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SCREENING LOG
- 3/17-3/23, 2003
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I watched IN A LONELY PLACE, DOUBLE SUICIDE, THE DANGEROUS
LIVES OF ALTAR BOYS, CHIHWASEON, films by Edwin S. Porter,
FORBIDDEN GAMES, HELL'S HINGES, THE TOLL GATE, HERO, EYES
WITHOUT A FACE, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, ALL THE REAL
GIRLS, THE MAGIC FLUTE, COME AND SEE, and OCTOBER. In order
of preference:
The Good, the Bad and The Ugly (1966, Sergio Leone)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0060196
Lord, what was I doing avoiding this film for so long? I've
never been much of an Eastwood fan but this movie made it
all make sense, and how. In many ways this is the formal apotheosis
of the Western, where all the stock gestures, moments, images
and attitudes are stretched out for maximum savoring -- especially
the faces (Leone gets as much existential mileage out of close-ups
-- his patented "two beeg eyes" approach -- as Ingmar
Bergman). The moral dilemmas that haunted Ford have been drop-kicked
out the window -- America as a society is irredeemable, caught
up in a Civil War which Leone depicts as utterly ludicrous
and wasteful (symbolized by the awesome explosion of a bridge).
Leone reaches as far back as von Stroheim to posit his view
of a world where the good, the bad and the ugly are ruled
by the same thing: greed. The only thing separating the three
is the respective level of their Machiavellian skills, with
the good being the best at manipulating other humans. But
the stark, almost Dali-esque landscapes upon which these rituals
of life and death are set bring both a dramatic urgency and
a zen-like sense of contemplation to these human struggles.
This is a rare achievement of a film, one that feels rough
and dirty and yet abstract and clear all at once. Of course,
the Ennio Morricone score needs no introduction, but now I
realize how its famous, coyote-like howl reflects the solitary,
scavenger-like existence of the film's nameless hero, and
captures the struggle of the wilderness in a single crystalline
sound.
Eyes without a Face (1959, Georges Franju)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0053459
I'm no expert on horror movies, but this is one of the most
genuinely chilling films I've ever seen, a nightmare that
feels like a poem. A plastic surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) abducts
young women and transplants their faces in order to restore
the beauty of his daughter (Edith Scob), the victim of a car
accident. Franju's mastery of light and shadow, sound and
silence, things concealed and revealed, is comparable to Jacques
Tourneur. What it has to say about mankind's obsession with
female beauty may or may not be profound (basically a children's
fairy tale gone horribly twisted), but the ways it finds to
visualize these ideas burn themselves into the memory with
a breathtaking elegance: the image of a young woman wandering
through the dark, dank halls of her father's underground lab
in a porcelain mask is the stuff of Gothic masterpieces. Maurice
Jarre's carnivalesque score adds just the right touch.
Hell's Hinges (1916, William S. Hart, Charles Swickard)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0006780
The Toll Gate (1920, Lambert Hillyer)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0011779
The prevailing wisdom is that movies like THE WILD BUNCH
and UNFORGIVEN thoroughly revised the Western genre to accurately
reflect the dark, sinister underpinnings of its violent ethos.
Well, these two seminal Westerns starring the prototypical
antihero William S. Hart show that, at least at the outset,
the Western was well-aware of the brutality behind its myth-making.
In HELL'S HINGES, Hart plays a rugged cowboy who falls in
love with the sister of the town's new preacher, and sets
forth to defend both against the corruption of the townspeople.
The film explodes in an apocalyptic blaze that is truly visionary,
anticipating the "American civilization borne of violence"
theme that stretches from John Ford's westerns all the way
to GANGS OF NEW YORK. In THE TOLL GATE, the Western redemption
ethos takes on deeply disturbing sexual implications: Hart
is an outlaw betrayed by his partner to the law; he escapes
and finds refuge in the arms of a mother and child, possibly
finding his salvation through domestic life -- but then he
realizes that the missing father is none other than his partner!
This is incredibly complex stuff, powerfully told and felt
-- I would have never guessed that some of the very first
westerns rank as some of the very best.
Hero (2002, Zhang Yimou)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0299977
The long, strange career of Zhang Yimou reaches epic heights
in this mythical blockbuster: a mysterious swordsman (Jet
Li) recounts to the first Emperor of China how he killed three
notorious assassins from a rival kingdom. Zhang's movies have
always been as enigmatic in their meanings as they are evocative
in their effects, functioning as whatever the viewer wishes
them to be, and with this baby he really outdoes himself.
Zhang breaks new ground in a unique idiom of grand hyperbole,
with wall-to-wall action, dramatic gestures gone miles over-the-top
and colors so rich they make the eyes water. The film would
be a work of complete stylistic abstraction if it weren't
for Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung (once again proving that
they are the greatest screen couple of our time) on hand to
invest the film with their tremendous emotional reserves.
