April 25, 2009
Werner Herzog's "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" (1998), a documentary about a Vietnam War POW escape, was for me, the second time around (see April 16 entry immediately below), almost unbearably sad. And the crux of the film for me is footage also used in Herzog's "Rescue Dawn," of Vietnam from the air, as it is being firebombed (in this case to hauntingly beautiful Tuvan throat singing). Why was it that a Bavarian boy named Dieter Dengler saw his hometown destroyed by U.S. air forces, and became infatuated with the idea of flying, so that he went to the United States as a teenager, suffered through a fruitless enlistment in the air force ("peeling potaoes"), put himself through college, joined the U.S. Navy, became a pilot (the joy of flying!), and became one of the first Americans shot down, over Laos, was imprisoned and almost died of starvation, and narrowly escaped to tell the story of the harshness of his captors (one of whom chopped off the finger of a peasant who'd forced Dengler to hand over his engagement ring)?
As in Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" (see below), there are beautiful jellyfish in this film--weirdly wonderful, almost otherworldly, and this seems to speak volumes about Herzog.
"Little Dieter" and "Rescue Dawn" join Herzog's "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo." Life is a jungle.
Herzog will die. Dengler has already died (a DVD addendum shows his military burial). All I love will die. For now: all praise to the glacier lilies now raising their yellow heads again for yet another season.
Werner Herzog's "Rescue Dawn" (2006) is a Hollywood feature-film version of the Herzog docuumentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" (hard to believe I saw that film over ten years ago now, as part of a Herzog retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; see the review dated April 2, 1999 here). Aside from the Hollywood beginning and ending, it's a compelling, believable drama, with powerful acting (by Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies, especially). As Roger Ebert notes, one thing that sets the film apart is Herzog's use of location (here the jungles of Thailand, rather than Laos where most of the action actually took place in the sixties). DVD outtakes show more of Herzog's philosophy, including decisions not to depict excessive violence against helpless people (Herzog bases this on his own feelings a a film viewer, saying he does not want to see a woman raped, for example).
Despite the brutality of the captors depicted in this film, I felt solidarity more than ever with the people of Vietnam (whose fields we see being firebombed early on).
Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007), reviewed here by Dana Stevens for Slate: Antarctica as seen by a two-person film crew (Herzog is credited for the sound). Guitar-playing scientists, twisty blue ice caves, volcano exploration, Shackleton's cabin, under-ice sea urchins, and one suicidal penguin.
"A Face in the Crowd" (1957), directed by Elia Kazan, stars Andy Griffith as a drunk with guitar, a man from small-town Arkansas who becomes increasingly famous and influential after his discovery by a naive radio journalist played by Patricia Neal. Reviewer J. Hoberman in the Village Voice calls Griffith's character Lonesome Rhodes "a focus group" of one and sees him as presaging Ronald Reagan and others: "No great stretch of the imagination is required to see Lee Atwater as George H. W. Bush's Lonesome Rhodes or Ross Perot as a Rhodes knockoff--and only a mild sense of tabloid melodrama is necessary to appreciate Hillary playing Patricia Neal to Bill's Andy Griffith (now vice versa). To watch Bush II work his down-home magic on a preselected crowd is to be reminded of Rhodes's modus operandi."
"The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun" (2006), a film in Danish, Russian, and English, with yellow English subtitles, is the sixth (and maybe last) in the personal Danish film festival I've been enjoying (see below, beginning with the March 15 entry). It's a documentary (though I didn't know that until part way into watching) about an old man who offers his seedy chateau to be used as a monastery. Quite fascinating on a number of levels (psychological, interpersonal, spiritual)--it is also poignant for all of its (or its protagonists') crotchets and droll humor.
A reviewer for Slant calls director Pernille Rose Gronkjaer's film "a moving testament to humanitarian goodness" which it is not, I think, but aptly notes that the "bantering" of its protagonists (Mr. Vig and the nun) recalls "Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart's chemistry in John Huston's The African Queen."
"The Bothersome Man" (aka "Den Brysomme mannen," 2006), a film by Norwegian director Jens Lien, is a dystopian tale about a man who finds himself transported to an urban world in which no one seems to suffer--and in which no one seems to experience joy. Not for the squeamish (nor appropriate for children), it operates effectively on several levels, most of them metaphorical. (Did the bothersome man die and go to hell? Does he just have a dead-end job and tiresome relationship? Is this a take a life on bland Scandinavia? All three? I don't know, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
Noel Murray's review in The Onion calls this "pitch-black, bone-dry comedy" kin to the "deadpan Northern European comedy of the Aki Kaurismaki/Roy Andersson variety."
Filmed in Oslo and Iceland's Sprengisandur National Desert Reserve.
April 2, 2008
Danish director Per Fly's "The Inheritance" (aka "Arven," 2003) is a cautionary tale (some say Shakespearean) about the danger of doing what one thinks one should (in this case taking "responsibility" for the family business after the owner-father's death) when it goes against one's feelings. In "The Inheritance" the family business is a steel company, the father's death was a suicide, and the dutiful son takes the helm of the company on the cusp of a merger, pressured by his mother and against the wishes of his beautiful actress wife (leaving their happy life in Stockholm to go home to Denmark). To say that the lead character (Ulrich Thomsen) is ultimately unsympathetic or a mystery would be to miss the point. I found the film an accurate take on the viciousness of corporate layoffs, the ambivalence (and sometimes familial nature) of big-money business deals, and the effect of such a soulless focus on those connected to it through marriage. The acting is strong: I felt like I was watching real people, not actors.
