monday, may 25, 2009
Pandora's Box
Film, due to its nature as a primarily visual medium, is often a pursuit of the proper objects of our obsessions. More often than not this ends up with a product that spends its energies putting a premium on pulchritude and lacks any suitable involvement of desire. Few directors understood this as early and as well as silent film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst.It's difficult to know if the director understood what he was getting when he espied the young, and undeniably lovely, Louise Brooks and selected her as his lead in Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) - the retelling of Frank Wedekind's "Lulu" plays. Brooks, it turned out, was much much more than just another pretty face.
Her attractiveness - both in terms of physical appearance and sexual magnetism - didn't simply provide a centerpiece for a particular film; it scratched the deeper levels of the medium's potential. Critic Andrew Sarris felt her beauty was evidence of cinema's ability to touch on the universal aspects of the human condition. read more
wednesday, november 26, 2008
Stalag 17
In 1953 the Second World War had not been over a full decade and, perhaps, too short a time to present a film depicting the conditions of German prisoner-of-war camps in a realistic manner. But a comedy within that setting was a goldmine of possibilities for the genius of director Billy Wilder.Stalag 17 may not be the director's masterpiece but it is a brilliant example of his ability to create a popular film loaded with subversive subtexts and his signature cynicism. Although he swaddles it all in broadly (and sometimes badly) played humor it's unmistakably there. And in that respect it was decades ahead of it's time.
Yet, today, Stalag 17 is difficult to appreciate on its own terms primarily due to the television show it served as the inspiration for, Hogan's Heroes. The first casualty of the limpid sitcom is Wilder's sharp wit and acuity but the ham-fisted humor remained intact. Because, lets be honest, Wilder offered up better funny than what's on display in Stalag 17 on lots of occasions. read more
thursday, november 20, 2008
Red Desert
We are so accustomed to the rich hues of colors that saturate movies that imagining a world at the point this revolutionary aspect of filmmaking was introduced can be difficult. While the introduction of sound is heralded as a revolutionary step forward for the medium but the advent of color seems almost mundane in comparison - an inevitability, if you will.Yet it seems a great deal of daring work by a number of directors in the early years of color broke incredible ground with this powerful tool and paved the way for the template of its use we take almost completely for granted today. It's helpful to step back and look at these efforts from time-to-time and none are more important than Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film, 1964's Red Desert (Il deserto rosso).
Like many of the famed Italian director's efforts, Red Desert defies conventional plot-driven storytelling in favor of an elliptical narrative that uses the visual strengths of the medium to explore emotional states and feelings. Antonioni's hallmark moodiness and existential concerns are in full display here as well as the director's fondness for long takes and stylized set work. read more
monday, july 28, 2008
Nanook of the North
The blasted hoary wastelands of the Canadian Arctic seem a strange place for film to have come to the crossroads of its development. When filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty undertook an unprecedented project in the early 1920s to record the lives of the Intuit Indians that lived in the Hudson Bay the result was nothing less than revolutionary.Flaherty's 1922 film Nanook of the North was a massive commercial success but, beyond that, it was nothing less than creation of an entirely new branch of cinema as well as redefining the aesthetic baseline for the medium as a whole. Upon its release, the film was enormously popular becoming one of the best known for the entire silent era.
It's impact can be found in the overwhelming number of stereotypes about Inuit peoples that it popularize - kissing with their noses, building igloos and waiting patiently over air holes in the ice for their prey; even the common use of the term "Eskimo" to describe these peoples. read more
monday, july 21, 2008
On the Waterfront
Watching Elia Kazan's masterpiece On the Waterfront for the first time is to behold a film with which one is already intimately familiar. It's pacing, setting and tone have been copied and referenced so often it is now part of how we conduct discourse about the medium.To put it simply, if you make a crime film you have to respond to the gauntlet thrown down by Kazan and Marlon Brando in 1954. And the parts of the film that pack the most power have long lapsed into the realm of cliche, making approaching them on their own terms a tough proposition.
