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SCREENING LOG
- 3/17-3/23, 2003
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I watched SPEEDY, LEON/THE PROFESSIONAL, SMILES OF A SUMMER
NIGHT, SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN, STAGE SISTERS, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT,
SHOLAY, THE AWFUL TRUTH, OKLAHOMA, LE SAMOURAI and TEN. In
order of preference:
Spring in a Small Town (1948, Fei Mu)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0189219
Voted in a recent Hong Kong film critics' poll as the greatest
Chinese film ever made and recently remade by veteran director
Tian Zhuangzhuang, this film about a woman tending to her
tubercular husband in an isolated household who is visited
by an old flame seems like the blueprint for so many films
I love. This film captures the beauty of Moments, and how
they connect to an eroding sense of the past and a frightening
uncertainty of the future, every bit as well as the films
of Hou Hsiao Hsien, and the painfully exquisite rendering
of repressed desires is on par with Wong Kar Wai or Zhang
Yimou. What's more, its sense of spiritual isolation and the
insecurity of modern society anticipates the films of Antonioni
and Bergman by a decade. Nonetheless I doubt that this film
influenced anyone overseas, or even in Asia; it was made in
a brief and tenuous period right after China's doors to the
world were pried free from the hands of Japanese occupation,
and right before Communism slammed them back shut. This is
the disassociated ancestor of a meditative brand of cinema
it never had the chance to influence. For me, Asian cinema
starts with four films: Ozu's I WAS BORN, BUTÉ, Mizoguchi's
STORY OF THE LAST CHRYSANTHEMUMS, Yuan Muzhi's STREET ANGEL
and Fei Mu's SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN.
The Awful Truth (1937, Leo McCarey)second viewing
http://us.imdb.com/Title?002859
Leo McCarey gives Ernst Lubitsch a run for his money, not
only as a talented director of screwball comedies, but as
a sensitive observer of adult feelings and emotions. Cary
Grant and Irene Dunne achieve a rare chemistry as a couple
on the rocks who undergo a hilarious yet profound change of
heart in the course of their divorce proceedings. McCarey's
observations on love are baroque in their complexity: these
troubled lovers are too familiar with each other to be estranged,
and yet they need to see each other as attractive strangers
in order to fall in love all over again. McCarey celebrates
the power of creativity and surprise as the lifeblood of a
loving relationship, and conveys his ideas in a small but
sharply drawn idiom of private moments and gestures. Irene
Dunne gives a laugh at the end of this movie whose sound I
can't get out of my head - itŐs the sound of the real adult
world, a sound I barely hear in Hollywood's comedies these
days. AS GOOD AS IT GETS and RUSHMORE are the closest we have
to McCarey these days, and we could use some more.
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955, Ingmar Bergman)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0048641
My problems with Ingmar Bergman may have found their answer
in this accomplished, thoughtful and moving comedy charting
a roundelay of affairs between two households and the actress
who commands both husbands' attention. This film has been
criticized for treading inadequately on the terrain of Renoir
and Lubitsch, but it's clear to me that Bergman is staking
out his own territory and working through his own preoccupations:
the frustrations of personal fulfillment, the intolerable
pettiness of middle class life, the gorgeousness of Swedish
women, and the fearsome and alluring cipher of death. You
can feel Bergman's ambivalence with the drawing-room material
he's dealing with; there's a mix of sympathy and impatience
with how he depicts his characters' shallow desires, clashing
with his own urge to break out into a direct confrontation
with the spiritual malaise lying underneath the farce (which
is exactly what happens in his later films). For someone who
seems so conflicted about his project, he does a fantastic
job of registering an impressive range of emotions and attitudes
here, which is something I can't say for the gloomy monotone
of his later, more "serious" work.
Ten (2002, Abbas Kiarostami) second viewing
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0301978
Ten conversations inside a car between a woman and a series
of passengers, shot with two hidden digital video cameras.
Upon second viewing this latest film by one of the most important
filmmakers working today makes a lot more sense as a story;
while it's never directly commented upon, you get a sense
of the woman driver's internal development as her character
speaks, listens and learns through the course of her conversations.