Leslie Camhi's review in the Village Voice notes that "Fly planned The Inheritance as the second film in a trilogy depicting the three tiers of society�lower, upper, and middle. His debut feature, The Bench, was set amid the working class."
This is the fifth film in a personal Danish film series (see below, March 15�25). Perhaps I should watch "Festen" ("Celebration") again.
"Mother of Mine" (aka "�ideist� parhain," "B�sta av m�drar,"2005) is a strong Swedish/Finnish drama about the travails of a Finnish boy, Eero, sent to Sweden during Finland's "Winter War" with Russia (concomitant with World War II), to live with a foster family. Feeling increasingly abandoned by the mother he hated to leave, he's eventually torn away again from the family he has come to love. The story is effectively told in two layers, one in color (the war-era with a Swedish farm family), one in black and white (in which sixtysomething Eero finally reaches peace with his mother and the past). There are supposed to have been about 70,000 such Finnish "war children," sent to Sweden on the assumption that things would be better there for them. This film makes a good case that such an assumption was wrong.
Here is Gunnar Rehlin's review in Variety
"Gitmo: The New Rules of War" (2005) is a Swedish feature-length documentary which, Michael Moore�style, isn't so much about "unlawful combatants" held at the U.S. Guant�namo Naval Base in Cuba as it is about the filmmakers' mostly rebuffed attempts to find out what goes on behind the barbed wire there. Courtesy of a base p.r. official, the filmmakers do get a tour of the base's recreational facilities, and shots of its commissary and its McDonald's. Highlights of the film are an interview with an Afro-British former detainee at Gitmo (though he reveals no surprising details, he does talk about music as torture, naming Kris Kristofferson) and a visit with demoted general Janis Karpinski who says the Army tried to make her "a fall guy" after the Abu Ghraib scandal (abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers) came to light. The film examines the complicity of "contract employees" (read soldiers of fortune), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Major General Geoffrey Miller (commanding officer at Guant�namo who visited Abu Ghraib before the scandal broke--and includes images of prisoner abuse.
Luis Bu�uel's "Simon of the Desert" ("Sim�n del desierto," 1965) is a short (45-minute), darkly humorous (and yet serious) film about an ascetic who has stood atop a column for six years, six months, and six days. Ed Gonzales' review in Slant picked up some details I missed in the crappy video version I watched (the subtitles of which were frequently illegible). Gonzales notes, as I did while watching, that this film anticipates Monty Python's "Life of Brian," and he notes such niceties as a man who's just had his hands miraculously restored by Simon, who uses one of them to swat his daughter who's just asked whether they're his old hands or new ones. One should expect the unexpected from Bu�uel, and here he delivers as he did in others of his best.
Austria-born Billy Wilder was a great filmmaker. Reading his filmography is like reading Hank Aaron's statistics: "Double Indemnity," "Lost Weekend," "Sunset Boulevard," "Stalag 17," "The Seven Year Itch," "Some Like It Hot," "The Apartment," "Irma La Douce," etc.
Wilder's strong "Ace in the Hole" (1951), a portrait of a journalist willing to "bite a dog"--to do whatever is necessary to get a story, did so poorly after it came out that it was pulled and rereleased with a new title. It has only been made widely available recently (2007) on DVD, thanks to the recognition of its quality. Kirk Douglas plays the lead role (reminiscent of his part in "Lonely Are the Brave," the film based on Ed Abbey's The Brave Cowboy). Douglas's character Tatum comes upon a story while traveling in rural New Mexico, a man trapped in rocks, and proceeds to milk the story for all it is worth, as people begin to flock to the scene in response to his stories. "The Big Carnival" is the film's alternate title, and the scene of the drama becomes a veritable carnival, complete with vendors, a big top, and a country band singing a hilariously deadpan song, "We're Coming Leo" ("While you're in the cave a-hopin' / We are up above you gropin'/ And we soon will make an openin' Oh Leo!") said by one reviewer to be "a biting reference to country-western singer Vernon Dalhart�s exploitive 1925 song 'The Death of Floyd Collins.'"
Best line in the film: "Good news is no news."
The Laura Poitras documentary My Country, My Country, a film about Iraq, focuses on a Sunni physician (and political candidate) and his family in the run-up to the 2005 national elections. As with the best writing about contemporary Iraq, the film humanizes the news, fostering empathy (especially for young people caught up in insane events outside their control, outside their parents' control). Nominated for an Academy Award in 2006 for best documentary feature film.
"The Seagull's Laughter" (aka "M�vahl�tur," 2001), written and directed by �g�st Gudmundsson, based on a novel by Kristin Marja Baldursdottir, is set in an Icelandic fishing village in what appears to be the early fifties, and follows events set off by the return to the village of a woman who went to "America" and returns with suitcases full of dresses, moving in with a three-generation household of women (the sole man is often at sea). With a tone that wavers between dark comedy and drama, the film's chief themes seem to be the angst of women who grow up isolated in small towns, their solidarity and possibilities. The outlook is bleak. Four of five husbands in the film are portrayed as philanderers and lechers; two are killed off in the course of the film, evidently by the repatriate.
The film's ending disappointed me, not that I had any expectations, but there were enough strong characters and images (chiefly the youngest girl in the household, through whose eyes we see many key events) that I'm still thinking about them the next day.
Roger Ebert liked it.