Moreover, there is the inescapable backstory of director's Kazan's controversial testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The director's act of "naming names" of movie industry players who had connections with the Communist part cannot be separated from the work. read more
monday, july 14, 2008
Nashville
Ludwig Wittgenstein once claimed that a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. While the Austrian logician he made the claim to in order to highlight a specific point about language, it turns out the sentiment applies quite well to film.Witness Robert Altman's 1975 masterpiece, Nashville. On one level it is a hysterical skewering of a type of cloistered regionalism and the eccentric oddities that it produces. But on another level it's a satirical exegesis about America as a whole and never more serious as when it's pulling your leg.
The movie packs the stories of two-dozen characters in Nashville, Tennessee just prior to a 1976 presidential primary. Given its setting pretty much every tale revolves around music and the industry of making it to some degree. read more
friday, june 13, 2008
The 3penny Opera
The 3penny Opera (or Die 3groschenoper) is a film that has been almost completely overshadowed by its history.Derived from the tremendously popular play its passage from page to screen was a famously stormy one. Playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill sued the filmmakers for breach of contract. After it was made the Nazis banned it and destroyed almost every known negative leaving it to be seen only through adulterated copies for more than 75 years.
In 2006, a new version of the film was finally made using a camera negative and the result was a version of the work that is nothing more than a complete revelation. Last year, the Criterion Collection released this on DVD and it is almost like witnessing a new version of this Weimar-era masterpiece. read more
monday, june 09, 2008
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
he Treasure of the Sierra Madre towers over modern film like few other movies in history. Its influence, direct or indirect, makes it a Rosetta Stone for unlocking the ethical underpinnings of almost every film examining the murky depths of man's own shaky morality in the modern world.The story of the trio of prospectors, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) and the grizzled old veteran Howard (Walter Huston) searching for their fortune in the rugged and ruthless mountains of Central Mexico during the 1920s has lost not a whit of its power in the six decades since it's release.
Bogart and the film's director John Huston first joined forces in the classic film-noir thriller The Maltese Falcon. The success of that film made the actor a star and gave Huston the directorial clout to undertake the more unorthodox The Treasure of Sierra Madre.Film critic Roger Ebert once praised the The Maltese Falcon as a beautiful synthesis of image, action and dialogue and this mastery of the medium extends seamlessly into The Treasure of Sierra Madre. If anything, Huston moves beyond the confines of his previous work as he brings the camera out of the studio and into the world at large. read more
monday, june 02, 2008
Zodiac
The truth, may in fact, set one free. But attaining it comes at a fantastically high cost. In a world increasingly insistent on facts as the preferred currency of knowledge it's more than a little surprise to many that truth remains as elusive to us as ever.Although David Fincher's film Zodiac wears the guise of a classic police procedural drama, this strange elusiveness of certainty about the world around us is the real subject it addresses.
The subject practically requires it. The film is about the so-called Zodiac killer claimed to have slain 37 people in California during late 1960s. It's a pretty paltry total for a classic American serial killer but doing people in wasn't Zodiac's real point of genius.
The case gained its real notoriety in the killer's brazen boasts to police though the media. Mailing a series of ciphers and taunting letters to various newspapers - notably the San Francisco Chronicle - the killer was able to create a harrowing public persona that gripped much of northern California throughout his period of activity. read more
monday, may 12, 2008
Jaws
Steven Spielberg's adventure across the landscape of modern culture began the summer of 1975 with a little film about a big fish. Jaws went on transcend the movie theater and became a phenomena in and of itself.It became a footnote in this area two years later when another young filmmaker, George Lucas, unleashed his unconventional science fiction epic upon an unsuspecting public. Today it's almost impossible to examine Star Wars outside of its wider societal impact but Jaws still stands resolutely on its own merits.