Kiarostami's technique is as fascinating as ever: each decision
made in the making of this film is an answer to a logistical,
ethical or philosophical question he asks himself. His desire
to get as close as he can to reality leads to a film where
he has physically removed himself from the production (he
gave his nonprofessional performers a rundown of their characters
and situations, and then sent them off in the car to "act'
the scenes while the camera rolled Đ a strategy made possible
only through digital video). It's no coincidence that this
is also his first film focusing on women; did he decide that
the most effective way for him to capture the Other Half would
be to vanish behind a hidden camera? And yet in trying to
efface his own influencing presence, he creates an unseen
gaze that can't help but invoke the unseen gaze of the authorities,
of Iranian society itself, whose stifling rules and codes
governing women's conduct inform this film both explicitly
in the dialogue and implicitly in the women's behavior. In
trying to remove himself, he has come up with a film that
has his inimitable perspective written all over it. A great
film, one of the best and most ground-breaking of last year.
Stage Sisters (1965, Xie Jin)second viewing
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0081553
Xie Jin, who has been making films in China for 40 years
despite many years of persecution and censure, delivered what
is arguably his masterpiece with this powerful melodrama about
two opera singer sisters who are torn apart by the conflicting
influences of capitalism (represented by an exploitive male
theater owner) and socialism (represented by a crusading,
altruistic female journalist). While it's a given that the
film serves a propagandistic purpose, it also conveys a powerful
and nuanced vision of feminist solidarity that transcends
all other political ideologies. In fact, the film was banned
by the government for being too lenient on the sister who
succumbs to capitalism, making it the last Chinese epic film
for decades until the advent of the Fifth Generation directors
in the 80s. What seemed like heresy to the Communists back
then makes perfect sense today as a groundbreaking, intricately
argued vision of feminist solidarity, shot (rather ironically)
in a grand Hollywood MGM Technicolor style that recalls George
Cukor's A STAR IS BORN. The dramatic scenes feel a bit wooden
at times, but Xie is a master in his use of music; it registers
at key points in the story with the clarion precision of a
Greek chorus.
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0059012
Orson Welles does a brilliant job restructuring Shakespeare's
Henry IV cycle around the immortal rapscallion Falstaff, played
by Welles himself. In a performance of earthy conviviality
both crude and cunning, Welles gives Falstaff his full due
as a key figure in understanding not only the greatness of
Shakespeare but of Welles. As impressive as it is, I'll have
to see this again to re-train my ear to the Shakespearean
idiom, not to mention the Wellesian idiom - as with TOUCH
OF EVIL Welles mixes tones and moods to create his own style,
one that seems to burrow into one scene after another, charting
nothing but its own heaving, restless energy. Particularly
noteworthy is one battle sequence that ranks among the most
brilliantly conceived of all time.
Leon/The Professional (1994, Luc Besson)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0110413
An unfeeling hitman is taught the ever-wholesome values
of life and love by saving the life of an embittered but vulnerable
little girl and slaying anyone and everyone that comes in
their way. On the surface, this film seems like a series of
narrative strategies calculated to be as provocative and as
inoffensive as possible, in the way that it gets us to care
about two "innocent" child-people while the rest
of the humanity gets served up for slaughter (including the
girl's family, whom, we're persuaded, are bad people anyhow),
and teases us to think that a 12-year old girl will become
an assassin, a truly transgressive premise whose radical potential
is left untapped as the film returns everyone to their stereotypical
functions for the big blowout climax under the auspices of
moral propriety. It's a perversely fascinating strategy that
inevitably falls apart, but, not unlike TAXI DRIVER, is often
compelling for its deranged sociopathic stance towards honor,
killing and womanly virtue. I'd say that the film begs, borrows
and steals liberally from Scorsese & Schrader (unstable relations
with virginal females), James Cameron (kick-ass feminism subordinated
by an approving patriarchal gaze; indiscriminate cop-killing)
and John Woo (chauvinistic notions of romanticized chivalry
held up in a morally vacuous universe) but something tells
me that Hollywood baby formula is all that Besson knows, so
why should he be faulted for working with what comes naturally?
Besides, the way he regurgitates it is maddeningly, uniquely
his own, a fulfillment of teenage male bedroom fantasies that
I'm still not sure are either truly inspired or resoundingly
inept. From his chest of pre-fab self-righteously suffering
action figures he has managed to concoct two of the most compelling
characters in recent action cinema. Leon follows the brutal-but-honorable
mode of the modern day knight a la Travis Bickle/Terminator,
while his damsel in distress Mathilda traverses similar patronizingly
"feminist" roles played by Jodie Foster in TAXI
DRIVER and Julia Roberts in PRETTY WOMAN: sassy, tough as
nails but desperately in need to be saved. Yet their rapport
is genuine despite the painful cliches of their dialogues
(probably the best performances I've seen from Jean Reno or
Natalie Portman). In the end, I feel sorry for Luc Besson.
