particularly creatures, we've derived from. The mistake is curiously simple enough (once you get around this equally derived problem of projecting all our derivations as gigantic anthropo-egocentrism, however deferential it's made out as divinely other): they, too, are derivative, these creatures an accumulation of results. Walking is not so much a solution to a problem, as if an A and B had been given to connect, as an impetus, a reaction. As Laurie Anderson put it, you fall forward, catch yourself, do it again, thus walking.
[10/97]
Battleship Potemkin (1925). Credits. Its paradigmatic story and the fact that it has become a paradigm as a film can make you take it for granted. On first viewing, it's impressive as pathos as much as anything: for all the vaunted or notorious technicality or formality of Sergei Eisenstein, the purpose is emotional and dramatic. There's the drama of bad meat, intimidation and fear are the action expressed by the editing, a title says that a character decides to take action and what he does is say something, a crowd mourns a dead sailor, and the balance of the drama comes from this sympathy of the townspeople, riding out in boats to meet the ship, rejoicing as they give the sailors food, standing and waving on the steps, and then being mowed down by soldiers. It's not unemotional, it's not even unsentimental. There's banner-waving and ideological zeal, the Soviet version of silent-era earnestness, but its merit is that it's dispatch, revolutionary shorthand, in medias res. Part of the paradigmatic conception is the way it doesn't stand on ceremony, as far as overture. Its context is taken for granted. Eisenstein's sophistication is the way he treats this sentiment. After the virtuoso cross-section of Strike, Potemkin shows even a lyrical side to Eisenstein. The pace varies more for dramatic purposes, and his theories of contrast included this as well. The Soviets developed the art of editing, of quick cutting and movie "dialectics," taken for granted and to absurdity today. But just as important a contribution to film was Eisenstein's notion of editing within the shot, something that ought to complicate the montage v. mise en scene debate, certainly the distinction between the two. Eisenstein's composition heightened the sense of angle and dimension in film. He's even a predecessor to Welles and Toland in that respect. In Potemkin, there's crossed angles of movement (a stream of people under an arch, another on top; the boats and ships), intercutting between several setups in the same scene around the same object (the swinging tables on the battleship just one of many examples), the angles of tracking shots (the Odessa step sequence and beautiful shot of the boat bearing the dead sailor), and the perspective shots (such as a shot from inside the tent of the dead man, with a boat crossing outside the frame of the tent). Apart from the mutiny on the ship and the massacre, Eisenstein doesn't think that drama, or even action, is only a special physical event. The exposition is of situation, of the factors that determine it, and for that matter Eisenstein's is film of suspense. It seems elementary, but this is what bears out the point of his method: to articulate with moving images (meaning the changing of them as much as the movement in them) which were also without sound. Music was, then, even inadvertently, as much a model for cinema as any visual art. To create rhythm, tempo, melody, counterpoint: the sense in which a melody (but really any effect of music) is greater than the sum of its parts is what Eisenstein thought of film. In the legendary, much explicated Odessa steps sequence, the baby carriage and its microsequence serve as a simple example of this basic view: the wheels of the carriage in single shots evoke this bouncing, teetering suspense, and the cutting away, the absence, intermittence or differential aspect of this give the narrative axis of this suspense. Negativity is not strictly a negative thing, negativity as creative force (the legacy of Hegel). [10/97]
Catch 22 (1970). Credits. Pushy delivery cheapens Joseph Heller's parody, which is already an exercise in exaggerated argument: paradox used despotically. There's a restlessness to be profound, just as in The Graduate, so lots of cinematic infatuation, here with the flashback structure, even when there's good stuff. Sometimes things are good and showy at the same time. A shot of the bombers heading out over sea prefigures Apocalypse Now. The satiric characterization is often just silly, as in Orson Welles's first scene at the flight briefing: pretentious slapstick. Across the whole, there's a smugness to it that makes it impertinent. It's played at such a pitch that it has no relief, an exercise by people who have the joke too pat. Alan Arkin's performance is the only thing that provides more interest, resonance. [10/97]
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Credits. Stanley Kubrick got down the ironic distance effect for this film but he has not had such a great script complement for it since. Terry Southern sharpens his wit on Peter George's story of nuclear brinksmanship, and uses his combination of smart-aleck erudition and love of silliness to greatest effect. The story is short, one line of action with three projections. As Nietzsche says, in the sense the Greeks gave to it drama does not mean just action. Here, drama is not just seriousness. Two steps removed, you nonetheless get a remarkable tragic effect. The comedy is played out in claustrophobic settings, executed with the iciness Kubrick would later become famous for. The bomb is "delivered" in the almost ridiculous image of Slim Pickens riding it like a bull, waving cowboy hat, an image that is thus as tangled and surreal as a dream. The look and the feel of this film, from this combination, are impressive in a dreamlike way, uncanny. I saw the film as child, without understanding that it was humorous, and years later, when I saw a clip of the Pickens bomb ride, the image was eerily familiar, like a nightmare. On the one hand, it's a burlesque of the military and the instrumentalist calculation they've generalized, but at the same time, the absurdity and burlesque parallel the offhandedness of precisely these people. The flip gesture of the ending, with now archetypal footage of atomic blasts lilting to "We'll Meet Again," is possibly the best example of countereffect there is in the movies. [10/97]