Because Spielberg seemed to understand from the very beginning that what he was making was a horror movie - nothing more and nothing less. Rather than stooping to the camp trapping the genre had become associated with, he delved deeper in telling his tale to tap into the more primal elements that have allowed it to endure. read more
friday, may 09, 2008
Death in the Andes - Mario Vargas Llosa
Sometimes, when the enormity of reality is simply too great a burden for the mind to comprehend, literature can serve as a midwife to understanding. It certainly is the case with Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Death in the Andes.The Peruvian writer's effort to distill the sense of helplessness and horror that gripped his country for the better part of two decades due to a bloody and violent Maoist insurgency is an astonishing accomplishment. It's also essential reading for those who did not experience that terrible period firsthand (such as myself) to have any hope of understanding what transpired in the Andean nation in those years.
Beginning in 1980, the Shining Path guerrillas began a civil war in Peru from the highlands. Ardent and hard-line Maoists, their intent was nothing less than to destroy the government of Peru and begin a worldwide people's revolution. read more
monday, may 05, 2008
The Train
Knowing what makes something art is not simply a matter of knowing what you prefer. And knowing if it's worth getting killed for is another matter entirely.Once beyond the casual ignorance of relativism one invariably finds that art and the idea of aesthetics becomes a very complicated very fast. And as difficult as figuring out what makes something art there is the even thornier problem of understanding its intrinsic value.
On first glance, John Frankenheimer's excellent 1964 film The Train would seem to be an unlikely vehicle for this kind of heady discourse. It's ostensibly an action film - a Burt Lancaster vehicle designed to help the star recover from the poor showing of his previous movie.
You expect it to move fast, move forward and always keep its eyes on the plot. And it certainly delivers in those respects but it is quite a bit more than that. Somehow, what emerged was something transcendent. read more
wednesday, april 30, 2008
Grand Hotel
An inordinate amount of the influential filmmaking that has created our modern approach to cinema is often described as a reaction to the massive and affluent studio system in Hollywood. Particularly that of its so-called Golden Age - the period following the silent era dominated by the five major studios; MGM, Paramount, RKO, Warner Bros, and Twentieth Century Fox.While the sins and transgressions of this period are many and well documented but it's also important to realize that its successes were massively influential as well. And the 1932 blockbuster Grand Hotel is a perfect example.
About the same time that Grand Hotel was being made, the Germans were hard at work coming up with Expressionism. Lacking the resources of the American film industry they leaned large on their vivid creativity. In less than a decade those directors would fuel a Noir renaissance in Hollywood. read more
monday, april 28, 2008
Persuasion - Jane Austen
A good friend of mine whose taste in books I respect and who also happens to be British can be made to actually cringe if you utter the name "Jane Austen." A lifetime of odiously sentimental BBC serials can do that but the author herself went out of her way to make the situation deplorable on her own.Her passion nears the degree of Mark Twain's who once insisted that reading Pride and Prejudice made him "want to dig [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." Still, I admire him for making it through the book, which is more than I could ever do.
Still, when pressed, my friend will admit Northanger Abby has some merit and, when pressed further (and offered a beer or two), will also allow for Persuasion as well. (An interesting pair since the two were published together after Austen's death.) And, I find that I not only agree with her general sentiment toward the writer's work as a whole, in the case of the latter I am enthusiastically in accord as well. read more
monday, april 21, 2008
Swimming to Cambodia
The unexamined life, as Socrates famously pointed out, is not worth living. By that standard, Spaulding Gray lived one of the most fantastic lives of worth. Sadly, he didn’t see it that way.For most of his adult life, Gray ruthlessly dissected his experiences in performances that were basically autobiographical monologues. It was a pursuit that should have kept him comfortably ensconced in the suffocating embrace of the New York art scene.
