SCREENING LOG - 9/17-9/23, 2001

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The same week that Americans resumed sports and other pastimes, I came back from a week in shock and watched The Scarlet Empress, Say Anything, Pollock, Les Vampires, Broadcast News, The Others, and Crumb. In order of preference:

Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)

I continued my viewing of this landmark serial and remain convinced that it is the wellspring for just about every noir and crime movie ever made. Episodes 5 and 6 feature the emergence of Moreno, a sinister third party meddling in the struggle between the Paris cops and the Vampires. Moreno's powers of illusion and hypnosis allow him to capture and seduce Vampire leader Irma Vep. Sleeping gas at a party, body doubles, robbers robbing robbers -- a host of crime movie cliches can be found here, none of them the worse for wear given Feuillade's lurid handling of the proceedings and pioneering use of camera depth of field. At the halfway mark, I as ready as ever to declare this one of cinema's greatest achievements.

The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

I had thought that the beginning of the Sound Era had crippled cinematic technique for a good decade or so, but this film proved me gravely mistaken. The story of how Catherine the Great emerged from a repressed maiden into a powerful empress is a work that throbs with sex, mostly in the shadows. Decadent in spirit and ornate in design, the film boasts several wordless sequences of immense lyrical power, with Gothic landscapes practically bursting from the screen, as if it were the first 3-D movie ever made. Dietrich seems a bit too old to play Catherine as a virginal ingenue -- but after her deflowering, she's back to her old knowing, carnal self, and we're enthralled.

Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1995)

My third viewing confirms that this is quite possibly the best film ever made about an American artist. This multi-faceted and comprehensive documentary on comic artist R. Crumb opens up a disturbing and fascinating box of wonders and horrors. Intimate, sympathetic, but never indulgent, the film gives us a thorough assesment of a man who somehow transformed a horrifically perverted childhood into a succesfully perverted career in art. After seeing how Crumb's brothers (one of whom committed suicide shortly after the film's completion) dealt with the same traumas, one can't help feeling admiration for Crumb's achievements while wondering about the nature of them, esp. his unapologetically sick ideas towards women. The film covers a lot of ground, expressing Crumb's views on everything and everyone's views on Crumb. The overall picture is full of complexity and finishes with a host of conflicting ideas, but not the least of which is triumph, for the film, its subject and its director. With Crumb and Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff has made two of the most relevant works on American society today.

Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)

Viewing it for the first time since it first came out, I was amazed at how it held up. The arguments of this once-controversial attack on how the network news became an entertainment industry may seem quaint now, but it still packs a cynical punch, and is damn fun to watch. Its rich wit is worthy of the screwball comedies it aspires to equal, though the character traits get pounded a little too heavily at times (a TV trick that Brooks could never shake off). Albert Brooks and Holly Hunt have a ball playing smart-asses, but William Hurt took my cake as the bimbo news anchor -- it's not easy to play stupid so winningly. Brooks is a major director of our time, severely underrated among critics; if only he would make more movies...

Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989)

On the other hand, every time I see a Cameron Crowe movie I'm more convinced that he's overrated. Crowe's debut film (produced by James L. Brooks) has winning performances from John Cusack as a fast-talking drifter and John Mahoney as an overprotective father -- Ione Skye is less impressive as the girl they're fighting over, who seems too good to be true. The film has moments that are remarkably on the money with teenage experience, but it also reeks of the same cheese that would undermine Almost Famous ten years later. Charming and irrepressible to a fault, this film would battle its nihilistic arch-nemesis Heathers for the soul of Hollywood teen entertainment for the decade to follow. Personally I wish there were a third alternative.

The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001)

Entertaining mystery done well enough, using all the well-worn scare tactics from the playbooks of Hitchcock and Kubrick - which is preferable to using computerized special effects and buckets of gore. It didn't help that Nicole Kidman's horribly affected acting gave away the "surprise twist ending" five minutes into the picture. I liked it for what it was, though I can't wait for the day when surprise twist endings are out of fashion.

Pollock (Ed Harris, 2000)

Quite the opposite of Crumb, this is a soulless paint-by-the-numbers (pardon the pun) biopic of landmark American painter Jackson Pollock. Ed Harris and Marcia Gay Harden do admirable work respectively as Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, but their scenes offer no real insight and only further mystification of the tortured artist as misunderstood genius. If anything, I felt he was a real asshole, which may have been the truth, but I didn't need to see a lame movie to confirm that.

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