Mother (1996). Credits. Modest movie-making, if this were TV, it would be great TV. Brooks is funny and sharp, his humor is built on a kind of banality you don't see a lot of, a winding, whining digression of neurosis that carries people too far. He's pithier than Woody Allen, but at the same time, his films are bland. He wants to be excruciating, but he pays the price for his drifting: the cumulative effect is drafty, his movies seem empty, like his character's apartment at the beginning of this one. This is a noble effort. Its point, that understanding your family means you have to see how they aren't just related to you, is one that's been lost in the jungle of family clichés. [9/97]
Irma Vep (1996). Credits. Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung plays herself arriving in Paris to star in a French TV remake of silent-era serial Les Vampires. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the director who has passed the peak of his career and may be in personal decline, as well. What is staged is a series of mundane anticlimaxes, a backstage drama that's formulated like a debunking but is actually about the fascination of circumstance and a sort of ordinary thrill of pretending that is what the movies are about even when a movie doesn't get made. Without being particularly novel or profound, the film is sharp and pertinent for its un-grandiose view of even movie-making, and in its playful, attentive manner. It manages to be eloquent about passing, about the sentiment towards brushings and "missed" opportunities, about failures and embarrassments all becoming wistfully fond moments. There's a sequence when, at a home gathering after one shooting, some of the movie-makers and their cronies are watching old films they shot in the 60s. One of them says his work is much better now, but a younger person says it shouldn't be repudiated. Our frame glides to that of the 60s student political film and for a moment you're caught in the nostalgia of it, no less so for its naive zeal and a sense of remoteness it now has, and then we cut back to the dinner party, something which is abrupt, but which has the sense of a fade, the way it's blended in the context. Olivier Assayas does this throughout the film, for example, when switching to the footage that is supposed to be that shot by the director within the film. His transitions have the effect of a change of attention, not of abrupt juxtapositions. What the film evokes as much as anything is the circumstance of visits, to foreign or at least distant places, the haphazard, the simultaneous hospitality and alienation, the fascination that can come even from the alienation. This mundane route sets up in one scene a movie stunt so that it is fascinating and suspenseful as such, and not as the action of some other plot: a woman is running along the metal rooftops, wet from rain, in high heels and latex. And this comes right before a little reflexive moment when an interviewer extols the virtues of action films over the intellectual cinema and Cheung disclaims that not only is she not a fighter and doesn't do her stunts in the action films, but that she prefers other kinds of movies and doesn't think that popular cinema should exclude them. [8/97]
Shane (1953). Credits. A revision of the western towards some kind of heroic innocence, Alan Ladd so noble even a bad guy (Ben Johnson) comes to like him. Brandon De Wilde is the obvious point of view. We're seeing the whole panorama through his wide-eyed gaze. There's interesting stuff here and there: Elisha Cook, Jr.'s boldness, Palance's lines when he taunts Cook (that whole scene is really one of the few good cinematic ones in the film). Mostly it's a strange storybook drama, a grown-up's idealization of old boyhood western fare. A bit more pithy than any Disney, or than big American family spectacles of the 50s and 60s, there's nevertheless a wilderness-family squeakiness about it that makes it something not quite a western. The issue of the drama, farmers against ranchers, is so earnest it's anticlimactic. It's like a memorial exercise, something you already know the conclusion to and quote reverently. The Clanton-type rancher villain has been humanized so much you can't figure out why he's hired the gunman. There's something faint about him. The character is stock, not filled out, despite the attempts to make him more folksy. The famous cinematography (it won an Oscar) is picture-book technicolor in static composition, a string of big, pretty, majestic and bland images. And there isn't that much of them, to boot, as much of the film gets stifled in rather drawn-out bar scenes, fighting ones though they may be. Save for Palance's confrontation of Cook, there's not much interesting shot construction. There's nothing like the composition and the sharp sense of expanse in John Ford movies. Jean Arthur is out of place. [7/97]
Gates of Heaven (1978). Credits. Documentary about pet cemeteries expands with its subjects like cotton candy into the whispy revery of their own lives. Ironic didactic style is demonstrated here before the 80s, when it became common and eventually commonplace. This film is closer to the Saturday Night Live docu-character humor of the 70s, there's less formal jauntiness and more interest in the subject. It's possible that you can get a serious register from this: the insurance salesman at the end demonstrates his own aggrandizing of things and thus his own tacit disdain without any need for scripting or analysis, while his younger brother expresses a less-deluded, poignant aspect of failed hopes and plans. Rather than information collage, as for example Atomic Cafe, this is interviews with real subjects that get them to state their own quirkiness, though not necessarily right out. The counterpoint cutting is unconcerned with narrative thread. In The Thin Blue Line, Morris uses a similar agglomeration of material, but he works it out more clearly and at least for rhetorical or emphatic effect, if not for sense. The cutaways to some illustration or dramatization, a kind of visual-aid joke that is nonetheless pertinent, are rarer in this film. More significant is the counterpoint of the testimonies, what Morris poses together in the film. In the first part, it's Floyd McClure, the failed pet cemetery dreamer, intercut with, among others, a rendering company executive, contrasting McClure's stories about the influence of the rendering company of his childhood on his development. In the later part, the family members who run the cemetery are all intercut (never speaking together) as well as with pet-owner couples. Possibly the silliest and cheapest addition is the monologue of the old woman, whose speech wanders all over the place. For all those people who would later exploit this kind of Americana in fictional ways (David Byrne's True Stories the most obvious example, but more generally, David Lynch), this serves to show that they're not far-fetched. It's also a document of the object of parody of The Loved One, and this is a much better demonstration than that film. [7/97]