In 1987 filmmaker Jonathan Demme made a movie of one of Gray’s best-known monologues, Swimming to Cambodia. It was a fortuitous collaboration and, as a direct result, this offbeat artist’s particular métier was able to find a much wider audience. Which is all the more surprising when one considers the disaster this film could have been in the hands of lesser artists. read more
thursday, april 17, 2008
Rashomon
Truth and justice, while not mutually exclusive, are not at all the same thing. Moreover, neither is necessarily helpful in understanding the desires of the human heart. Akira Kurosawa’s legendary 1950 film Rashomon is justifiably famous for demonstrating the paradoxes created by the former but is often overlooked for its incisive examination of the latter.Which is odd since not only is this theme powerful in every frame of the film it is also stated outright by the director in his autobiography. He explicitly points out that he chose to film a version of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s story In a Grove because it “goes into the depths of the human heart as if with a surgeon’s scalpel, lying bare its dark complexities and bizarre twists.”
Rashomon is a masterpiece and foundational work of cinema not because it undertakes these questions but because it asks them in such a unified and powerful manner. The entire aesthetic of the film works as a whole to deliver its message. It is a film to be experienced not simply watched. read more
monday, april 14, 2008
The Shark Net - Robert Drewe
Looking back on one’s childhood in prose can be an exercise fraught with peril. The extremes of emotion untempered by experience can color one’s recollections fatally making the result either a maudlin nostalgia piece or an overly cynical dissection.This is why Robert Drewe’s unapologetic memoir of his youth in Perth, Australia, The Shark Net, is such a refreshing effort. It’s a cavalcade of experiences loosely looped together and charged with that sense of expectation one is immersed in until their teens.
Only the best writers can avoid this particular Scylla and that’s without even contending with an accompanying Charybdis. In this case, it’s the location in question, Perth, Australia. The remote city on the west coast of the continent – a place as far away from everywhere as you can get down under. read more
monday, april 07, 2008
The 39 Steps
Alfred Hitchcock looms formidably over modern cinema to the point that undertaking the examination of his work can be a daunting endeavor. But it is worth remembering that one of the key reasons his work has retained its importance for so long is because it’s so damned enjoyable to watch.Best of all, it’s funny. Wickedly funny.
What makes it amazing is that you can start from there and go just about any direction you want because he’s taken such meticulous care in crafting the thing that it’s packed full of meaning waiting to be unleashed to the curious observer. But that’s certainly not a necessary requirement when you sit down to get started. All you need to do is sit back and trust him to do his thing.
The 39 Steps is seen as the high-water mark of the famed director’s stretch working for UK film companies before he decamped to Hollywood. This twelve-year span was less a period of apprenticeship than a honing of the skills he would then explore to their extremes over the rest of his career. It served as the genesis of his genius as the pre-eminent auteur. read more
friday, april 04, 2008
Casino Royale
James Bond has come to be inseparably associated with an array of characteristics and accoutrements rather than any essential aspect of the character himself. It’s worked very well for the endurability – and profitability – of the franchise but it leads to a suspicion that there is nothing at the center at all.What you see is what you get and, no matter how charming and elegant the outward appearance. For the viewer, it’s the perfect character for wish fulfillment, so much so that the franchise has done quite well for the past several decades on the momentum of its own conventions and charm.
Which is why Casino Royale was such an odd shock when released in 2006. Instead of a modernization or revisualization it is a concentrated study of one of the more conflicted characters in modern fiction and what those conflicts suggest about ourselves. read more
wednesday, april 02, 2008
The Italian Job
Among their many eccentricities, the British foster an astonishing adoration for motor vehicles. It’s not just an idle fancy either, it’s of sufficient scale to almost counter their distressing disdain for possessing a proper cuisine.Which is probably why the film The Italian Job works so particularly well even in light of the fact it really has no business doing so. This Michael Cane led caper film from 1969 should have been a cookie-cutter copy of any number of similar movies foisted to the public as general consumption in that era but its not. It’s a vivid and wonderful romp that has proven to be as durable of any film of that era.
