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SCREENING LOG
- 8/19-8/25, 2002
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I watched THE FALL OF OTRAR, TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, LATCHO
DROM, WINGS, SIGNS and MOTHER INDIA. In order of preference:
Mother India (1957, Mehboob Khan)
http://www.imdb.com/Title?0050188
Imagine GONE WITH THE WIND on steroids and adorned with
musical numbers and you may have an idea of this steamroller
of a movie, a national epic from India about an all-suffering,
all-sacrificing farm woman who struggles to lift her family
and her village over institutionalized poverty. This film
may lack the polish that one associates with the streamlined
narratives and elegant visuals of Hollywood musicals, but
that's just what may be its greatest virtue: it goes for broke
and breaks the bank. Great music, dance numbers involving
ploughing oxen, uber-Greek tragedy that puts Oedipus and Medea
to shame, childish slapstick and Nehru-era social democracy
get irretrievably mixed together, and yet somehow a blistering
examination of Indian society gets mapped out, which then
gets ripped up and tossed into a fiery climax. Resistance
is futile.
To Have and Have Not (1944, Howard Hawks)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0037382
Humphrey Bogart is an unsentimental American expatriate who
somehow gets mixed up in helping a WWII resistance fighter
escape from the Gestapo. Sounds awfully similar to another
classic Bogart movie, and apparently Hawks made this film
after losing the job of directing CASABLANCA. It is easy to
make comparisons: under Hawks' direction the story is more
streamlined and assured than its predecessor, and Bogart's
performance is impossibly complex in range, motivation and
feeling; his immortal roles in THE MALTESE FALCON or CASABLANCA
seem merely iconic. Bogart and Bacall's chemistry is far more
intimate and less hyped than Bogart and Bergman. The intricate
but unassuming sense of purpose that Hawks lends to his story
may be also what makes it less renowned than CASABLANCA --
it doesn't have any of the easily consumable, all-stops Movie
Moments to claim its spot in the popular movie pantheon (plus
Hoagy Carmichael is no match for Dooley Wilson in terms of
screen presence). But on its own terms, it's a masterpiece.
Latcho Drom (1993, Tony Ratliff)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0107376
A fascinating pseudo-documentary about the Rom people, commonly
referred to as gypsies, and who occupy such diverse areas
as India, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia,
France and Spain. All of these areas are covered by the film,
though with minimal narration: the multicultural Rom experience
is conveyed by the staging of the daily rituals of the people
in each region, most notably in the performance of their music
-- and what music. Powerful and diverse, the music of these
people is remarkable in how malleable it is to each region
(from flamenco to Indian and all parts in between) and yet
the spirit is pretty much the same everywhere: lusty, vibrant,
with a tinge of tragedy that belies the 1000 years of vagabond
travails this people have endured, including the Holocaust.
This is easily the best musical of the 90s, even though it
pushes the envelope of that genre towards a new concept involving
aspects of documentary and fiction. My only reservation is
that the presentation of the Rom people involved a bit too
much mugging and cloying at times, and one wonders if the
film would have benefitted from more context. But this is
small potatoes: hook this movie up to a great sound system
and have the time of your life.
The Fall of Otrar (1992, Ardak Amirkuloff)
http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?104224
This three hour national epic from Kazakhstan about the
obliteration of the Kipchaks at the hands of Genghis Khan
is a dense but alluring historical tract shot in mostly sepia
tones. Its style is bizarrely philosophical and pulpy; the
characters speak in dialogue that sounds like poetry, even
while being tortured by flies eating their faces or participating
in bloody sieges and slaughters. The roving camera movements
help to straddle the two modes: the long tracking shots of
the mass killings seem both meditative and exploitive, Mario
Bava-meets-Andrei Tarkovsky. The scene with the Islamic cleric
in an all-out-tussle with a Taoist priest while Genghis Khan
laughs with amusement convinced me that this film had a profound
understanding of its world that would require a second viewing
for me to fully appreciate. Certainly in a class by itself,
though I'm more awed than moved by it.
Wings (1927, William Wellmann)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0018578
TOP GUN 60 years before its time: the adventures of a juvenile
fighter pilot flying WWI missions over France, killing his
best friend and wooing his tomboy girlfriend. This movie tied
with FW Murnau's masterpiece SUNRISE for the first ever Oscar
for best picture. Unfortunately most of their successors have
resembled Wellmann's movie than Murnau's, opting for pomp
spectacle and easy sentimentality over lyric artistry. The
flying sequences with antiquated biplanes are outstanding;
unfortunately they are bracketed by an interminable succession
of fratboy antics. When the hero shoots his best friend down
he registers the tragedy with as much emotion as a boy who's
lost his G.I. Joe action figure.
Signs (2002, M. Night Shyamalan)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0286106
I won't even bother summarizing the plot of this new twist-o-rama
supplied by Shyamalamadingdong -- it's simply preposterous.
BUT, I will say that I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected
to, mostly because I saw it with a full theater audience.
Responding to the audience's reaction is half the fun of a
Shyamalan movie: the way they let themselves be led at a painfully
slow pace through his claustrophobic plots, building the tension
from their self-manufactured anticipation more than anything
in the movie itself. The film's striving for spiritual revelation
is completely meaningless, and Shyamalan, whatever his issues
are, seems acutely aware of this, allowing both Mel Gibson's
struggle with his own soul and the overall accumulation of
suspense to be counterpointed by various glib one-liners uttered
from the mouths of child actors. Personally, I found these
Hawksian wisecracks to be a welcome relief to Shyamalan's
sterile tone and arch construction: they made the characters
more convincing in showing their incredulity at being plopped
into a ridiculous story -- I felt they sympathized with me
as much as I did with them.
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