I Can't Sleep (1994). Credits. So slack and aimless it's impertinent. A curious example of how even a French blasé style can be whimsical and empty. A Lithuanian girl turns up in Paris, a man who runs up to a car and strikes the passenger has black fingernails, his brother is an immigrant worker who has to put up with crappy Parisians, and some one is killing grannies. The opening shot is the most engrossing of the film: two helicopter operators are laughing hysterically, in flight. It's the one thing that has the laisez-faire intrigue that's supposed to be the whole film, which means it's downhill from the opening shot. It's vacant, slack chic. At least it can be said they didn't bother to grasp at anything profound or grandiose. [7/97]
Citizen Ruth (1996). Credits. An indigent woman is pregnant again and pro- and anti-abortion forces battle over her as a symbol. The woman herself is in an impressionable but unreachable middle, so self-interested and narrow-minded that any side can be expedient to her. Dern plays it down a strange middle of her own: with dispatch, even energy, but no pinch. It's a very eager attempt to play a fume-sniffing junky, but the eagerness doesn't cover it all. There are nice touches to the story, even astute ones, for example the interesting pro-choice volunteer guard Harlan (played by M.C. Gainey), and in some ways the lightness of it is refreshing, not only compared to the soupy hyperbole of contemporary fare, but also to some of the smugness of the whole "independent" thing, these days. Kurtwood Smith, who slopped it on as the villain in Robocop, does a good job, here, along with Mary Kay Place, as the Christian activist couple. The film takes care to set them up without caricaturing them, put us in their living room and then show their colors. By the time we've seen their full tilt, our heroine has already shown hers as well. About half way through, the story fizzles. It gets too much going on in skirting ways and its main action is a standoff, a wait. [7/97]
A Taxing Woman (1987). Credits. Bouncy melodrama about woman tax inspector chasing after tax-evading, love-hotel mogul with sleazy connections. The interesting situation is portrayed with so much bustle that it's hard to tell how serious it's supposed to be. It's not quite the pitch of kung fu movies, but it's something along the way. People are never still, always touching each other, even grabbing and pushing, and the camera is restless, too. The whole thing is shot so close, framed in and then jittery. There's also a cute aspect to it. The lead character is an implicit feminist heroine, the thrill of the story coming from the contrast of her with the mobsters and chauvinist businessmen, and her debunking them. At the same time, unclothing and tormenting of women occurs like a compulsion, at the same giddy pace, and any contrast between the smart, hard-working heroine and the parasitic women of the honchos -- molls and wives -- is blurred in the free-wheeling pop tone. It's not saying anything, except maybe that hard work and civil obedience are good (which can be very anti-feminist), and even the focus of the drama gets scattered. During the big investigation, the woman gets lost in the group, but when she turns up to make her mark it's in silly, capricious ways: finding a key while the other officers are having a strip search turned on them, then even sillier than that, playing mom to the mobster's son. The flightiness is most apparent at the end, when there's a sudden play at heaviness. Like the opening shot, of a woman breast-feeding an old man (cf. The Grapes of Wrath for a funny film history note), it's just symbols like charms on a necklace, there's no more context for them. [6/97]
Bound (1996). Credits. Lesbian chic thriller, narcissistic and glossy, self-consciously tries to invert the thriller stigma of lesbians, which is perhaps more famous than it is important. The directors have copied the Coen brothers, most notably Blood Simple, though there's all sorts of other silly nods, even to an absurd point of referring to themselves in the credits as "The Wachowski Brothers." Jennifer Tilly is directed to speak in a sultry whisper that with her voice sounds like a spoof and Gina Gershon is just a big pout. The setup sequence at the beginning is smug, expedient, compressed and cheap: pasteboard. By contrast the twists of the plot seem to give the film enough business to stop preening, but then it's nothing but a stage mystery, complete with body hiding. Joe Pantoliano is decent in his role, though the directors have him lay it on too thick. [5/97]
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). Credits. Like so much of Saturday Night Live comedy and so many of its comedians, Myers here is too content with characterization. It's mugging. As if some friends laughed at his mod twit and his James Bond villain amalgam and he slapped together a movie. Much time of the movie is spent on Doctor Evil, as if Myers is working up the character. The character is good, one Myers really gets absorbed in, and it's a clever take on the Bond world (as, for instance, Doctor Evil's speech at the support group), but it drifts, so much raw material. The business of Doctor Evil's son is a waste, all the 60s-to-90s culture shock misspent. The Austin Powers character is an even better example of Myers's own contradictions. Strange blend of 60s elements, the real precedent for this is Casino Royale, with Peter Sellers and Woody Allen doing Bond shtick. But apart from that, there's nothing really perceptive about the mix. It starts infectiously, there's sly mock-ups of 60s montage style, even a subtle reading of the contradictory mores of the times in a sequence where a nude Myers is being well-hid by the mise en scene. It trails into cutesiness and ambles, even the nude cover-up thing getting repeated and flattened. Myers has a scene in each of his movies in which he uses funny business to woo a girl. It's a conceit, and unfortunately, while he may have experience of those who are won, not all of us fall for it. [5/97]