Resented by the French for being too Hollywood, resented by
Hollywood for being too French, poor Luc makes films that
can never settle themselves, but always be caught up in a
maelstrom of youthful, cultural and ideological contradictions.
Not only his career, but his movies, seem to be about the
dilemma of being caught between two worlds: between Hollywood
and Paris, pop vs. avant garde, between childhood naivete
and adult cynicism, between the brilliantly unique and the
numbingly obvious, between sodomizing and fellating the audience.
What can I say; he's an artiste, at best likened to
the kid brother of Nick Ray, at worst the colleague of Michael
Bay. I'm willing to lean towards the former.
Sholay (1975, Ramesh Sippy)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0073707
Two ex-con buddies team up with a crippled ex-policeman
to defend his village from a ruthless, raging bandit. This
"curry western" (which borrows a good deal from
Sergio Leone, and Kurosawa by extension) was voted the greatest
Indian film of all time in a recent poll of experts, and for
that reason perhaps my expectations were impossibly high coming
into this. It has a legendary status in India for breaking
box office records and bringing the Bollywood movie industry
to a new era; whether this new era is more analogous to THE
GODFATHER or to STAR WARS' influence on Hollywood is unclear.
While all three deal heavily in reconstituted mythical formulas,
this film stands somewhere between the violent cynicism of
the former and the giddy excess of the latter. As sprawling
camp entertainment this is fine, fun and harmless, and not
without a number of memorable moments throughout its 3 1/2
hour span (the villain in this movie is so deliciously evil
he could challenge Darth Vader on the bad guy meter). But
somehow I hate to think that this is what the Bollywood aesthetic
has come to, if only because I've already been spoiled by
the more socially progressive and tautly crafted Bollywood
musicals of the 50s.
Le Samourai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0062229
Highly influential existentialist action flick about a hitman
roaming through a hipster's 60's Paris shot in various shades
of low-key gray. The film's distinct hushed mood may be special
to some, perhaps as some European approximation of the Zen
aesthetic (curious then to think that Asian filmmakers like
John Woo and Takeshi Kitano may be influenced by this, just
as Westerns were influenced by Kurosawa who was influenced
by Ford), but it just struck me as being mostly surface. Neither
could I connect with Alain Delon, whose getup here strikes
me as a prettified version of Robert Mitchum. Personally I
prefer ALPHAVILLE which came before this and GHOST DOG: THE
WAY OF THE SAMURAI which came after - they feature a more
vigorous re-appropriation of cultural materials that supplements
the requisite coolness.
Speedy (1928, Ted Wilde)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0019412
Harold Lloyd's last major feature places him in the urban
terrain typical of his oeuvre; here he's wooing a girlfriend
while trying to save his grandfather's horse-drawn carriage
business from being muscled out by cable car magnates. The
story can be read as a metaphor for Lloyd's career at the
dawn of the sound era, especially in how he clings desperately
to his rickety, obsolete vehicle in the face of powerful new
technology and a new industry to go with it. There's really
not much in this film that can't be found in other, better
Lloyd films: his standard neurotic, bespectacled expressions,
an unreflecting middle-class outlook caught up in constant
diversions; compared to the narrative cohesion of THE KID
BROTHER the episodic movement of this story feels like a step
backward. But for plain fun you can never really go wrong
with Harold Lloyd.
Oklahoma! (1955, Fred Zinnemann)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0048445
If this Rogers and Hammerstein musical is considered to be
a national treasure, its reasons are lost on either myself
or on Zinnemann, who manages to make this a certifiable bore.
Even a terminal craftsman like William Wyler wouldn't be able
to drain as much lifeblood from the proceedings as Zinnemann
does here: the supersaturated Technicolor seems to overcompensate
for the lack of energy on screen that it ends up underscoring
the sense of jaundice and artificiality to the film's setting;
the dance numbers have all the zest and spontaneity of hillbilly
robots. The title would be more representative of the film
if it had a question mark in place of the exclamation.
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