Danish filmmaker Bille August's "Zappa" (1983) is described on the DVD package as being a "prequel" to the coming-of-age story "Twist and Shout" (see below). I think it's a better film, funnier and more compelling (if even more violent), with the primary theme being bad influences (protagonist Bjorn falls in with an upper-class sadist). Especially good: the well-written, well-acted character Mulle who is strong and sweet, working class (note the photo of Marx in the family's flat), a bit pudgy, athletic, and likes to play with his family's caged bird).
Set in Denmark in the early sixties, and nicely portraying the era's music, hair, and dress, "Zappa" only strikes one or two wrong notes. (One is that Bjorn goes along with the bully for longer than makes sense.) Another theme here is teen sex (including unwanted erections), and the film introduces and maintains Bjorn's relationship with a girl (Kirsten) which continues in "Twist and Shout."
Stephen Murray's review of the two films on Epinions is apt and articulate.
German great silent filmmaker F. W. Murnau's "Sunrise" (1929), his first Hollywood film, is notable in part for the acclaim it received at the first Academy Awards ceremony (Janet Gaynor won the award for best actress). The plot is simple: young rural husband and father is seduced by a woman from the city, determines to kill his wife, but can't quite bring himself to do it. The film has won wide praise for its innovative practices (the urban film set is amazing). Here's a page devoted to the film from John Akre's "Web of Murnau" and here is Todd Ludy's "MURNAU & MAYER'S SUNRISE: an appreciation.
Bille August's "Twist and Shout" (aka "Tro, h�b og k�rlighed," 1986), a sixties-era coming-of-age story (and sequel to "Zappa"), involves a Danish teenage boy infatuated with the Beatles, a girl who fancies him, a girl he fancies (and impregnates), and a best friend whose tyrannical father has locked up his mother.
Henning Carlsen's "Hunger" (aka "Sv�lt" and "Sult," 1966), a Danish/Swedish/Norwegian coproduction, is based on the excellent Knut Hamsun psychological novel about the life of a starving writer in 19th-century Christiana (now Oslo). It's a remarkable film in many ways, and for starters it seems modern and fresh. (I was startled to learn that it had been made over forty years ago.) If my memory serves, it's quite true to the novel, and is aided by a startlingly true performance by Per Oscarsson in the lead role (which won him Best Actor award at Cannes in 1966). Sets and cinematography are also strong.
Read a little more about the film (and DVD package) here.
Akira Kurosawa's "Drunken Angel" (aka "Yoidore Tenshi," 1948), Kurosawa's first film featuring actor Toshiro Mifune, is a dark story about two antiheroes, an alcoholic doctor and the young gangster he is treating for TB. Takashi Shimura is the doctor and Toshiro Mifune the sharp-dressing yakuza. The opening credits set the tone, appearing over the bubbling surface of a cesspool. (A short adjunct documentary about the making of the film gives away the secret of how the bubbles were created.)
"After the Wedding" (aka "Efter brylluppet," 2006), directed by Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier, reminded me of another Danish film, Thomas Vinterberg's "Festen" ("Celebration"), the key phrase being "family secrets." In this film, nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film of 2006, a Danish man living in India is offered millions of dollars for his orphanage if only he will agree to stay in Denmark. The film includes a couple of nice Satyajit Ray�like touches, and, for me, at least one surprise. While the plot may seem rather implausible, the behavior and situations it describes ring true (and the film provokes thought).
"Big Enough" , an insightful 2004 documentary film by Jan Krawitz, revisits the subjects of her 1982 film "Little People," just as the Michael Apted's "Up Series" (see below) checks back in with the people it first profiled in the early sixties. "Big Enough" profiles the lives of dwarfs, all of them articulate, strong, and dignified. In an interview on the PBS website, Krawitz says, "It's about dwarfs, who they are, what their concerns are, and how they are trying to live their lives in an average-sized society. On a more general level, the film speaks to the whole issue of otherness, difference, and acceptance. Where are we headed as a society in terms of genetic testing? Who's going to determine the norms about who has the right to have children and who doesn't? I think the film has its tentacles spread quite widely and I intentionally did that. Looking at dwarfs allows us to look at ourselves, meaning the average size world � to look at disability, to look at diversity, to look at acceptance."
"Girlhood", an excellent 2003 documentary by Liz Garbus, follows the lives of two girls in prison (and out). It's a film that seems not to have an agenda other than to show an often harsh reality in all its messy complexity. In an interview, Garbus was asked, "Is a Michael Apted '7-Up'-type project in your future?" She responded, "I don't know if HBO would fund me for seven years, but to do a revisiting film is something I'd really love to do."
"Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed"(2004) is a documentary (by former national-class distance runner Shola Lynch) about the 1972 presidential candidacy of African-American congresswoman Shirley Chisholm whose campaign (and its seriousness) led to today's Obama�Hillary Clinton face-off for the Democrat nomination (something unthinkable as late as the late sixties: a black man and a woman). Chisholm, who represented Brooklyn in Congress from 1969�1983, gained support from the National Organization for Women, and many young people (the likes of Barbara Lee, now a congresswoman herself, then a student at Mills College), but found herself eventually spurned by the Congressional Black Caucus (and erstwhile supporters there such as Ron Dellums) in a capitulation to pragmatism seen again 28 years later when people decried Ralph Nader's candidacy, thinking him unelectable. Focusing in part on Democratic National Convention politicking, the film includes interesting stock footage (and music), as well as contemporary interviews with people involved in the campaign, including Chisholm herself (she died in 2005) who comes across as wise, strong, courageous�in a word: inspirational.