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Credits. Dennis Price's character Mazini puts gasoline in place of developing chemicals to kill one of the heirs played by Alec Guiness. He sits down to tea with the wife and as they begin to talk we just hear the sound, a sudden gush of flame as in a furnace. It's so quiet you can miss it. That's the way the whole film is pitched. Starched and talky, in the crusty estates of the gentry, the film plays its blunt homicidal moments off a drawing room pace. Mazini is an obliging, self-made gentleman to others, but has schemed to achieve a dukedom by killing each of eight remaining heirs in his way, all of which are played by Guiness. Valerie Hobson, as an elegant, headstrong but gullible lady, and Joan Greenwood, as a fickle but shrewd climber, are both great in their roles. Ealing Studios. [4/97]
The Conversation (1974). Credits. Francis Ford Coppola in between The Godfather movies makes what he thought of at the time as the real artistic film. There's a hint of intellectual posing in this movie, fleeting moments when it seems grasping. But mostly it's an ingenious combination. Although it may be inspired by Blow-Up, it's less faddish than that, and the realist line of the film makes much smoother allegory, here. Most clever is the way Coppola has incorporated the editing process into the plot. It's intriguing to watch the takes over and over, like the editor, trying to find something or get it right, and there's the extra step of sound, angle and error all playing their part in the surveillance. The wiretapping theme was in the air with Watergate, and this is similar to Chinatown, its contemporary, in its meditation on surveillance, paranoia and power. [4/97]
A Walk in the Sun (1945). Credits. One morning in the life of a single company of marines who set down in Italy as part of the invasion at Salermo. Like All Quiet on the Western Front which Milestone directed fifteen years earlier, this is an in-close account of regular guys on the front, a WWII version of Remarque's classic. Less prosaic, however, this one is more heavily written, a dramtist or literaturish kind of poetic banality. It's affecting, in its way, attains an almost sing-song pitch of comments -- which by the way is far better than the annoying theme song, meant to be an ode to the same troop. The dimensions of its plan are commendable, one tiny little operation, summed up in the closing lines of John Ireland, one of the letters he writes to people out loud: "Today we took a farmhouse and blew up a bridge." The nervousness, breakdowns, leaving behind the wounded, and the impromptu aspect of fighting are its fine perceptions. But like Ireland's letter-writing, which keeps him saying things out loud, it often comes off very devised, reality turned out, theatrical. Dana Andrews gives a good performance. Richard Conte, also. See reference to this in Blue in the Face, where Harvey Keitel and Jim Jarmusch talk of how they got started smoking and make reference to Conte, the machine gunner, regularly saying to his ammo man, "Butt me," then asking for a light. [3/97]
Kansas City (1996). Credits. This has the feel of Robert Altman's 70s movies, not only for its physical resemblance to Thieves Like Us and it's nominal and dramatic resemblance to Nashville, but for an edginess. There's something even of M.A.S.H. to its tone. Altman's expressed idea for the movie, and it might as well be for all his stuff, is the jazz as metaphor for the rest: that he gives his actors a melodrama, in place of the melody for the musicians, and they improvise around it. The business is good, especially the stuff between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Miranda Richardson, and the apposition of the music with the rest. An all-star group of contemporary jazz musicians was assembled for the film to play the music of the Hey Hey Club in Kansas City, through which passed Count Bassie and Charlie Parker among others. The music is good, the scenes of them playing, and the otherwise uncommented juxtaposition is a good enough trick still today, if not especially today. The resonance is not only of the 30s and 40s, but of the 70s, and not only of the early 70s movie infatuation with that previous era, but the testamentary style of movie-making that was coming through so much, like open cinema, cinema verité, documentary, guerilla journalism, and Altman's jumble ensemble movies. Leigh does the same thing with her Jean Harlowe hamming, recalling both periods but doing the 30s better than just about anyone in the 70s could. Richardson plays a prescription addict who for that reason and some others seems untroubled and actually vaguely entertained, once she gets over the initial fright of being held at gunpoint. The Leigh character kidnaps her and they wander around town as a not well-planned evasion tactic. Both actresses give presence to even the slack aspects of their roles. Together they make some eloquent pithiness, a slouching realism, as of people on a long trip or stranded some place. Harry Belafonte brings off his naturalistic obliqueness well, too, in a role as the gangster head of the jazz club. His line of action in the movie, however, is stretched too thin, as if contrived to suit the purpose of intercutting the parallel action. The evocation of the period includes the black gangsters and their gambling rackets and the political machine of Pendergast that rigs voting for the Democrats and touches Franklin Roosevelt, among the dirty laundry. The effect is cumulative, with this kind of juxtaposition, a sort of showing things mingling, and in that way it's at its best. It doesn't fare well if you try too much allegory on it, to make something of the racial aspect that way, or as some parable. But after all this, the movie