Producer Michael Deeley has called The Italian Job "the first eurosceptic film" and summed up the idea behind the plot as simply “us versus them.” On one level it takes on the classic youth vs age with the cheeky young Charlie Croker taking on not just the authority of the Italians but Mr. Bridger as well. read more
monday, march 31, 2008
Between Meals - A.J. Liebling
"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better." – A.J. LieblingDespite his tempered boast concerning his skill as writer, the one thing that always set A.J. Liebling's work apart from everyone else was style. Moreover, it was a style whetted by insight. Reading his work was rarely something you felt obligated to do but rather you welcomed as a delightful journey that would take you somewhere worth going.
Liebling was at his best when writing about his passions and rarely did he give them such full attention as in his 1959 tome, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. As an unrepentant Francophile and gastronome Liebling had few peers and this book revels in those passions without apology. In the hands of a lesser writer it’s a recipe for disaster, but Liebling was never a lesser writer, no matter what speed he was working at. read more
thursday, march 27, 2008
Hiroshima mon amour
Alan Resnais’ monumental 1959 film, Hiroshima mon amour, takes on the formidable conceit of expressing the sublime. In this case, the aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. That event not only devastated the city but entailed vast and profound effects on the world afterward.It would seem, perhaps, that film would be perfect for this type of subject. The critic Siegfried Krackauer noted that film was an ideal medium for conveying the impact of “phenomena overwhelming consciousness” such as acts of violence and destruction on the scale of Hiroshima.
Such events, he wrote in 1960, “call forth excitements and agonies bound to thwart detached observation” which serves to make recounting the experience of it almost impossible for those who witnessed it. Film, he argued, has the means to convey the scope and impact of the event “without distortion.” read more
wednesday, march 19, 2008
The 400 Blows
The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups), according to the critic and director Jean-Luc Godard, was the first battle of the war against the establishment by the French New Wave.As a critic, Francois Truffaut was the enfant terrible of the movement and his attacks against the studio system of the time were so abrasive they got him barred from the Cannes Film Festival in 1958. A year later he returned with The 400 Blows and took the prize for Best Director.
Yet instead of a bold divisive film like Godard’s Breathless a year later, Truffaut’s film is a startlingly sincere and intimate work of art that clearly shows the sympathy the director held for both his subject and the medium as a whole. read more
monday, march 17, 2008
Breathless
Breathless (À bout de soufflé) is the acme of the French New Wave and when it hit theaters in 1960 it started an inferno that still burns across the cinematic landscape.Certainly, Breathless was not the first of the films by this group of young French critics-turned-directors but Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature certainly crystallized the ethos of the burgeoning movement and became its defining statement.
And deservedly so. It was defiant in its style, abandoning all the revered methodology and forms of the existing cinema and demanding to be accepted artistically on equal terms. A tendency that led many to label Godard’s approach anarchistic even though the film itself a long slow study on style.
“I consider my Breathless as being the end of old cinema,” Godard said 1961. “Destroying all the old principles rather than creating something new.” read more
wednesday, march 12, 2008
Raiders of the Lost Ark
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” - Joseph Campbell, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”There is a compelling power to Raiders of the Lost Ark that electrified audiences in 1981 and has continued to make the film a fantastic experience even for those who have seen it countless times since.
It is a fact all the more remarkable since the charm of the franchise sags visibly in the films that followed it. While the sequels mimic the structure and symbolism laid out in the first installment, they rarely transcend the formula itself as the original did consistently and are painfully weakened for it. read more
friday, march 07, 2008
Krakatoa - Simon Winchester
“Post literate man’s electronic media contract the world to a village or tribe where everything happens to everyone at the same time: everyone know about, and therefore participates in, everything that is happening the minute it happens. Television gives this quality of simultaneity to events in the global village.”- Marshall McLuhan, foreword to “Explorations in Communication,” 1960
The volcanic explosion that destroyed the island of Krakatoa in 1883 is much more than simply a phenomenally powerful natural disaster – it’s an event that has wormed its way into the collective consciousness.