I've watched and rewatched some documentary films this month, including "49 Up", the latest in Michael Apted's every-seventh-year series that started with "Seven Up," following the lives of a dozen or so children in Great Britain as they grow and become adults. After watching the whole series over the course of a couple of weeks, I started dreaming about Nick and Tony. Longitudinal study, reality TV, and cumulative tale all in one, it provides much fodder for thought, about child-rearing (nature and nurture) and class culture and mobility, among other things. For the most part, a certain dignity comes through from of the participants. All but two have stuck it out all these years, despite the distaste of some about how the project puts them in the public eye and makes them revisit the painful past. (I'm particularly interested because these people are my coevals.)
"Camden 28" is a recent documentary film about the early seventies arrest and trial of antiwar activists in Camden, New Jersey, who broke in to the local draft board headquarters to remove and destroy records. Four were Catholic priests and laypeople. In part it's a film about a movement (and a war), with elements of tragedy--betrayal, death of sons, torn allegiance--but it's also about a time, just before the U.S. ceased its bombing of Vietnam, when the public tenor was so against a war that protesters, backed by witnesses such as Howard Zinn, were exonerated for the first time, despite admission that they had done just what they were charged with doing.
"Libby, Montana" is a film about a small northwestern Montana town, its vermiculite mining operations, and widespread asbestosis; a company (W. R. Grace) whose officials did nothing to inform its workers and the community about the dangers of asbestos and the mine's dust; on-site EPA clean-up workers pressed by cost-cutting government superiors; mine workers and community members; and politicians. There is no happy ending in this film. Libby is located about 90 miles west of where I sit and write these words.
For a number of reasons I haven't been watching films lately. Some things I have been watching: snow falling on firs, deer tracks, sunlight on the Swans at dusk, a northern pygmy owl. Why am I even inside right now?
In Ingmar Bergman's "Hour of the Wolf" (1968, a.k.a. "Vargtimmen") we see birds, a creepy castle, a walk up a wall (and onto a ceiling), and Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow as a troubled couple again. This time they're on an island, seemingly alone at first, but then with . . . ghosts? artistic ghosts? or are they people who live in a castle on the other side of the island? Erland Josephson and Ingrid Thulin also appear in this dark, weird film that contains some memorable images and scenes. One minute of the film consists of nothing but two characters in a dark room, waiting for a minute to go by.
Made around the same time (and same place?) as "Shame" (see below)?
Roger Ebert's review of 1968 says "[I]f we allow the images to slip past the gates of logic and enter the deeper levels of our mind, and if we accept Bergman's horror story instead of questioning it, 'Hour of the Wolf' works magnificently. So delicate is the wire it walks, however, that the least hostility from the audience can push it across into melodrama. But it isn't that. If you . . . see it, see it on Bergman's terms."
Gordon Thomas's essay in Bright Lights Film makes sense of "Hour of the Wolf," and includes five stills.
Vittorio de Sica's "Ladri di Biciclette (a.k.a. "The Bicycle Thieves" and "The Bicycle Thief," 1948) is a black-and-white film about a man, a boy, and the bike he needs for his newly won job putting up movie posters around Rome. Its themes: hope and hopelessness, desperation, and solidarity. Here is Roger Ebert's 1993 essay about the film.
Ingmar Bergman has died. But his films live on. I have just watched the stomach-wrenching "Shame" (1968, a.k.a. "Skammen") in which a couple played by Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow are shattered by war. Rodney Welch writes in BlogCritics Magazine that this film "will probably burn a hole through just about everything you've seen recently; one of those movies that leave you thinking 'This is cinema. Everything else is just shit.'"
Filmed in black and white by Sven Nyquist, it begins (and in some ways continues) as a Bergman relationship film, sexy and insular, and turns into what I think is fair to call an antiwar film, full of some of starkest, most uncomfortably brutal (and probably unforgetable) images ever screened.
On the Bergmanorama website, Bergman himself is quoted: "The film isn't about enormous brutality, but only meanness. It is exactly like what has happened to the Czechs. They defended their rights, and now, slowly, they are being submitted to a tactic of brutalization that wears them down. Shame is not about the bombs; it is about the gradual infiltration of fear."
I've been watching documentary films on DVD. The most recent three: Sam Green and Bill Siegel's "The Weather Underground", Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" (about his month-long McDonald's-only diet), and Dorian Supin's "Arvo P�rt: 24 Preludes for a Fugue." The first two were Academy Award nominees. I will now avoid bomb-making and Big Macs, and seek recordings of the beautiful music of P�rt.
Thomas Riedelsheimer's "Touch the Sound" (2004), a documentary about deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie (featuring Glennie collaborator Fred Frith).
"Nothing But a Man" (1963), a black-and-white feature directed by Michael Roemer, is a gritty story about Black life in the South in the last days of Jim Crow. Focusing on the trials of a young couple, Duff and Josie-- a railroad section worker and a elementary school teacher (played by Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln)---it's a look at the economic and social forces of racism and one man's refusal to demean himself in the face of them, as well as being about Duff's relationship with his father and his own son who lives apart from him, and about whether to run away (up North, for example) or to engage in the struggles at hand.
Unusually good in many ways, the first way is this film's unvarnished, non-Hollywood look, nearly cinema verite, with characters and settings that--before anything else--look real. It reminds me of early films by Charles Burnett ("Killer of Sheep," for example) and its images and questions have stuck with me in the days since I've watched it.
