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SCREENING LOG
-8/2-8/8, 2004
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Joan the Woman (1917, Cecil B. DeMille)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008150/
yes (#5 for 1917, #3 among Joan of Arc movies I've seen,
between Rivette and Besson)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, Thom Andersen)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379357/
I think it's safe to say that we're living in a golden age
of documentaries. My 2003 top ten list (going by IMDb release
dates) has five documentaries (six if you count THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS),
three times more than in any other year. And now comes what
has to be one of the best documentaries about movies ever
made: Andersen's three hour documentary about how Los Angeles
has been portrayed throughout film history -- as a background
setting, as an explicit subject of a movie, and even as a
character -- is as sprawling as the city itself, but never
less than fascinating. Andersen references clips from dozens
-- if not hundreds -- of movies to weave a provocative, insightful
and sometimes personal reflection on the city he's lived in
for decades, and what the fictional version of L.A. (an abbreviation
he despises) has to say about the real life Los Angeles, and
vice versa. Andersen hones in on specific buildings and neighborhoods,
linking their appearances in films over successive decades
to create mini-histories and sociological studies that show
how and why the city evolved and devolved over time. Among
the many, many observations and assertions he makes:- The
modernist Los Angeles architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and
many others -- originally conceived as utopian living spaces
-- are often the settings of drug dealers and crooks. - DOUBLE
INDEMNITY was the first film where the city of Los Angeles
became a character. - CHINATOWN and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (the
film that inspired Anderson to this project) are responsible
for creating false, nihilistic mythologies about Los Angeles
and modern society by extension. - DRAGNET epitomizes the
contemptuous attitude that LAPD has towards the people it's
supposed to protect. - Robert Altman's best L.A. film: THE
LONG GOODBYE. His worst: SHORT CUTS (a film that, in Anderson's
view, reeks of contempt for its subject matter). - For a city
that seems utterly dependent on automobiles, some of the best
Los Angeles movies involve characters who do not have access
to their own cars (this is what he finds most interesting
about CHINATOWN, that Jake Gittes has to go through the entire
second half of the film without his own set of wheels). -
Good Los Angeles movies: L.A. PLAYS ITSELF (a gay porn film),
Robert Aldrich's KISS ME DEADLY, Charles Burnett's KILLER
OF SHEEP, Victor Nunez' EL NORTE. - Bad Los Angeles movies:
SteveMartin's L.A. STORY, Diane Keaton's HANGING UP, Lawrence
Kasdan's GRAND CANYON.
These are but a few of the many points Andersen raises, and
by the end one feels a tinge of overwhelming despair at wanting
to watch dozens of the films profiled in this mammoth project.
Andersen does an amazing job of making dismissable B-movies
or Hollywood trash look fascinating, while casting assumed
masterpieces in a less flattering light, while making you
want to revisit them nonetheless just to see if you really
agree with him or not. This is a film that can totally transform
one's way of watching and understanding movies, not to mention
Los Angeles. It's an obvious labor of love, and the abrupt
manner in which it ends seems to hint that the story of Los
Angeles on film is far from finished. YES YES (#3 for 2003
between VIBRATOR and DOGVILLE) (#3 for new films seen in 2004
between VIBRATOR and BEFORE SUNSET)
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944, Preston Sturges)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037077/
yes (#6 for 1944 between LAURA and HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO)
Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder) second viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036775/
YES (#2 for 1944 between A CANTERBURY TALE and MEET ME IN
ST. LOUIS)
Laura (1944, Otto Preminger) second viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037008/
yes (#5 for 1944 between TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT and THE MIRACLE
OF MORGAN'S CREEK)
I was surprised by how much bad acting there is in both
of these unassailable classics, but I think it's bad acting
with a purpose. In DOUBLE INDEMNITY the bad acting, especially
Fred MacMurray's, is totally appropriate to the sad-sack pathos
of the movie and its vision of modern alienation. Wilder's
thick-lined characterizations risk drawing everyone in the
film as a Dick Tracy cartoon -- MacMurray is a stiff-necked
jerk who tells bad jokes and tries too hard to be cool; he
has no right to earn our sympathies and yet his lower middlebrow
tackiness is endearing, perhaps because we identify more than
a little with it; he's us trying to act like a movie star
and not quite succeeding. Or perhaps because his excessively
explicit voiceover narration insists on crowding our headspace
with his, like Robinson's "little man." Barbara Stanwyck,
on the other hand, is movie star to the nth degree -- she
takes a rather thin femme fatale character and makes an Art
Deco statue out of it -- even in as plain jane a setting as
a suburban supermarket, she has a way of looking down at you
even when she looks up at you. Edward G. Robinson, ostensibly
the most virtuous person in the movie, is a borderline obsessive-compulsive
who loves numbers more than human beings, and living breathing
proof of the capitalist ethos as the most insidious 20th century
moral depravity. MacMurray's endless monologue to the dictaphone
is enough proof that the film is not about heterosexual romantic
deception, but really a homoerotic cat-and-mouse between an
alienated working stiff and the corpulent corporate ideal
he both idolizes and detests. The ending is a weird moment
of homoerotic reconciliation whose moral could be "The company,
like God, loves and forgives you."
In LAURA the bad acting is also strangely appropriate, insofar
as it makes one feel more comfortable with the even stupider
plot details -- why on earth would a detective let anyone
tag along while he's questioning people about a murder???
It plays like a burlesque, each of the actors disarms you
with their campiness, and one can then embrace the more genuinely
touching aspects of the film, how desperate and possessive
many of the characters seem to be to this empty, shallow Maltese
Falconess called Laura, another virgin-in-peril type played
by Gene Tierney, this time so devoid of personality or sensuality
that she only brings out the gayness in the male leads even
more. In its own way its a goofier take on alienation than
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (with that interminable theme played with
even more oppressive insistence as MacMurray's voiceover)
-- and the laughable dinner theater performances of quavery-voiced
Clifton Webb and Transylvanian hick Vincent Price, in their
own weird way, further accentuate their characters' emotional
desperation roiling beneath the surface, making them more
sympathetic than the blandly composed lovers (whose totally
unconvincing lack of chemistry is what keeps this film from
YES-ville) who win out in the end.
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