It’s difficult to put the size of the eruption into proper scale simply because it was so incredibly enormous. The explosion was 13,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Almost the entire 15-square-mile island was simply removed from the face of the earth – almost 900,000 cubic feet of material. read more
thursday, march 06, 2008
The Double Life of Veronique
You do not so much watch La double vie de Véronique (or The Double Life of Véronique) as you immerse yourself in it. It’s a sublime exercise in light, color and texture that strives in every frame to transcend the aural and visual shackles the medium imposes.The film is often overshadowed by the late director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s subsequent work, the trilogy Trois couleurs. After finishing those films, the director announced he was retiring saying he did not feel film could be as profound as literature nor properly express the inner feelings of the characters.
But, in many ways, The Double Life of Véronique, is a singular masterwork, exploring the limits of what film is capable to express without the baggage of an overt message to convey. It somehow succeeds in revealing the depths of the medium in precisely the areas he felt it was powerless. read more
friday, february 29, 2008
The Wages of Fear
Fear, it is said, has a taste. While that may or may not be true the great French director Henri-Georges Clouzot showed pretty definitively that it has a sound. And that sound, as it turns out, is the high-pitched roar of a two-ton truck.It is this sound that permeates the second half of his 1953 film Le Salaire de la peur, known in English as The Wages of Fear. It not only puts the characters on the screen at the edge of their wits, it plays dark havoc with the audience as well. And Clouzot uses it like a surgeon with a scalpel.
What makes The Wages of Fear so powerful isn’t the technical achievement but the philosophical one. It is one thing to make a tense thriller and convey that powerful sense of anxiety that comes from having one’s life held in a precarious balance and it’s another to use that to sheer away all artifice and decorum. read more
friday, february 22, 2008
Duel in the Sun - John Brant
If you run marathons you are really headed to one single destination – Boston, Massachusetts.Founded in 1897, the year after the event was introduced at the first modern international Olympic Games, the Boston Marathon is the world's oldest and most prestigious annual marathon. The standing of the race is further bolstered by the fact it is the only major American marathon that requires a qualifying time.
Simply put, for the hundreds of thousands of runners who undertake the burden of running 26.2 miles as fast as they possibly can, running in Boston is the summit of their possible achievements.
Most who choose to take on the challenge of running a marathon do so knowing they have no hope of ever competing in the Olympic Games or even glimpsing the front of the pack where the elites reside. But if they can reach Boston, they will not only accomplish a major physical achievement but will also become part of an event whose history goes back more than a century and, in some very small way, be joined with all the runners who have gone before them. read more
monday, february 18, 2008
True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey
In the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia hangs a massive suit of iron armor. Immense, imposing and silent, it grips the imagination even if one has no inking of the strange story behind it.In some ways this suit – fashioned from stolen plowshares – has become inseparable with the legend of the man who once wore it, Ned Kelly, and both have become intimately interwoven with Australia itself. That's a tempting target for a novelist but filled with a legion of dangers, which makes Peter Carey's True Story of the Kelly Gang all the more masterful for it's success in conveying the tale.
Kelly was a bushranger which is roughly equivalent to the mountain men of the American west. They lived off the wilderness partly as a means to hide from the authorities since they commonly robbed coaches on the highways as well as small town banks. read more
monday, february 04, 2008
The Searchers
Few films carry as much symbolic baggage as The Searchers. Its reputation as one of the greatest films of its genre stands in an uneasy juxtaposition with the fact it’s effect is to undermine the most treasured tenets of the classic Western.It’s a testament to the craftsmanship of director John Ford that he could create a film with all the requisite mythos and, at the same time, make a movie that addressed issues much deeper and darker. While the story travels long the lines of the typical tale from the American west The Searchers twists the narrative for its own ends.