Here is Roger Ebert's 1993 review.
Lars von Trier's "The Five Obstructions" (2004) is a documentary about von Trier's challenge to filmmaker Jurgen Leth, to remake Leth's 12-minute 1967 film "The Perfect Human" five times, each time with restrictions imposed by von Trier. It's an interesting game--and reminds me of Douglas Hofstadter's 1997 book Le Ton Beau de Marot, which in part examines how imposing severe restrictions in writing and translating a poem can paradoxically foster creativity. (That said, I think the third and fifth "obstructions" here, if not cop-outs, are not particularly interesting: the third "obstruction" being complete freedom, and the fifth, Leth made to read words written by von Trier.)
Thanks to Mark O. for tipping me off about this film.
Howard Hawks's "Red River" (1948) is an iconic cattle drive tale that positively shrieks "Gay! Gay Gay!," with real-life gay Montgomery Cliff, looking more like a New Jersey hustler than a cowboy, playing surrogate son to John Wayne, and comparing pistols with John Ireland who plays a character named "Cherry."
I'm not alone in seeing this film as queer. It's been shown at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" (1978, a.k.a. H�stsonaten) is another Bergman drama about a dysfunctional family, powerfully acted, as usual, this time by Liv Ullman and Ingrid Berman who play an adult daughter and the mother who abandoned her (and her sick sister) to go on tour as a concert pianist. The films depicts the mother and daughter coming together for the first time in seven years; harsh words are expressed. Shot in bright, warm colors that bely its inherent darkness, "Autumn Sonata" is an early sibliing of the film "Sarabande" (see below), and as tension-ratcheting.
"The Official Story" (a.k.a. "La Historia Oficial," 1985) was the Academy Award winner for best foreign language film in 1985. It's a drama about a bourgeois Argentine woman who comes to realize that her adopted daughter may have been stolen from a couple who have been "disappeared" politically.
As is typical of Hitchcock, the tension builds throughout, but--as usual with a Hitchcock film--I found something lacking. Depth and believability, for starters.
Jimmy Stewart plays a friend invited to the party, whose nihilistic, Nietzschean philosophy inspired the killing.
This was Hitchcock's first color film.
Jean Renoir's "Boudu sauve� des eaux" (a.k.a. "Boudu Saved from Drowning," 1932) is a sleepy comedy (ostensibly) about a Paris tramp (played by Michel Simon) who jumps off a bridge, is saved by a bookseller who dives in after him (while hundreds of more likely looking lifesavers mill about and watch), and then wreaks havoc in the bookseller's home when the latter takes him in. Critics who call this film a "comic paean to anarchism" are missing the boat, I think.
Watching Edgar G. Ullmer's "Detour" (1945)--a budget black-and-white film that now has been issued as part of a film noir DVD package--is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. It follows the whiny story of a hitchhiking loser who claims he really didn't kill that man who gave him a ride, nor that foul-mouthed woman he picks up...
Alfred Hitchcock's stagy "Rear Window" (1954) is, like most of his films, entertaining and suspenseful, though, for the life of me, I can't see how it has engendered so much intellectual interest and analysis.
The plot: James Stewart, laid up in his apartment with a broken leg, watches his neighbors and imagines that one has committed a murder.
Here's Roger Ebert's review from 2000 and Ebert's review from 1983.
Sergio Leone's tedious "Once Upon a Time in the West" (1969) is an opportunity to count filmic stereotypes. From its stylish, wordless opening scene to its homoerotic denouement, the film slowly presents them: hardluck Irish, fickle woman, woman who loves a bad man (same character), bandit with a heart of silver, quiet mysterious stranger, bad guy wearing black (and getting his in the end), etc. If the film has a subliminal message, it's that Charles Bronson should have done something else with Henry Fonda beside shoot him. The film begs the question, what director has made a truly revolutionary western? "Once Upon a Time in the West" is one I can imagine Ronald Reagan watching over and over.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006), directed by the music video team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, has garnered Academy Award nominations. Why? Mostly because it's made to please. Yet another black comedy about a dysfunctional family, this one follows a road trip to California so little Olive can compete in the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Watching it at least requires suspending rational disbelief. That said, I enjoyed watching Paul Dano play a Nietszche-admiring, weight-lifting teenage boy who's stopped talking.
Critics are not in agreement with the masses. "Grating . . . The latest in a long line of Sundance clunkers," says a review in the Village Voice. "A faintly unsatisfying watch," says a review in the Guardian. Roger Ebert hasn't deigned to weigh in on it.
Werner Herzog's "Land of Silence and Darkness" (1971, a.k.a. "Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit"), the Bavarian director's first feature-length documentary, examines the world of deaf-blind people. Was it partly scripted? One can see flashes here of Herzogian excellence presaging films to come, but watching it may put you to sleep.
A white reporter in Africa swaps identities with a dead man in Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger (1975, a.k.a. "Professione: Reporter"). The reporter, played Jack Nicholson, decides to keep the trans-European appointments of the man whose identity he adopted, even though he know this involves gun-running. Along the way a young woman joins him, played by 22-year-old Maria Schneider three years after her "Last Tango in Paris" role with Marlon Brando. They flee from place to place and nothing much happens, except that one of them dies.
The film's effect is nihilistic--and reminiscent of the Werner Herzog film "Fata Morgana" about deserts, appearances, and illusions.
Roger Ebert writes , "I did not admire the film in 1975... I admire the movie more 30 years later. I am more in sympathy with it."