After watching this twice, I still can't decide if this is
a spectacularly aestheticized, Zen-like meditation on the
art of martial arts cinema, worthy of the great King Hu, an
over-produced commercial attempt to capitalize on the global
appeal of CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON; or a coded, submissive,
possibly ironic 2-hour propagandistic commercial for the Chinese
government. As frustrating to interpret as it is glorious
to experience, this may be the pinnacle of Zhang's artistic
achievement, rivaling Eisenstein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE in its
iconoclastic beauty and quizzical intent.
In a Lonely Place (1950, Nicholas Ray)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0042593
Underrated gem that doesn't quite fulfill the noir expectations
it sets up, but instead completely becomes its own raw, wounded
animal of a movie. Humphrey Bogart is a struggling writer
who finds love with a gorgeous Gloria Grahame (both at their
best, exuding true chemistry) while he's being investigated
for murder. This stirs up an emotional molotov cocktail for
Bogart's character, and the paradox of the Bogart persona,
that cool-eyed veneer encasing a mind taxed with wary uncertainty,
has perhaps never been mined as deeply as in this film. This
film seems to best emblematize the cinema of Nicholas Ray:
a cinema of emotions dangled from the sleeve, of fragile dreams
vulnerable to one's own self-destructive despair; the last
half-hour of this film make this heartbreakingly clear and
is truly masterful in tone and feeling. Indeed this film may
be Ray's most personal statement (he separated with wife Grahame
during shooting). Both Godard's CONTEMPT and Scorsese's RAGING
BULL owe this movie big time.
October (1927, Sergei Eisenstein)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0018217
Eisenstein's famous editing techniques reach their most radical
heights in this free-associating recounting of the days of
the 1918 revolution, when the provisional Russian government
was formally deposed in favor of the Bolshevik regime. The
film is alternately breathtaking (the image of a white horse
dangling from a drawbridge is sheer genius) and jokingly obvious
(images of the provisional leader are intercut with a strutting
peacock; religious beliefs are derided in a single brilliant
series of icons from around the world), but as far as didactic
filmmaking goes this film possesses a poetic soul, one that
fearlessly creates substance out of its audacious style. Watching
this film helped me clarify my feelings over Eisenstein, esp.
in comparing OCTOBER with IVAN THE TERRIBLE. OCTOBER is Eisenstein
at his freest and most explicit; even when the film is at
its most ingenious and creative, it is still in the service
of a single message -- in contrast, I prefer the endless coded
mystery and elaborate ambiguities of IVAN THE TERRIBLE. Either
way, Eisentein's genius cannot be denied.
Forbidden Games (1952, Rene Clement)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0043686
Highly affecting tale of a young Parisian WWII refugee who
is taken in by a farm family after her parents are killed
in a German attack. The boy in the family befriends her and
together they develop a macabre fascination with burying animals
in a makeshift graveyard, even stealing crosses from the local
cemetery to enact their designs. The film raises a number
of worthy questions about the faulty values humans place in
religious rituals regarding death and mourning; the children's
elaborate "games" are juxtaposed with the family's
relatively crude treatment and burial of a dying member. The
tone of the film fluctuates wildly, from a harrowing opening
sequence of wartime atrocity to jaunty country slapstick to
haunting pathos; it's a fascinating tonal inconsistency which
may reflect how the film's intent is mainly to retain the
audience's attention. As a byproduct, every time it starts
cooking with its ideas, it falls back to a shot of the sad-eyed
4-year old starlet for instant pathos (the final moments are
particularly heavy-handed). The overall result is a film susceptible
to contradictory interpretations, but as fluid and captivating
storytelling it approaches masterpiece status.
Come and See (1985, Elim Klimov)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0091251
Klimov's much-heralded account of a Byelorussian boy's horrific
experiences upon enlisting to fight the Nazis is in certain
ways beyond reproach: it sets out to be the War Movie to End
All War Movies and gets awfully close. The manner in which
it does so resembles George Foreman's boxing technique: ever
so gradually it lumbers along, taking wild swings and occasionally
landing them hard, before finally backing you into a corner
and unleashing a relentless onslaught of visceral blows. Two-thirds
of the film plays like a loose, incidental series of fever
dreams in a similar manner to APOCALYPSE NOW; the final half-hour
climax, depicting the genocide of a Byelorussian village,
is almost unbearable but credit Klimov for not flinching.
A remarkable final sequence keeps the film from being read
as mere propaganda, though it still seems confused about what
it really wants to say other than "war is hell". Which may
very well be enough.