The tale of Ethan Edwards unrelenting odyssey of vengeance stands as one of the most influential in American film. The man’s five-year search for Indian tribe that kidnapped his niece and his possible intentions to slay the girl for becoming part of their society has resonated far beyond the popularity of the genre that created it. read more
wednesday, january 30, 2008
The Classical World - Robin Lane Fox
Years ago, during my first ill-fated attempt at attending an institution of higher learning, I took a class in Ancient Roman History for no better reason than it was unusual and nobody else seemed interested in taking it.I still recall the befuddled enthusiasm of the professor, who wore the same tattered pinstripe suit covered in chalk dust each and every day… well, each and every day I found time to attend his class.
Or any class for that matter. Not surprisingly, I was not invited to return to that institution the following year. After that, my education became much more scattershot yet continued apace and I eventually even was able to manage to garner a degree but my studies on the world of the Ancients was never realized.
It was an oversight I always regretted. So much about the fascinating events in the Mediterranean basin between about 800 BC and 200 or so AD is simply assumed as part of the culture we live in. Yet, our – my – understanding of this era was erratic at best; a compendium of names and places that had little bearing on each other or organization, chronological or otherwise, in my mind. read more
monday, january 28, 2008
If...
Lindsay Anderson’s If…. is a film that persistently defies simple explanation and, in that respect, it is maddeningly like life itself.If…. slides from bizarre to hallucinatory with disturbing ease. Anderson is keen enough an observer to know that that strange rituals of the boarding school are absurd enough to not need much prompting to become flights of fancy.
Is a man playing guitar while using the toilet any weirder than committing a giant alligator to the flames? Not really. But the constant succession of odd images eventually overwhelms the viewer so that by the time the chaplain pops up out of the drawer it’s almost mundane.
Almost. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning or, even better, at the center. And the centerpiece of the film is Malcom McDowell. read more
monday, january 14, 2008
Once
Once is a musical for the digital age.Which is something of a surprise given it seems just to be the classic low-budget boy-meets-girl film that has been a staple of art houses for decades.
It tells the story of two musicians in Dublin whose ability to express what they feel through their art is as profound as their inability to do so through talking normally. When asked about his painful former relationship the protagonist can only sing a jokey song which tells a harder truth than the most heartfelt words. When asked who she loves, the girl replies in a foreign tongue. It's only when they are playing their instruments and singing to each other that they connect.
It's a unique situation but the filmmakers seem insistent on universalizing the couple; from the obstinate insistence on not allowing them names to the distant way they are allowed to be seen. Many of the shots of them are in crowded streets at a distance with passersby blocking the shot an making it difficult to understand what they are saying. read more
thursday, january 10, 2008
Watchmen - Alan Moore & David Gibbons
When Watchmen was first published in the mid-1980s it was in the middle of what turned out to be a great renaissance in comic books. A number of artists and writers were in the process of transforming the medium and everywhere you turned there was another book you just had to read.Watchmen, though, was something else entirely. Even in a time of giants it stood above the rest. It took the medium and did things with it never attempted before and never matched since. It begat a legion of deplorable copycats but it also fueled a new look at a long maligned artform.
In that respect it probably has more in common with the French New Wave cinema of the 60s which reached back into the 'low brow' films of a generation prior to create a new highbrow way of moviemaking. Author Alan Moore and artist David Gibbons are keenly aware of all the trashy superhero books that preceded them and Watchmen is as much a homage to them as a final nail in the coffin. read more
monday, january 07, 2008
The Third Man
Carol Reed’s noir classic The Third Man is a masterpiece of the genre. It’s a film that comes laden with a half-century of admiration, fan exegesis and a legion of movies that have been inspired by its brilliance.All of which makes viewing the film for the first time a somewhat intimidating affair but - ironically - it's a film that meets you on your own terms. Possibly because the message it carries is one that still resonates as strongly today as it did when the film was first made.
What struck me most forcefully having watched it recently was how unfettered the writer, famed British novelist Graham Greene, was in trotting out his favorite subject – faith and its place in the modern world. Where things become really interesting is in how director Carol Reed then takes this idea and unfolds it in every aspect of the film. read more