Fritz Lang's "M" (1931) features Peter Lorre as a serial child murderer who's pursued both by Berlin police and by another large gang: organized criminals who want the police heat turned down a couple of notches.
Here's Roger Ebert's review which offers some background on the film's relationship to Nazism. "When you watch 'M,'' you see a hatred for the Germany of the early 1930s that is visible and palpable," he writes.
As others have noted, "M" is a police procedural and early example of film noir.
That's Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (from the Peer Gynt suite) that the killer whistles as he stalks little girls.
Ingmar Bergman's "The Passion of Anna" (1969) features four of Bergman's frequent cast members--Liv Ullman, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow, and Erland Josephson--in a drama that features most of Bergman's usual themes: ennui, difficult relationships, stormy psyches.
It's a color film this time, set again on Far�, in the winter. Max von Sydow's "Andreas" lives alone in a house full of books, but doesn't really seem to be a reader or a writer. Maybe he's given that up. His sole friend is a dog he's saved (after finding it hanging by a noose in a tree) and another loner who's accused of killing local farm animals. Then, as the DVD jacket states, "he becomes entangled with Anna (Liv Ullmann), a beautiful, mysterious widow, and a neighboring couple (Andersson and Josephson) harboring their own sorrows and illusions."
Who's telling the truth, if anyone? Who's owning up to it?
Bergman here experiments with inserting clips of each of the four actors appearing to explain their motivations in playing their roles. And, for all its obvious Bergman-ness, the film contains Bunuelian elements (the mysterious crimes against farm animals, for one thing) and ends with increasingly fuzzy frames, shot from a distance, but becoming enlarged, that reminded me of Herzog.
From the DVD package of "All That Heaven Allows" (1955): "Jane Wyman is a repressed wealthy widow and Rock Hudson the hunky Thoreau-following gardener who loves her in Douglas Sirk's heartbreakingly beautiful indictment of 1950s small-town America." The marketers of this DVD call it a "subversive Hollywood tearjerker." Well.
Artfully created, if clearly artificial, "All That Heaven Allows" describes a romance in which lovers' age difference is not as significant as their social classes. (Hudson's manly "Ron Kirby" wears red flannel shirts, drives a battered Woody, and hunts.) As for the claim that Kirby as a Thoreau-follower, the evidence is chiefly this: a scene in which Wyman's "Cary Scott" picks up an open volume of Walden at the house of Kirby's friend "Mick" and reads a short passage aloud: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed? [Pausing] If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Having read this, Cary comments, "Why, that's beautiful" to which Mick's wife responds, "Yes, that's Mick's Bible. He quotes from it constantly." "Is it Ron's Bible, too?," Cary asks. "I don't think Ron's ever read it. He just lives it."
The filmmakers played fast and loose with Thoreau. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" comes from the beginning of Walden, but the rest comes from the Conclusion, with a few words removed. (Thoreau actually wrote: "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?")
This film inspired Rainer Fassbinder's "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul."
I first viewed Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" (1966) as an adolescent college student in the mid-70s. Now I've seen it, at last, a second time.
For those unfamiliar with it, "Persona" is a black and white film almost entirely focused on two people, an actress who has chosen to stop speaking (played by Liv Ullman) and the nurse who is assigned to live with her (Bibi Andersson). Filmed largely on Faroe, as with other Bergman films, "Persona" contains some brilliant, inspired, experimental strings of images, including in the opening sequence. Several times it breaks open, making it apparent that we are watching a film: images of old motion pictures appear, film running through a projector, and even the apparent destruction of this film in process. There's also a scene in which the same monologue is repeated word for word, with the camera focusing on a different person. That said, "Persona" is carried by the powerful acting of Ullman, whose muteness speaks clearly, and Andersson, whose spoken words make up most of the film's soundtrack.
Dark, at times erotic, beautiful, harsh, and, for me, a reminder of the 60s, though the film may be timeless, "Persona" ranks among the top fifty in the Sight & Sound 2002 directors poll, though not on the critics' poll.
Here's Roger Ebert's review, one of his first, from 1967. And here's Ebert's 2001 review in which he writes that "Persona" is "a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries."
Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" (1958) is a witty samurai action film, starring Toshiro Mifune. Though not as deep or dark as "Seven Samurai" or "Rashomon," it's fun to watch. Some scenes seem straight from a Hollywood western. Others foreshadow films made long after this one, such as "Star Wars" which evidently was directly inspired by it.
I usually find fight scenes in films tedious, but not the duel in "The Hidden Fortress" between rival samurai generals.
What's up with those short shorts worn both by Mifune's character and by Misa Uehara as Princess Yukihime? Holy moe.
Here's the Internet Movie Database entry.
Ingmar Bergman's "Saraband" (2003) is a sequel of sorts to Bergman's "Scenes of a Marriage" (1973) pairing Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson as former wife and husband who come together again briefly. In this colorfully photographed but painful film we have a father who is contemptuous of his septuagenarian son, a son who loathes his father, a father who loves his daughter dysfuctionally, and two distant daughters. Because it was made by Bergman--and these are fine actors who played the came characters memorably thirty years ago--I watched the film with interest, but I wouldn't recommend "Saraband" unequivocally.
Here's Roger Ebert's review.