itself hits hard at the end with a big grasping dramatic finish (melodramatic perhaps even by design) and shows just the weakness of Altman and his kind of meandering. As John Cassavetes and even Mike Leigh demonstrate, improvisational methods can produce gawky stuff, moments when the improvisation is all too apparent, and when the artists themselves are stretching. Sometimes it's to effect, as a portrayal of how in "real life" we overdo things to embarrassment. But, as in this case, when it's a big play at tragedy, and a tragic ending, it counters the effect of the whole thing. Short Cuts did the same thing with the earthquake at the end and the murder of the girl (the abject alibi). Here, it would be as simple as not having Richardson fire the gun, but just walk out leaving the crying Leigh with her boyfriend. It would have had the same ambiguity for Richardson's character without the extra big question and the tragic dimension, and more in keeping with the rest of the film. Having the boyfriend walk in to the house like he does is silly enough (rather than, say, being dumped off). Right after this, Richardson delivers the punchline, what she didn't do today was vote, and it would be far subtler without the gun. [3/97]
The White Balloon (1995). Credits. Like Where Is My Friend's House? which Abbas Kiarostami wrote and directed, this is a story about a child's adventure in the mundane world of adults, and like the previous film, this is a patient, unaffected drama. Whereas the former film was more a parable, this one has a similar plot, almost the same plan, but is more anecdotal, broader and in some respects less grave. The implication is more evenly pitched, since here the little girl's desire for the goldfish is a matter of her own indulgence, not the dilemma of the switched notebook in the other film. Her own curiosity causes her as much trouble as the adults who take advantage of it, and the demonstration here could be seen as a cautionary one aimed at children as much as adults, but even for that it's careful, circumspect, sympathetic. The control of all the elements is amazing (Jafar Panahi is the director of this film, Kiarostami the writer), as in Satyajit Ray's films or Zhang Yimou's. The children, as in Kiarostami's other work, are great, artless but expressive. They do their parts -- they have that guileless, un-self-conscious acting that children can have when they're not trained to mug and trump it up. The sympathetic aspect of the drama is not maudlin, and it doesn't stack the deck. There are helpful and caring adults, but the point of view of the children is always how they are left with the situation the way the adults do not see. The children are thus shown to be as much victims of their own deference as anything else. In a completely unassuming way, it builds to a poetic finish, and not merely in the sense of being artific or beautiful. There is a moment of sheer dramatic evocation, one of those great scenes that's like an epiphany the way it's not expected but you feel all the nuances of it, and in this case it's a moment of a sort of gratuitous glee. And then the final shot is poetic in the sense of indirection, allusion and association. The happy ending of the brother and sister, their closure, is traded off with the unknown, the openness, of the Afghan boy. Their story has been told, his has not. [3/97]
Everyone Says I Love You (1996). Credits. Inchoate, a lot of clever material, some very unclever, some unoriginal, in a strange mix. The cinematography is sloppy, blanched, unappealing. There's a remoteness to the whole thing, the whole cast acting like Woody Allen with retiring face, hardly ever making eye contact, with the camera or each other. For the first time, something like fatigue seems to show in Allen's work. His jokes are not as sharp. They're more easy, as if he settles for them too quickly. His nervous stammering is drawn out to the point of obfuscation, in at least one scene. The narration is so muffled it's confusing at first. Several of the scenes are this way, as well, muffled and flat, particularly the song and dance number in the jewelry store. There's an attempt at the kind of naturalistic jumble of things, like in a Robert Altman film, and in some of Woody's other films. But here, like in bad Altman films, it comes off sloppy. The direction seems at fault, as if it's gotten away from Allen. The ideas and the devices, some of the plot jokes, are all nice and funny, and the singing and dancing has its charming moments. In some instances, the accumulation of all this plot works well, when it's a rolling chaos of crossed love stories. But much of the time, it's like two movies: a tangled Allen plot, like Hannah and Her Sisters, and this whimsical song and dance thing. In the Allen scenes with Julia Roberts, for example, there are a couple of moments of song, but then it falls into typical Allen shtick, and you forget it had anything to do with that device. Then another musical number comes and you remember he's doing that in this movie. Often the music numbers bring in another tone and the typical Allen melodrama seems too prosaic. The jewelry store number is right out of Pennies from Heaven, hardly improving on that one. There's a bit of 42nd Street and old Hollywood streetlife rhapsody, also something of Rene Clair or at least Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight, which may be the reason for the Paris locale. But this has neither the deftness of Clair nor the complete whimsy of Mamoulian's piece. The first scene with Tim Roth is the worst of the film, with Roth's convict slopped on so thick it doesn't even produce the incongruous punch Allen thinks it does. [3/97]