The Magic Flute (1975, Ingmar Bergman)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0073822
The prospect of seeing my favorite opera, one that espouses
joy, imagination and a love of life like few works of art
I know, directed by someone whom I've often (at times unfairly)
derided as a gloomy, narcissistic soul-basher was intriguing,
to say the least. The results fell expectedly somewhere in
the middle. Bergman keeps the production stage-bound for the
most part while opening it up to cinematic possibilities towards
the latter half. The metaphysical shadings of certain scenes
resonate with his overall oeuvre, though Mozart's material
infuses his spiritual preoccupations with a sense of child-like
wonder (a point hammered home by the recurring extreme close-up
of a girl in the audience); the same child-like wonder that
would re-emerge to glorious effect in FANNY AND ALEXANDER.
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002, Peter Care)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0238924
Effective adaptation of Chris Fuhrman's graphic novel about
Catholic schoolboys who prank and loiter their way through
the days until the story requires them to get serious. The
first half of the film is a lark as the camera has fun hanging
out after school, letting the boys be boys. They're all charismatically
roguish, though Jena Malone is the true standout of the cast
as a sweet Catholic girl with a dark secret (on the other
hand, Jodie Foster and Vincent D'Onofrio are criminally wasted
playing the church authorities, roles so cardboard they bring
the narrowness of the film's juvenile perspective into question).
When issues like incest and expulsion arise the film doesn't
seem to know what to do with them, which in its own way honestly
reflects the abilities of the protagonists; to compensate,
the film employs animated sequences of comic fantasies that
reconfigure the real-life conflicts.
All the Real Girls (2003, David Gordon Green)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0299458
God bless David Gordon Green for trying. There's no question
that the guy, to paraphrase Warren Beatty in MCCABE & MRS.
MILLER, has got poetry in him, so it's a wonder why he feels
obliged to employ it in the service of a prosaic, unoriginal
love story about a twentysomething guy who's slept with 26
girls but falls in love with a virgin teen who could just
possibly change his world. But before the male chauvinism
and unabashed juvenility of the enterprise rears its ugly
head, there are some undeniably beautiful moments only partially
borrowed from Terrence Malick. Green has a great ear for capturing
the priceless quirkiness of human conversation, just as Tim
Orr's camera captures the golden light of dawn and dusk like
nobody's business. This film won an award at Sundance for
"emotional honesty", and while I appreciate the sentiment,
"cloyingness" could just as easily substitute in the place
of the noun (though Zooey Deschanel's performance is heartrendingly
honest, esp. given that she has to listen to co-star Paul
Schneider's gurgling effusions of narcissistic heartache while
wearing a straight face).
Chihwaseon (2002, Im Kwon-taek)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0317234
My enthusiasm for legendary Korean filmmaker Im Kwon-taek
after watching his previous feature CHUNHYANG was dealt a
blow by this disappointingly rote rendering of the life of
19th century Korean painter Jang Seung-up. The choppy narrative
follows Jang as he drinks, paints, whores, busts up some furniture
and drinks some more, all the while being praised for his
raw talent despite his lack of pedigree. Visually the film
is certainly sumptuous, and there is some mildly interesting
discussion about art, but otherwise it seems as rife with
suffering-artist cliches as Ed Harris' POLLOCK, with little
of that film's emotional connection with its characters.
Double Suicide (1969, Masahiro Shinoda)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0064975
Filmic version of a traditional "bunraku" puppet story about
a man desperate to buy the freedom of a geisha girl. Elements
of the bunraku are incorporated into the production, such
as "puppeteers" dressed in black who manipulate the props
and occasionally the actors. Conceptually it's interesting
but I couldn't find my way into the story, esp. with the performers
screaming their lines half the time.
I also watched Before the Nickelodeon: The Cinema of Edwin
S. Porter, (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0083633),
an insightful documentary of the most well-regarded of filmmakers
who came up under Thomas Edison's production company during
the turn of the century. The film contained no less than a
dozen complete Porter shorts, which were a treat. Porter is
most famous for his classic short THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY,
a film which makes the case for him as being America's first
bona fide filmmaker. But what doesn't get talked about are
his artistic achievements in the art of cinematic storytelling.
As one of the first "storytellers" of narrative
cinema, he was faced with dilemmas concerning how to make
different events make sense as an overall story. In many ways
he was the pioneer of film editing, using a variety of techniques
(juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated shots, showing the same
event from different angles) to explore the different ways
that movies can tell a story. Sadly, his quirky techniques,
were steamrolled by D.W. Griffith's more fluid and linear
style of storytelling, and Porter's stature waned as his technique
was derided as outmoded (though it looks positively avant-garde
by today's standards). Porter's biography and artistic innovations
are given their full due in this online article: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/archive/innovators/porter.html
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