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SCREENING LOG
-1/13-1/19, 2004
Back to 2003 Index
I watched DRUNKEN ANGEL, STRAY DOG, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS,
THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, THE HOURS, THE BAD SLEEP WELL and THE
SCARLET EMPRESS.
4 x Kurosawa and Mifune
In chronological order:
Drunken Angel (1948)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040979/
The immortal tandem of Kurosawa and Mifune made their debut
with Takeshi Shimura as a world-weary doctor constantly on
the lookout for a drink while reluctantly trying to help Mifune's
gangster fight TB -- unfortunately Mifune's underworld associates
cling to him, preventing his rehabilitation. This intriguing
mash-up of two post-war genres, Hollywood film noir and European
neo-realism, mixes the cynicism typical of the former with
the guilt-ridden sentimentality typical of the latter, leading
to emotionally uneven results that seem typical of the bipolar
passions exhibited in many of Kurosawa's post-war films. I
used to think that this swinging instability in tone was evidence
of a creative mind that hadn't thought through the Big Issues
he was presenting to his audience, but I've come to see the
virtues of how this approach might destabilize his audience
and bring them to confront the problems he leaves unresolved.
Take for instance, Takeshi Shimura's smart-aleck doctor, the
way he gets to rest on his smug observations on what it takes
to live a good life -- and it seems like he's supposed to
serve as the voice of authority. And yet the guy is also depicted
as a selfish drunk throughout the film, so just how authoritative
is he? But because of Kurosawa's bipolar tonal disorder,I
can't tell if these contradictions are deliberate or haphazard,
but at least now I am less inclined to dismiss it. Toshiro
Mifune's manic, haunted performance as the doomed gangster
is outstanding, by the way; he more than ably serves as the
emotional and moral focal point for Kurosawa's generally detached,
boderline-pontificating view of society's ills. #10 for 1948
Stray Dog (1949)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041699/
This police procedural involving a policeman searching for
his stolen gun as it is being used to commit several crimes
makes for a bracing run-through of the Kurosawa playbook,
with a full gamut of stylistic devices and dramatic situations
being employed and explored. Though the film indulges in long
sequences where the hero does little more than roam the streets
-- there's one 15-minute sequence of Mifune just walking!
-- Kurosawa uses them as an occasion to do capture a variety
of Vertovian glimpses of Japanese street life, and the results
are full of a teeming urban energy that he finds both exciting
and frightening -- I actually prefer it to the stiff and stratified
top-down view of Japan in his more revered film HIGH AND LOW.
The constant forward motion of the film keeps Kurosawa's lapses
into strident moralism in check, and the dialogue between
Mifune's guilt-ridden policeman (another fantastic performance
by a younger, more vulnerable Mifune) and Takeshi Shimura's
cynical detective offers a debate over whether to treat criminals
with compassion or contempt. Eerily, the obsessive young cop
finds himself identifying with the criminal in their shared
background of post-war malaise, and in the climactic fight
scene they wind up lying side by side in exhaustion. Of the
many Kurosawa films I've seen, this strikes me as one of his
most energetic and engaged with the world. #6 for 1949 between
CROWS AND SPARROWS and ADAM'S RIB
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051808/
Most famous for being an inspirational text for STAR WARS,
and oddly enough I'd take Lucas or even Luc Besson's FIFTH
ELEMENT over this meandering and overlong adventure yarn involving
two bickering bumpkins enlisted to help a princess and her
samurai escort flee to safety. Dave Kehr described this film
as "the only Kurosawa film unburdened by a need to make art",
and while I'd agree that this is the most entertainment-oriented
Kurosawa film I've seen, it isn't devoid of Kurosawan urges
to make broad declamations on both the Folly and the Virtue
of Man, as evinced in the sheltered princess learning about
life by dancing around a bonfire and saving a girl being sold
to prostitution, set in high contrast to the subordinates
bumbling through their misadventures borne of their own avaricious
stupidity, like two exiles from a Coen Brothers snickerfest
-- I've often suspected Kurosawa of having an aristocractic
view of society, and this film doesn't assuage such thoughts.
Much like my problem with the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, the
characters seem too broad and abstract to convince me of their
humanity, and the proceedings, while diverting, tend to proceed
at a stately crawl.
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054460/
Revenge plots don't get much more contrived or convoluted
than one involving the bastard child of a murdered corporate
executive who marries the daughter (who is club-footed, lest
we don't get that she is a Helpless Innocent) of another executive
in order to seek revenge within the company -- the story is
supposedly based on HAMLET but somehow Shakespeare did a better
job of upholding my suspension of disbelief. The opening sequence,
a rigidly performed wedding reception packed with reporters
(media and publicity is a running theme throughout), doesn't
do much to set all this up clearly -- way too many characters
are introduced at once -- but it does introduce the film's
expert employment of long, carefully choreographed takes that
Kurosawa first explored in THE LOWER DEPTHS, mastered in the
first act of HIGH AND LOW, and uses to great effect throughout
this film. Despite the improbability of the plot, Kurosawa
elicits great performances from his ensemble and mixes in
a series of murderous intrigues to keep things lively. Helped
by a a passionate yet restrained performance by Toshiro Mifune
as the vengeful son, Kurosawa charts interesting ground concerning
the extremes -- psychological and moral -- to which people
must go to expose corporate malfeasance But this still pales
in comparison with a very similar film from the same year,
Sam Fuller's UNDERWORLD U.S.A.