Star Wars (1977). Credits. On the 20th anniversary showing. Twenty years later it may be hard to remember the merits of this film, especially when it's begotten so much badness not only in movies, but in everything else. A space adventure with (at the time) no stars and a model-making teenager's sense of material detail kicked movie merchandising into hyperspace. Now people plan products first and write the screenplays later, and no one can imagine decor having any blank space -- there has to be lots of shapes and specious detail on every sitcom set. The surprising thing about Star Wars now, especially seeing it on the big screen, is how much less slam bang it seems by comparison to what's it begotten. With the computer effects, the exaggerated, video-cam faux verité, and the three-minute rule now reduced to the three-second, Star Wars is plain stodgy and gappy. In those desert scenes at the beginning, with the robot leads walking around, why, the camera is still. You'd think you were watching some fuckin' four-hour Lawrence of Arabia, by today's action film standards. It's also hard to remember that the pure hokum of the trilogy didn't show up till six years later. By now, the conclusions of Return of the Jedi are stamped on the whole series. Star Wars is like an old serial movie, such as it was modeled on, with similar heroes and shortcomings (for example, as if it weren't bad enough that the Storm Troopers can never hit our heroes with a shot, Obiwon Kenobi refers to their precision shooting early on), but among the three of them it has the best plotting, the action a nice little chain of events even if none too sophisticated. Its most commendable aspect is its tone of matter: the material of its production and the matter of factness by which it is presented. Not only did it break through the outer space of a formica future, by adding rust and dirt and oil and the "long time ago" fantasy stuff (something that was not new to sci-fi readers), but it dropped the heavy expository and let you take things for granted. It also left aside the high-symbolic pretensions of a lot of "serious" science fiction, although it certainly has its own metaphysical mush. It's a technician's movie, a technician's fantasy world. In that sense, it's also cinematic. They created this big, thick environment to watch and hear. On that note, the computer-effect additions tacked in for this 20th anniversary exhibition are superfluous at best and even counterproductive. Lucas developed the technology of optical printing, especially in the next big step to The Empire Strikes Back. The whole point of that is the sophistication of film images, the superimposing of miniatures and different elements of a scene to look integral on the same piece of celluloid. The computer effects are garishly different. They're nothing but cutesy updating, a strange mark of the legacy, that not even the film that kicked off the special effects frenzy can be immune from its own faddish succession principle. [2/97]
The Postman (1994). Credits. Sentimental, the plot, if you read it or have to tell it to someone, sounds silly, and so it is even as it unfolds. But the telling is actually pretty good. As romantic and flighty as it is, it's also pithy. The material of the story and the treatment by the director is not too fanciful. The actor, Massimo Troisi, provides a fair rustic odor, with a very non-actor naiveté. This in itself starts to seem smug by the end, but that may have more to do with the film's reputation. This is one of those films that is given a bad name because of the way people like it. In this case, then, it's actually better than the great movie people think it is, not least by being something less grandiose. The business of the film, of the story, is what is good. It's drawn in close to this poor uneducated man meeting a famous writer. Even the scene in which Pablo Neruda (played nicely by Philip Noiret, but with someone else's voice) helps the man win his love is interesting and plausible. Some really nice stuff later when the postman makes an audio post card of his island. Nice, unforced poetics, like the Tavianni brothers in Night of the Shooting Stars (review for this is in the print version Film/Script), like much Italian cinema that can be lyrical without being effusive. The casting of the postman's lover is somewhat awkward. The actress is so striking and voluptuous that she's against the grain of Troisi and Noiret, cut from some more spectacular cloth, as if she were cast for different, more apparent reasons. There are some jumps in the story, the kind of lurches which give it a melodramatic feel, relying on too much. The last scene, with the intercut material of the postman at the rally, gets too sloshy, another case of filmic conceit giving too much. [2/97]
Reversal of Fortune (1990). Credits. Competent, fairly straight narrative manages to be effective, even chilling. The built-in advantage is the narrative aspect. Mostly the film is a flashback dramatization of Klaus Von Bulow's story as told to Alan Dershowitz. Director Barbet Schroeder's good sense is in the dispatch, sticking to that narrative line, the suspense of the story, and rolling through it efficiently. Of course the acting helps: Ron Silver's bustling Dershowitz, Jeremy Irons's ambiguously chilly Von Bulow, even Glenn Close, with the indirectness of the comment, the intercutting, delivers her manic "Sunny" in an efficient way. Two examples illustrate the economy of the script and the execution. The scenes with Dershowitz and his law students deliver that kind of ardor you see in uncoached but often all-too-passionate real life, but without falling into the kind of ardor of portraying that makes representations cloying, as in TV crime dramas. In one of the early meetings with Dershowitz, Von Bulow makes a silly, decorous remark about respecting Jews, and Dershowitz, in the middle of shuffling his papers, turns and just looks at him. The film avoids didacticism on the one hand and dramatic pretense on the other. It's a good, efficient, dramatic job that communicates the uncanniness of the events. [2/97]
Kingpin (1996). Credits. Burlesques of The Hustler, The Color of Money, The Graduate, Indecent Proposal, and more along the way in a dumb-funny joyride. It's cheap props strung on a clothesline, this whole school of comedy. Bill Murray, no stranger to this kind of thing, provides the best example, first by his simple presence here, but then in the big finale at the end. The momentum of a film like this, the fact that it's just running, is apparently all it takes, because its pretensions to a plot do not keep it from washing out its own climax with stale, TV-zone, party noise. The soundtrack backgrounds everything, makes it all like radio, and Bill and Woody bowl, apparently their funny clothes and hair and mugging enough for the show. This scene is neither a tense bowling climax, nor clever bowling comedy in any way. It's just some activity, some goings on, presumably wacky per se. [2/97]
