SCREENING LOG - 10/28-11/03, 2002

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First I'd like to thank bkamberger for his Charitable Endowment of several hard-to-find videos of all-time Hollywood classics. I intend to watch and enjoy them over the coming months.

I watched INDIA SONG, THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK, SPIRITED AWAY, Z, LA PROMESSE, MASCULIN/FEMININ, SAMURAI ASSASSIN, SAFETY LAST, BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE AND PLAYTIME.

I once asserted that great films can be arranged in two broad categories. There are the Rule Makers, those that play brilliantly and win according to the conventional expectations and comfort levels of general audiences. Then there are the Rule Breakers, those that throw convention out the window and demand to be appreciated on completely new terms that they set for themselves. Both of these categories are great, but when you put them together, as it seemed with two films I saw last week, you get something that I can only call Magic. To wit:

In rough order of preference:

Magic Making Par Excellence:

Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati) second viewing, in theater

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0062136

I plea the excuse of poor screening conditions for my original lukewarm review; seeing it in a restored 35mm version made all the difference. This time I could see just how radical a breakthrough this film is in terms of story, sound, editing, camerawork, composition, content, everything. There is so much going on in this movie that one's eyes almost pop out from sheer exhaustion. What's more, all of this is tied into a profound vision of the world: man conquers the dehumanizing effects of modernity with a song, a sense of humor and a spirit of communal understanding with others trying to make it through their day and dinnertime without the building collapsing on them. And it's a laugh riot: By the end, everyone, including the packed audience I screened this with, realizes their capacity to be a performance artist, even in life's most routine moments, and their capacity to see life as an endless succession of poetic experiences. This is one of the few films that has the potential to change one's way of life.

Spirited Away (2002, Hayao Miyazaki) in theater

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0245429

Possibly Miyazaki's best film to date (and therefore one of the greatest animated features ever made). This Carrollian rabbit-hole of a movie involves a girl who wanders with her parents into a mysterious bathhouse complex for the spirits of the earth. Her parents are turned into pigs and the girl must work as a slave while figuring out how to rescue both them and herself. On the way she encounters a dozen characters whose sheer variety of forms suggests the entire stylistic lexicon of non-computer animation as the inkwell for Miyazaki's pen. Whatever the case, everything is rendered unfamiliar and new, which magnifies the true intent of the heroine's quest as one towards maturity and judicious moral conduct. Her complex relationships with all of these characters is perpetually in flux, but her own internal sense of goodness, hope and love see her through and literally transform the world around her. Disney should be ashamed that they sabotaged this film's U.S. release; perhaps they were painfully aware that they had acquired a masterpiece that exceeded anything they had ever done?

Rule Making Excellence:

brunt Silent Classic of the Week:

The Docks of New York (1928, Josef von Sternberg)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0018839

It's is quite possible that the best work of the man who made Marlene Dietrich famous was in his late silent period, with THE LAST COMMAND and this masterpiece about a bullying sailor whose love for a suicidal prostitute changes both of their lives. At first the story seems slight; the film's greatness throughout rests largely on Sternberg's amazing use of stage depth, smoke, light and shadow, to create a visual feel that is grittily realistic yet romantically alluring. By the end, however, the film is all about the characters, and the miraculous love that blossoms between them, conveyed in gestures both grand and small. Quite simply, a beautiful film.

DFC-2 Teen Film of the Week:

La Promesse (1996, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0117398

A Belgian youth assists his father in importing and exploiting illegal immigrants for cheap labor. When an African man suffers a fatal accident at their worksite, he implores the boy to look after his family, causing a major internal conflict in the boy's conscience. A superb example of the the gritty neo-neo-realist momement that sprung up in 1990s European cinema, this film packs an emotional punch while resisting sentimentality at every turn. It's a very thoughtful character-study as well as a startling look at the realities of European immigration. The ending is open-ended, but it may have radical implications for contemporary European society the more one thinks of it.

bkamberger Charitable Endowment Film of the week:

Safety Last (1923, Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0014429

Harold Lloyd's most famous film, containing one of the most famous film images, of Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock. That image -- a man desperately clinging to time -- may be one of the quintessential statements on the purpose of the movies. The film itself doesn't get nearly as metaphysical as that, but as a great entertainment and a technical achievement this is top-notch: the film develops Lloyd's Everyman character and put-upon predicament with classic Hollywood efficacy, and the extended climax is amazingly gripping from start to finish.