Ingmar's Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" (a.k.a. "Viskningar och rop," 1972) is set in a house where two middle-aged women have come to stay with their sister who is dying. As Roger Ebert says, this is a film about about "dying, love, sexual passion, hatred and death - in that order." As usual with a Bergman film, it contains beauty, emotional drama, and strong acting. (The sisters are played by Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Andersson, and Liv Ullman.)
Mostly I've been watching clouds, not films. That said, I've checked out some DVDs from my new public library and here's a report on the first one I watched:
Werner Herzog's "Fata Morgana" (1971) begins with what seems to be a head-on shot of a jet airplane landing over and over again. Viewers' patience will inevitably be tried. Watching the film on DVD and listening to Herzog's commentary, one learns that these are multiple shots, subtly different, of different planes landing over the course of a day. Superficially, "Fata Morgana" is a travelogue set to music, moving from the Sahara Desert to East Africa. In it we see wonderful slow pans of undulating sand dunes, skies reflected on plains, eclectic ruins and habitations, while listening to Mozart, Leonard Cohen, and a woman�s voice reading a translation of the Popul Vuh in German. Things get stranger: A German man holds a giant lizard and talks about how difficult it is to catch one, a piano-drum duo plays in a room to no apparent audience, pale-skinned people clamber in sand pits, gesturing oddly. All said, it's an early and bizarre Herzog effort, like a pretentious student film in ways, mostly tedious, yet weirdly beautiful. I might not have stuck with it had I not discovered that the DVD includes a version with Herzog's commentary. (I've never watched a film this way before and found myself going back and rewatching scenes with new appreciation.)
Woody Allen's "Match Point," filmed in England and co-produced by the BBC, is reminiscent of Hitchcock-- and Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity." That said, it's noir light, with characters that seem superficial. (The plot involves an upper class British family, two interlopers--an Irish tennis player and an American actress, and a crime of passion.)
The effect for me was like reading James M. Cain, not Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a book one of the characters is reading. It disturbed me just temporarily, in a cartoonish way, not deeply, and it made me crave something more substantial, say by Kurosawa or Kieslowski.
Roger Ebert thought more highly of it.
Jane Campion's "The Piano" (1993) is a melodramatic tale of sexual repression, set in a remote location in New Zealand in an earlier era, telling the story of a mute woman and her daughter who have come via small boat with a few belongings, including a piano, to fulfill an arranged marriage.
It as a beautifully shot film and well acted, though one may have to blink a few times to accept Harvey Keitel as a Maori-tattooed whaler. It's also strongly written, although its metaphors sometimes are perhaps a little too obvious. Not everything is entirely clear and tidy, nor predictable, and for this reason I look forward to seeing more of Campion's films.
Oddly, the film reminded me at times of Werner Herzog's "Aguirre: Wrath of God." Both films begin with a group of people shlepping things through jungle and both involve crude white men in country that is not their own. (Supporting cast in "The Piano" include many Maori people.)
Roger Ebert gave it accolades.
Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale" is based on his own experiences growing up in New York City and coping with the confusion of separated parents. Its effect is both sad and humorous.
Read Roger Ebert's review.
Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man" (2005), a documentary about brown bear lover Timothy Treadwell, is largely composed from over a hundred hours of footage Treadwell himself shot in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten there by a grizzly.
On one level this is a story is about misguided "love," about going over the edge into foolhardiness and insanity, reminiscent of the tale told in Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild. For thirteen years, Treadwell summers in Alaska, self-appointed protector of bears, camping in a remote wilderness refuge where few humans go. Here he names bears, photographs them, lives in a tent with bears all around him, and films himself talking about living on the edge, close to death, holding forth on secrets he claims about how to live peaceably with animals who might kill him.
On another level this is a dark comedy: We see Treadwell primping in front of his own camera, talking to bears and foxes as if they are small children, treating foxes as pets, exclaiming on the wonders of one bear's freshly deposited excrement, and ranting sophomorically against all he senses oppose him. For perspective and biography Herzog interviews Treadwill's parents (from whom we learn that he changed his last name for Hollywood marketability), as well as friends, an ex-girlfriend, and the coroner who examined Treadwell's remains. He also talks with a Kodiak bear expert--and a Native Alaskan museum curator who's the sole person in the film to speak of the dangers of habituating brown bears to humans.
It's clear that Treadwell was doing what he loved--and seems to have wanted to die the way that he did. In making this film, Herzog inserts his own diametrically opposed world view just once or twice, in key places toward the end, asserting that the world is not inherently peaceable, but rather violent and chaotic.
Roger Ebert recommends that you see this film.
I think it is a natural for a double-feature some day, paired with the 1996 documentary "Project Grizzly," about another, marginally saner, grizzly-obsessed human.
Has it really been over seven years since I've last watched Ingmar Bergman's "Smiles of a Summer Night" (1955, a.k.a. "Sommarnattens Leende")?
Here's a synopsis by Rachel Gordon.
"The Stone Reader" (2003) is a documentary by Mark Moskowitz about his quest to learn more about the author of a novel he first picked up in the 70s and then put down for 25 years, The Stones of Summer, by Dow Mossman, published in 1972 by Bobbs-Merrill.
When Moskowitz read this book in the 90s, he was moved by it powerfully, but could find nothing else Mossman had written. His searches didn't even turn up evidence that Mossman had published another word. Sharing the book with friends who didn't mirror his enthusiasm, Moskowitz wondered who else had read the book, who simply knew about it, and whatever became of its author. In this shaggy but fascinating film, Moskowitz documents interviews with literary scholars, agents, publishers, and even a book designer with whom he talks about "one-hit wonders" (authors who wrote or are known only for one book), first books, and how someone reviewed so favorably in the New York Times Book Review could go missing.