A Gentle Woman (1969). Credits. Robert Bresson's deadpan style is a distribution. It's not so much that he's choked off one kind of expression as shifted to another. A string of shots, a whole sequence, without a face occurs at the beginning of the film. Instead you get arms, shoulders, passing legs and trunks of people, furniture. The sequence has a trace effect, a transaction of things: open window, chair and table both upset by something, a scarf flying in the air. The focus skewed from the customary face actually trails into an eloquence. Bresson's focus is on the other places of transaction. He shows lots of hands, exchanging money (a leitmotif: L'Argent, Pickpocket), writing things down on paper, etc. The drained acting style can get thick, heavy-handed, or seem supercilious. But it also works nicely to enhance dramatic moments. When Dominique Sanda cries or lashes out, it has a stunning effect, more pithy, against the mainline blankness. Bresson seems to have a shrewdness about it, but sometimes it feels like he's simply morbid. One moralist was, here, tempted by another, as this is an adaptation of a Dostoyevsky story. There's an easy interpretation of Bresson, one not unworthy of Dosteyevsky: an indictment of the emptiness and objectification of humans. Bresson runs the risk of making things so brittle here as to be almost caricaturish. He's got the sense of how people don't really express things to each other, the poker game that goes on in the separate minds of close quarters. But since this is Dostoyevsky, I kept thinking about the turn of the century, the Romanticist aspect, the emotions, and that certainly Dostoyevsky would play out the same drama even against that. Bresson's squelching almost all the banal emotion risks stacking the deck, or, in fact, sacrificing another kind of shrewdness, that of the same drama going on while two people carry on with each other even in apparently happy, bouncy ways, if not florid. [2/97]
Cinema Paradiso (1988). Credits. Relentless wistfulness between Italian lyrical realism and American wonderment crap. It's lyrically realistic wonderment crap, which makes it better than most American coming-of-age movies, but worse than a good deal of Italian movies. Set in a Sicilian village and centered around a movie theater, it's the story of a young boy who has a loveable, old friend in a movie projectionist. The boy takes over the projectionist's job and grows up in the meantime, to become a young man with love troubles and all that life stuff, and then he returns as an older man, the one who's been remembering all this the whole time. The thing is, it's all anticlimactic. Even if it's based on real events, the fact that it's set in a movie theater makes it prepossessing. There's nothing outside of the movie theater to give it measure. So all the shots of the audience fondly watching movies, crying with them, quoting the lines -- that's all the shots. It's almost an infinite regress joke: remember our life watching movies, those wonderful days when we remembered. Except it's not supposed to be funny, but poignant. The drawn-out ending, with the older man coming back to his town, has not spanned any other developments, so the return to the village to see the people all old, the theater gutted, doesn't really produce the wistfulness it's playing for, since we've never left any of them. And the film doesn't take the chance at the shock of the present against the protagonist's memory. It's all the same nostalgic shimmer. [12/96]
The Lost Horizon (1937). Credits. Boring piece of pious fiction, or fictive piety. Stately and crisp, a handsome production, but in which nothing really interesting happens at all. It's pure stipulation. Coleman's performance is the best thing about the movie, but it's wasted by the rest. The business in the mountain paradise is nothing but mugging by Edward Everett Horton and stupid ribbing of him by Thomas Mitchell. The brother of Coleman's character is the worst of all, and horribly cast (John Howard), a lughead extra straight out of some 30s B-movie bolting out his American accent next to Coleman's suave British. What were they thinking? The flimsiest and flightiest of the plot is in this character. He gets petulant and volatile about Shrangri-La, which is not a bad idea, but then disappears for great stretches so that there's no development to him, not even to the romance he strikes up. They had to manufacture some drama. The best they can imagine for an ideal society is good manners (about, for example, interest in women, a thin piece of thinking that only begs the question -- you see how utopian thinking just sidesteps things) and putting little flutes on birds. The high lama is Sam Jaffee, layered with make-up and shot through dusky mist, looking a bit monstrous despite the cooing and reverent straining of the foreheads during his hokum invocations. You wonder if this is how Dyanetics got started. And in fact, the movie has an eerie implication like that. This film seems to be the intersection of several utopian lines, including Hollywood's. You're seeing the 1930s version of the self-made religions of today, whether it be walkabout Englishmen searching for God in the Himalayas or spiritual refuge at the ends of the empire, or American myth peddlers like Frank Capra packaging it all up for you. At the end of the film, there's a kind of epilogue, where some English colonel quickly relates his pursuit of Coleman. He tells of what would be a far more interesting film. Graham Greene said the story really should have begun upon the return to the Western world, how it would be after the experience of Shrangri-La. [12/96]