3 x Reviewings
The Scarlet Empress (1934, Josef von Sternberg) second
viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025746/
I am very high on von Sternberg now, having recently seen
ANATAHAN and re-screened DOCKS OF NEW YORK, with six other
titles to be viewed in the coming weeks. As of now this one
is my favorite, the most fun I've had watching a movie in
quite some time, a film whose aesthetic could have had a discernible
influence on Sergei Eisenstein, Sergio Leone, and John Waters.
Eisenstein in how the impossibly dense and expressive, gargoyle-infested
set design resembles that of IVAN THE TERRIBLE, adding jungle-like
layers of visual subtexts and sub-subtexts to the pageantry
proceedings. Leone in how his close-ups make giant relief
maps of human faces swathed in light, shadow and texture,
and the way that a pair of eyes are filmed that say what pages
of dialogue cannot. Waters in how un-seriously the film takes
itself, especially in regards to the dialogue -- lines are
tossed off so casually that it's as if von Sternberg finds
them to be such a cumbersome burden to movies in the post-silent
era that he is unafraid to show his contempt for them. He
also seems to acknowledge the inherent ridiculousness of having
American actors pretending to be 18th century Russians, the
Masterpiece Theater dialogue spoken with Californian accents,
and he invites us to share in the delightful absurdity of
this bourgeois pretense of tastefulness... but only in order
to pay even more attention to what's really important to him,
the funhouse environment he has concocted in all its intoxicating
surfaces and artifice, a Gothic sexual revolutionary fantasia
on steroids. To alter Keats' famous line, for von Sternberg
there seems to be no beauty in truth, but a world of truth
in beauty. #1 for 1934
Battle of Algiers (1965, Gillo Pontecorvo) second
viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058946/
Is there such a thing as an even-handed propaganda movie?
One that gives you a fair and balanced view of the virtues
and flaws on both sides of a struggle, and yet is unmistakably
in favor of the anti-colonialist motivations that drove a
terrorist organization to bring about a long, bloody and eventually
successful revolution? Apparently the facts of this film in
depicting the Algerian Liberation Front's resistance to French
occupation in the 50s were presented compellingly enough that
the Pentagon recently screened it to its staff as a tool for
understanding the situation in Iraq, just as various resistance
organizations, from the Black Panthers to the PLO used it
as a textbook for breeding revolt. It really does work as
a kind of open source text, capable of being read any number
of ways, which ultimately attests to the guilefully guileless
sophistication of the filmmaking, as revolutionary in its
lo-fi techniques (jittery handheld camerawork in stark black
and white, now over-used to the point of cliche) as it was
in its pro-Third World ideological content. The sequence where
three Algerian women sneak into the French quarter to plant
bombs in major civilian areas is as disturbingly frank in
its representation of "ends justify the means" terrorist tactics
as it is unbearably suspenseful to watch, and attests to just
how masterful a storyteller Pontecorvo is despite the grungy
appearances. Even the murky sound mix has a purposeful feeling
of "authenticity", a subterranean story finally being exposed
to sunlight -- mixed with Ennio Morricone's gritty, percussive
score, the cries of demonstrators on the street achieves a
piercing primalness that could very well serve as the quintessential
sound of humankind's desire for freedom. #2 for 1965 between
PIERROT LE FOU and LOVES OF A BLONDE
The Hours (2002, Stephen Daldry) second viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274558/
Seeing it again (without continuing to dwell on how this
film does a hatchet job conveying Virginia Woolf's ideas)
I still find it both contrived and compelling, an ambitious
compilation of Best Actressy moments weaved together in an
anxious tapestry that offers a number of fascinating connections
between characters and difficult ideas about the (d)evolution
of women's liberation over three generations (conclusion:
to suffer is to be free and vice versa), that is when it's
not trying to ram their significance down the viewer's throat
with a relentlessly grim presentation weighed down further
by the ponderous keyboard pounding of Philip Glass at his
most ersatz. I don't trust Stephen Daldry to know what he's
doing, so I maintain that the many things that are good and
interesting about this movie (Jeff Daniels, for instance)
are unintentional -- everything else is so stifled, deliberate,
strained for signficance, that it reeks of its creators trying
too hard, which is pretty damn ironic for a movie whose presumed
theme is the celebration of freedom.
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