Moskowitz's journey takes him to the University of Iowa where he talks with the professor to whom Mossman's novel is dedicated, William Cotter Murray. When Murray connects the obsessive reader and with the disappeared author, many questions are answered, but a few more are raised. Is a book a failure if it has reached and moved just one reader? What book am I now most needing to read? What does it say about this work mostly about male readers and writers, that it is dedicated to two mothers "who taught us to love books"? And what does it say that the story is conveyed via film and DVD instead of in print?
Remarkably, for me, the film slowly zeroes in on places and people I know, including the University of Iowa library, a professor who once rightly suggested to me that I ought to go to Paris or South America--that the Iowa Writers Workshop was not for me--who these days likes to go to the dogtrack in my hometown, and a house full of papers and books.
Here's Roger Ebert's review.
"Lost in Translation" (2003), Sophia Coppola's film starring Bill Murray as a middle-aged American actor in Tokyo doing liquor commercials and Scarlet Johansson as a bored young woman in Japan with her mostly absent, doltish husband, conveyed the protagonists' ennui so effectively that I stopped watching part way through. I was bored, too.
Ingmar Bergman's "Sawdust and Tinsel" (1953) begins with a scene that presages one from "Seventh Seal" (a film that came out four years later)-- a silhouette of carts and horses going over a hill. In the next shot we see a cart traveling upside down; then the camera pans to show that this is actually the reflection of a cart crossing a bridge.
With this lovely beginning we are introduced to a down-at-the-heels traveling circus troupe, and before long to its director and some of his cast, including young Harriet Andersson in the role of bareback rider and jealous lover.
Fellini's "La Strada" came out a year after this film, a comparable look at human psychology and interpersonal relationships with an itinerant circus setting.
With a summer this sweet, isn't something bad certain to happen? Yes, if it's a Bergman film. As in his other works that this one recalls--I need to make a list to distinguish them all-- the tension between dark clouds and bright sunlight presages an emotional storm.
This one reminds me of "Summer Interlude" (1951)--which I've seen in recent years, though mention of this has gone missing on these pages.
Time for me to move to a new planet. I just watched another film on video that I realized early on I'd already seen: "Fuori dal mondo" (a.k.a. "Not of This World"), an Italian production about a young novitiate nun and the owner of a dry cleaning business who come together after the nun is handed a newborn baby in a park. (It turns out that I saw this at a theater in December 2000.)
Compelling in a gentle way, the film examines conscience, interpersonal relations, and the consequences of one's decisions, some of which cannot be changed.
"Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould" (1993): I liked this even better on second viewing, having watched it a first time almost exactly four years ago.
Roger Ebert tells it like it is.
"Los Repatriados: Exiles From the Promised Land" is an important documentary about the forced repatriation of Detroit's Mexican immigrant population in the early 1930s. As many as 15,000 people were sent back to Mexico, most of whom were U.S. citizens, perhaps 3/4 of the city's Mexican community. Many were Ford auto plant workers, and many were children-- including filmmaker Elena Herrada's fatber who had to learn English a second time when he later returned to the U.S.
This forced removal was not an isolated instance limited to Detroit. How many were repatriated nationwide? Herrada speakes of one million repatriados, sixty percent of whom were citizens.
The concern is global and contemporary. Around the world people flee oppression and move toward economic opportunity, only to be caught up in virtual prisons and rejected outright. This morning's Star Tribune has an article (buried on page B-8): "436 Somalis are facing ouster" (from Minnesota.)
Fran�ois Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451" (1966) is an English-language film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel about a repressive future society in which "firemen" don't put out fires, they burn books. Oskar Werner plays one such civil servant, Montag, a man who comes to question what he's doing, decides to read a book for himself, and ends up joining the resistance-- a rural enclave of people who keep books alive by reciting them from memory. Julie Christie acts a dual role as Montag's TV-zombie-wife and a laid-off teacher who is one of the rebel few.
Dated and timeless at once, it's one of the best films I've seen about books and libraries.
Francois Truffaut's "La femme d'� c�t�" (a.k.a."The Woman Next Door," 1981), with Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant, is another one of those train wreck in slow motion stories, somehow compelling even though the outcome is preordained. The plot: A young married father deals with his ex-lover's moving in next door by first avoiding her, and then restarting their affair... disastrously.
Roger Ebert points out in
his review how much like a Hitchcock film this is, writing also that the plot "is a quintessential one for Truffaut, the French director who has successfully made more than 20 films without yet portraying a healthy, mature relationship between a man and a woman. All of his lovers are doomed by the demons of their passion, and by underlying streaks of violence (in his serious films) and frivolous inability to make a commitment (in his comedies)."
To a degree, this film holds a mirror to a human condition:
the duel or rapprochment within us all--between wild, passionate bestiality and responsible, mature rationality. Who hasn't felt this battle inside?
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Ingmar Bergman's "Monika" (a.k.a. "Sommaren med Monika," 1953) is a dark black-and-white film about two young lovers who leave their menial jobs in Stockholm and go adventuring for the summer on a boat, living on mushrooms and air. Harriet Andersson plays a teenager sick of living in a full household with an alcoholic, abusive father, and Lars Ekborg plays a barely older young man who's lived alone with his father since he was small.
January 24, 2005
January 16, 2005
January 15, 2005
January 9, 2005
January 2, 2005
Want more? Film reviews from 2004