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967). Credits. From the same period as Masculin Feminin and Weekend, with much the same concerns, devices, the use of titles, etc. This is even more diffuse, glancing at a couple of characters but following no one in particular. Seems to grow out of banal ambling itself, sitting around in cafés, groping for new expression, staring into coffee. The segment with the shots of swirling coffee becomes the most eloquent of the film, the gaping day gathering itself into an expression of its own diffuseness. But most of the film is awkward, reaching, and Godard comes off here the way he hints at elsewhere: self-conscious, clumsy and groping as if in a new intellectual suit. Vivre sa vie was a much better film about prostitution. In this one, the idle curiosity prostitution and sex are like a stray theme, still tangled in the conception like debris, as if Godard couldn't quite let go of some frame. Ironically, it's when he has some line of action, some continuity, when there's a throughline, precisely one of the properties of bourgeois cinema, that Godard's wit is most acute, his commentary is deft, and his formal attacks most pertinent. It's as if he needs something to burlesque. Thus Weekend can get away with almost all the experiments of this film -- 360-degree pans, skipping of the narrative voice, the titles, dropping in and out of registers with the music track, etc. -- and be well-placed, savage and funny. [12/96]
The Conformist (1970). Credits. The cinematography has a breadth and a tone distinctive first from the other films of the earlier 70s but now so distinctive of that time, something expansive, burnished and sharp. This also has to do with the locations and sets. The virtue of the contribution is the style of accommodating the sites. In the same way, the subject matter is interesting, but the movie is an allusion to it. The movie is a gloss, a luster. This sometimes manages to be apt, an obliqueness or disconnected feeling that could stand for the central character's disposition, but other times it just seems tangential, a kind of sentimenality or impressionability of evocation that's not really pertinent. An example is the early scene when the main character, with his hitman sidekick, visits his mother. Not only is the plotting all emotion and no logistics, but there's all these sweeping shots with blowing leaves, a kind of sidelong Dr. Zhivago strain accompanying a conversation about an impromptu murder. Is this ingenious? It doesn't seem like it. It doesn't reach the excesses of 1900, where the soppiness latent here is outrageous. [11/96]
Secrets and Lies (1996). Credits. Smoke inverted this kind of idealism. While that movie meditated on the usefulness of lies and fictions, Secrets and Lies follows the more traditional line arguing for truth and honesty at all costs. The business of it, particularly with the dialogue and acting, is what's so good, here, although there's also an excess of that. Brenda Blethyn is so good at her part, at being broken down and jittery, and then punchy and candid, Leigh got carried away with her. She's almost unbearable at first because of how fraught she is, then later she's too much of a good thing. The ending is idealistic, coachy, but the whole time, there's all this character detail that keeps you fascinated. That's the strength of an exercise like this, when even platitudes have characterization. If you draw the context sharply then you give them meaning. The film is tilted too much toward these ideas. The black woman is just this side of a cipher and you wonder what sorts of characterization and content were consciously avoided to allow the premise of the plot. Later, after the revelation, there's nothing about race, no issue at all. It's as if race where used here solely for the aspect of obvious visible distinction, for the payoff on the drama about the abandoned daughter. Still, good stuff is derived from it. The scene when Hortense goes to the counselor for information about her real parents is great, for both her and the counselor. Leigh has shown this tendency for being idealistic before. In Abigail's Party, he went the opposite direction for a grand climax, a big tragic ending that was jarring and unnecessary with the bleakness. That one had a reaching bad ending, this one a reaching good one. When Hortense says at the end that she wants to go to the pub with her newly discovered half-sister and that they should tell the truth about their relationship no matter what because otherwise you get hurt, it's hard not to have a counter-impulse. It's too peachy, and you wonder do they not live in a world with skinheads and the National Front? Fairly easy symbolism, using classic ideas: the characters are a photographer and an optician, looking but not seeing the truth. (Does one, then, ever see it?) Again, Leigh manages to treat this well: the montages of the family photo sessions are great evocation, much more graceful and efficient than even the symbol of the photographer by itself. [10/96]
Trouble in Paradise (1932). Credits. The sparkling peak of Lubitsch's work and a model of film comedy. Like Rene Clair's Le Million of the preceding year and The Thin Man two years later, this is rolling, deft narrative. The dancing cinematic style is a comic rhetoric, a montage narrative principle for comic purposes, but this doesn't limit it's ingenuity or effectiveness as any kind of film. On the contrary, it gives this montage style all the force and value of comedy. The sequence from the Colet & Co. commercial, which in the plot is a radio commercial, but which with its montage visual elaboration anticipates film and television ads, a sort of spoof before the fact, through the opera scene, is a dazzling relay of the various elements of film drama, using cutting to collapse and trope and change rhythm, unmatched sound, a plot-based irising (a man looking through opera glasses), and quick, staccato dialogue. One quick comic exchange between two suitors is delivered in the course of this, a chiasmatic gibe, and it provides the most contiguous figure for the cinematic method: the film works like word play. It's screen play. The playfulness figures throughout the film. At the beginning of the film we're shown a gondola on the Venice canals, but it's a garbage man's (prefiguring The Third Man among other things), and he then breaks into "O Solo Mio." This foreshadows the main irony of the film, the juxtaposition of thievery and aristocracy. There are shadows and cutaways playing at dissimulation and innuendo. A man changes his silhouette. In a marvelous pre-code twist on discretion and indirection an amorous vis-a-vis is given in a cut to a mirror then to the double shadows cast on the bed. The deftness of the delivery is maintained even in the more prosaic or theatrical aspects, the dialogue scenes never compromising the timing. And the model, if not moral, of this form: civility, nobility, through hanky panky. [10/96]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
