SCREENING LOG - 6/27-7/3/2005

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MMarnie (1964, Alfred Hitchcock) third viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058329
Haven't seen this since puberty, when the idea of a frigid, repressed, traumatized woman in need of rehabilitation had a profound effect on me. Seeing it today, there's just a lot of annoying stuff I can't get past -- the male hubris of the premise, no matter how much it tries to cast doubts upon itself, bothers me as much as Connery's "Southern" accent. However, where the latter is a flaw that I can find no justification for, the former is very much on the virtuous side of the film's imperfection. Any way you cut it, this is an incredibly brave, messy film -- I can't think of many films that expose the pain of marriage and the desperate efforts of married people to resolve that pain, efforts that risk causing as much harm as good.
yes

The Mortal Storm (1940, Frank Borzage)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032811
Potent film about peace-loving Germany steamrolled by the advent of belligerent Nazism. Borzage sure knows how to get that feeling of what it's like to be the only person in a room full of patriotic zombies screaming for blood. My main beef is that the characters are depicted largely as either conscientious objectors or fascist zealots, with little blurring of the two -- I'm personally more interested in those who find themselves caught and struggling ideologically. The ending is quite haunting as an assertion of Christian transcendental mysticism, Borzage's own ideal.
yes

Mildred Pierce (1944, Michael Curtiz) second viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037913
Fascinating as a mash-up of '30s sacrificial mother melodrama with '40s noir expressionism (via CITIZEN KANE -- the film's time-jumping narrative also seems indebted to KANE). Crawford's relationship with the men in the movie still feels refreshingly contemporary in its gritty self-assurance (dare I say moreso than a lot of today's whiny, neurotic domestic melodramas).
yes

Panic in Needle Park (1971, Jerry Schatzberg)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067549
Lots of grungy New Yawka posturing, Warholian blank stare camerawork and shrill Cassavetian improv, but not a whole lot of insight. Pacino's raw talent is palpable.
mixed

Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim) third viewing (first viewing of the "four hour" version)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015881
After seeing the four-hour cut, I have to make a painful admission that "total cinema" sometimes just isn't enough. Ebert has said that the idea of this movie is much more evocative than the experience of watching it, and I'm afraid I agree.
yes

War of the Worlds (2005, Steven Spielberg)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407304
This may be splitting the difference between the Hollywood vs. arthouse controversy unfortunately played out above, but as I watched this film I was reminded of two movies: Pasolini's SALO (which I like) and Bergman's SHAME (which I don't). All three strike me as somewhat contrived, illogical scenarios constructed to unleash a loose stream of humankind's worst nightmares. Pasolini's is surely the most focused and unflinching of the three, perhaps because its scenario is the most controlled and contained. In comparison, the other two films work less as convincing realizations of situations and more like the unbridled imaginations of people perversely horrified and attracted by human atrocity, played out over a roaming fresco landscape of imagery that's surreal, somewhat ridiculous, yet genuinely traumatized.

Speaking specifically of WAR OF THE WORLDS, I can't think of another Hollywood blockbuster where the deaths were as disturbing to me. There have been plenty of megaplex attractions with a high level of collateral damage, but somehow the way that people are dispatched in this movie is rendered so meticulously that it goes beyond mere spectacle and taps into a genuine human anxiety of being annihilated in unspeakable ways. Of course, there were some people in the audience who snickered and applauded at the sight of people onscreen being vaporized, and as much as I wanted to slap them, I had to let it go and reflect on my own reactions. Some people can't tell the difference between a film that makes a generic, imprecise spectacle of death, like INDEPENDENCE DAY or TWISTER, and seem to wink at you not too take it too seriously, just to ease the tension -- and one that is far more vicious and adept at honing in on the agony, pain and intensity, because the filmmaker, the same guy who made all those Oscar winners, can't help but want to be taken seriously, it can't just be another disposable summer roller-coaster.

And it isn't, at least for me it wasn't. I don't take lightly the images of clothing and dust drifting through the air, or the image of posters of missing people strewn along a fence. Because these are images that I saw in real life, and that I lived through. And to see them being used in a movie is almost too much to bear, especially if it's just meant to be a disposable entertainment. So is that the real motivation? Or is Spielberg copping those image to make conscious references and elevate his film to the level of contemporary allegory? I really can't tell, and I'm not really sure what to think about such a project. On the one hand I think it's great to infuse a mainstream blockbuster with elements of the zeitgeist. On the other hand, the very idea that he would try to take these images and couple them with made-up atrocities found throughout cinema history (death by vaporization, death by blood-sucking, death by impalement, death by entrapment in a car sinking in a river, death by being eaten alive by an apparatus that looks like a human rectum) is something I find incredibly tasteless -- as if he were trying to combine real-life horror and cinematic horror to create Ultimate Horror. I can see the pitch session now -- "You thought 9/11 was bad? Well, wait till you see what I can do with THIS movie, using all the shock and awe tactics I've got up my sleeve. AND I can make it a post-9/11 statement! That will take care of those pesky critics." Like with SHAME, there's a disjointed, assembled quality to the imagery that feels like it was collected from random sources that happened to disturb the collector, and pasted together as haphazardly as a FACES OF DEATH video.

It's amazing how so much calculation can lead to something so incoherent. One moment the aliens are blowing away humans indiscriminately, the next moment they are assiduously harvesting live humans so that they can use their precious blood as fertilizer to start up their agricultural campaign. Like SHAME, the events depicted in this movie make no damn sense, and because of that its seriousness feels strained, its effects cheap and arbitrary, other than for the unrelenting aim of shocking the viewer. I'd be lying if I wasn't genuinely shaken by this film when I left the theater... and yet, despite being disturbed in a way that no summer blockbuster has disturbed me, I feel that the experience was meant to be disposable, which really, really saddens me.
mixed - but possibly yes with the benefit of time and perspective

Late Spring (1949, Yasujiro Ozu) second viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041154
Seeing this again, I found myself surprised and having to adjust to how "slow" this movie felt, even by '50s Ozu standards. There's a nearly wordless sequence on a train that takes nearly 5 minutes and is basically shots of the train's interior and exterior. Also a bizarelly composed-and-cut bicycle ride sequence. But towards the end Setsuko Hara gives a line that offered me with the "aha" moment: "I just want things to be the same." And then it all made sense, this insistent lingering on moments that seem to stretch into infinity -- quite brilliant given that the two I mentioned involve rapid movement, and yet Ozu shoots them in as static a way as he can. He does this with people too -- the most devastating shot being the very last one, Chisyu Ryu's shellshocked expression as he peels the apple -- the falling apple peel seems to do more "acting" than Ryu, who's as still as a statue, but the combination of the two is heartbreaking.
YES

Films by Charley Bowers:

All are interesting curiosities though not as impressive as the shorts on the first disc of the two-disc set I watched.

The Extra Quick Lunch (1917)
not listed on IMDb

A.W.O.L. (1918)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008811

It's a Bird( 1930)
not listed on IMDb

Say Ah-h! (1928)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240881/

Believe It or Don't (1935)
not listed on IMDb

Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939)
not listed on IMDb

A Sleepless Night (1940)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247708/

Wild Oysters ( 1941)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033263/

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