SCREENING LOG - HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL, 2005

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1. Bonjour Tristesse: This movie worked for me big time -- I would have given it three yeses if it weren't for a little bit of drift in the second half. The interpersonal themes, as you and Addison describe, are all interesting, and indeed that seems to be one of Preminger's hallmarks (starting with LAURA), the perverse relationships and fixations people have with each other, and the unknowability of the true (and often destructive) motivation for their actions. This is something you see in Kubrick as well -- and like Kubrick, Preminger's stylistic approach to the material is to treat it as coldly as he can, with long, elaborately staged takes that let you see how people move around in a room with each other, and absorb their sense of positioning (mental and emotional as well as physical) in a situation. The other great Preminger film I saw last week, ANATOMY OF A MURDER, is all about procedure, how the people involved in a criminal case work systematically to get to the bottom of the crime, dealing as clinically as possible with the dirty laundry of human desire -- and as with a Kubrick movie, the contrast between cold casual surfaces and the human emotions masked beneath them is quite unsettling.

That's the beauty of BONJOUR TRISTESSE -- is that it portrays life as a continual party, and through a series of seemingly harmless events starting with Deborah Kerr's welcome arrival, the party starts to crumble from within, as if you're suddenly aware in the midst of an all night revel that people are looking pretty smashed and damaged, and this party might not be so fun. That's the weird thing about this movie, that Jean Seberg wants to preserve her f-ed up situation stringing along with dypsomaniacs, aimless heirs and random hangers-on because it's all she knows. 18 years old and already wanting to entomb herself in an eternal childhood among old people. The thing is that Preminger does everything he can to keep these conflicts at a low simmer, as if he's challenging you to notice the problems amidst all the dolce vita. In this sense he had Antonioni and Fellini beat by a few years.

Indeed the film can be seen as the missing link between '50s classic Hollywood and '60s European New Wave -- between a stately, set-driven mode of filmmaking that was already creaking under its own weight, and the fresh, vivacious sense of aesthetic and sociological upheaval that was looming on the horizon.

2. Amar Akbar Anthony-- other than watching Amitabh Bachchan run away with every scene he was in, it was simply the most entertaining film I've seen this month. If I wanted to make any grand claims for it, I would say that I admire its ambition to try to weave together so much of Indian life, including all the things that lead to the contradictions and conflicts that country has suffered. Hindu, Muslim, Christian, rich and poor, relgious and secular -- it's all mixed together, quite blasphemously I'm sure -- the most rocking party in the whole movie features a gigantic Easter egg. Along the same lines it tries to entertain on every level - high and low, comedy, melodrama, action, pretty lamely choreographed action at that. But even that lameness reminds you that these guys are busy making a movie, putting on a show, all for you. That's the thing I like about Bollywood, that the movies often feel like an open invitation for anyone who just wants to be entertained and go along with a three hour yarn with dance numbers and fights thrown in for good measure. The cricket match in LAGAAN plays like a real cricket match -- it takes its time and you feel like you're literally there on the sidelines cheering on. You get a much stronger sense with Bollywood movies (at least ones like AAA) -- or HK movies of the 80s and 90s -- than you do with contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, of what it must have felt like back in the 20s or 30s or 40s, when you felt a lot closer to the movies you watched, that the stars were larger than life yet somehow within reach, and that this cinema really belonged to you in some way.

3. Michelangelo's Gaze. It's just a beautiful work -- the work of a dying man, and yet so active! It works on so many levels -- as a dialogue between film and sculpture (film as sculpture) -- a valiant attempt to express the real-time thoughts of a man without using a single word, just the way he looks (buried behind a paralyzed face) at things, and the way the camera looks at things. I can't remember the last time that a sculpture was filmed with such concentration and beauty, the textures of Michelangelo's marble bodies and fabrics, how they seem to be pent up with so much energy trying to come out -- how Antonioni and Michelangelo's Moses are in the same predicament -- and yet the frozen face of Moses is still able to convey so much feeling thanks to the master's well placed chisel. It's a frozen expressiveness that Antonioni's face struggles to achieve -- he has to achieve it cinematically, by cutting to what he's watching - so we the viewer can feel the emotion, the desire and the yearning that lives in the space between shot and reverse shot. Profoundly moving.

4. The King of Comedy. The thing about DeNiro's climactic standup routine is how brilliantly it shows how comedy and tragedy are interconnected, as with Woody Allen's comedy. A way of taking all the crap in your life and making it funny and cathartic. Definitely makes the top three or five Scorsese movie moments on my list, more compelling than some of his more famous ones like the nightclub tracking shot in GOODFELLAS, or even "You talkin' to me?"

KING OF COMEDY plays like a flat, de-glamourized remake of TAXI DRIVER, which is a plus and a minus. There's hardly anything attractive or flashy about DeNiro's acting or Scorsese's direction -- no virtuoso camera or editing tricks, other than some wonderful transitions into fantasyland -- though the fantasies themselves are both banal and eerie, like Rupert Pupkin's ambitions. As a result, there's a lot of ambivalence between the viewer and the film. But this also puts the viewer in a more active mind to evaluate what happens and not get sucked into it like what happens in TAXI DRIVER. It's a hard film to love but it does things to earn that love that are quite remarkable.

5. Lo Wei and Bruce Lee. I finally got around to watching FISTS OF FURY, which was on both lists of top 100 Chinese movies that have been circulating. I wasn't a big fan of FISTS OF FURY -- it takes a whole hour for Bruce Lee to even start fighting and the fights aren't all that impressive, and the story is unremarkable. But only when I looked on IMDb did I realize that FISTS OF FURY is also known as THE BIG BOSS, whereas the other Bruce Lee movie I had, CHINESE CONNECTION, is actually the FIST OF FURY listed on those top 100 lists. So I watched that and I could see a marked improvement -- solid storytelling and fights that truly displayed Lee's prowess. Historically speaking, his films brought a new realism and physicality to the fights, where there wasn't so much artsy high-flying choreography a la King Hu but some serious technique on display. I'm not sure what role Lo Wei played in the creative effort or how he worked with Lee. I'm also curious to know what role he played in the 1991 Stephen Chow homage (which only quotes one scene from the original -- and does a shot by shot remake of the final fight scene in RAGING BULL).

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