Z (1969, Costa-Gavras)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0065234

This political thriller, based on the actual murder of a Greek politician in 1963, takes entertainment into a new level of political consciousness; or is it the other way around? The extended early sequence detailing a political rally descends to violence is exceptional filmmaking; from there it's a solid police procedural. The overall effect situates the film somewhere between the incendiary but multi-faceted grittiness of BATTLE OF ALGIERS and the slick pop agit-prop of TRAFFIC (Mikis Theodorakis's soundtrack certainly rivals Ennio Morricone's work on the former). The film also borrows the best and worst of OPEN CITY, what with the intricate plotting and the association of villainous thugs with homosexuals. But the powerful ending more than validates the film's merits.

Rule Breaking Excellence:

ali-112 French film of the week:

Masculin-Feminin (1966, Jean-Luc Godard)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0060675

This can be seen as Jean-Luc Godard's version of a teen movie: an energetic but confused wanna-be social activist woos, analyzes, and argues with his girlfriend, a budding pop star. Also titled "The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola" this film offers considerable political subtexts, but I found its chief virtue to rest in a handful of long interviews with its young actor-subjects which elided beautifully into the realm of documentary. Those moments, embedded in a digressive but energetic narrative, gives one a vivid feel for what it was like to be young in Paris '66 -- everything seems both immensely important and inconsequential; these kids look like they could live forever, a feeling that proves to be horribly wrong by the end.

Rigor Global Consciousness film of the week:

India Song (1975, Marguerite Duras) in theater

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0073166

An incredibly beautiful film, in a catatonic way, this elegy to the Colonialist lifestyle takes place almost entirely indoors, with a small cast of characters who wander through the opulent rooms and hallways of their mansion as if in slow-motion. The only dialogue is spoken through voice-over, creating a complex and disorienting effect between sound and image, intensifying the ghost-like quality of this lost world. This technique seems to have been co-opted by Wong Kar Wai for more consumer-friendly forays into nostalgia, and the cloistered interiors resemble the settings of some David Lynch films. There's much to think about here, and while only half of this film worked for me on the first viewing, but that half has a truly haunting, lingering effect on the memory.

The Rest:

The I'm with Howard Schumann on This One Film of the Week:

Bowling for Columbine (2002, Michael Moore) in theater

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0310793

I'm all for gun control, and while we're at it can we issue restrictions on Michael Moore's ego? This "documentary" examining America as a gun-toting, commercialized culture of fear and racism is certainly worth watching for the way it brings us face-to-face with the horrors of our recent history, and gets us thinking about how we should respond to school shootings, terrorism and impending war. One just has to face having their intelligence insulted by Moore's flagrantly manipulative interview tactics and self-righteous hyperbole. A typical example of his technique is filming himself solemnly placing a picture of a 6-year old school shooting victim at the door of NRA spokesman Charlton Heston's home --Moore's audacious opportunism often caused me to laugh out loud, which isn't an inappropriate response given that this film is best seen as a news entertainment (the kind which, incidentally, is a target for Moore's criticism). In terms of insight, Marilyn Manson makes more sense in a 30 second sound bite than the entirety of Moore's rambling 2 hour thesis. Nonetheless, it's painfully evident that Moore's methods lead to results: by acting like a jerk (with a couple of Columbine kids in tow) he can get Kmart to stop selling bullets. It's depressing to think that a bull-headed film like this is what it takes to raise public awareness about the nature of America's violent preoccupations; I just hope the full house audience I sat with didn't take any of Moore's message at face value. (A much more thoughtful film about American culture and political awareness is John Gianvito's as yet undistributed THE MAD SONGS OF FERNANDA HUSSEIN, still the single most important film I've seen this year).

Chris-435 Charitable Endowment Film of the Week:

Samurai Assassin (1965, Kihachi Okamoto)

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0059673

Toshiro Mifune stars as a dispossessed samurai caught up in both the courtly intrigues of Edo castle and the mystery of his father's identity. This is certainly the talkiest samurai film I've seen, which made it difficult for me to really get into. The film has a virtuoso climactic battle, and there are some interesting uses of New Wave editing, indicative of the trend towards stylistic flash surging through Japanese filmmaking at that time.

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