tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91494118321278443852024-02-18T22:04:18.401-05:00MONDO 70: A Wild World of CinemaA randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.comBlogger1958125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-59609905130201119002020-03-08T18:52:00.004-04:002020-03-08T18:52:31.860-04:00DVR Diary: BRIGHT LIGHTS (1935)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>B</b></span>usby Berkeley's comedy is a star vehicle for Joe E. Brown, Warner Bros.' leading comic of the pre-Code era, that makes a half-hearted try at being a newer kind of comedy. Acknowledging the rapid evolution within a year or so of what came to be called screwball comedy, <i>Bright Lights</i> grafts an already-standard feature of screwball, the "madcap heiress," onto the Brown project. Claire Whitmore (Patricia Ellis) apparently flits around the country doing whatever pricks her fancy, generating headlines whenever she's discovered. Reporter Dan Wheeler (William Gargan) discovers her working as a chorus girl in a burlesque theater where Joe Wilson (Brown) is the star comic. Wilson does an act with his wife Fay (Ann Dvorak) in which she sings while he, playing a drunk, heckles her from a balcony. Wilson combines insult humor and daredevil physical comedy; wandering the balcony to interact with audience members (or plants?), he constantly teeters on the railing until, challenged by the singer to show some talent of his own, he swings from a curtain rope Tarzan-style onto the stage, hitting the curtain and sliding down to join Fay in a soft-shoe routine. Berkeley makes the most of these scenes, shooting from angles that emphasize the (illusory) threat to the star while taking advantage of Brown's athleticism. The star does his own crucial stunt to climax the act, starting in close-up on the balcony and swinging into the curtain and sliding down. Berkeley then cuts to the stage to get a close shot of Brown landing and doing a forward roll, ending up on his feet and ready to dance. The director can trust his star later in the film to chase and then be chased by an airplane at an airport, and to hit the ground at the right moment for the plane to take off over his head. Brown gets to do the sort of things in his films, particularly those where he plays an athlete, that Buster Keaton should have been doing in sound films. Brown, however, was more of an all-around entertainer than Keaton, if less a creature of pure cinema, and <i>Bright Lights</i> highlights his versatility, showcasing not only his physical talent but other elements, like his drunk act and his baby talk storytelling, that probably haven't aged as well.<br />
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Brown himself is no screwball comic, though he's best remembered today for his comparatively screwball turn as an addled millionaire in <i>Some Like It Hot</i>. Apart from the madcap-heiress angle, <i>Bright Lights</i> could have been made years earlier. Tipped off by Wheeler, the producer of Anderson's Frolics hires the Wilsons and Whitmore for the latest edition of his Broadway show. Joe is ecstatic to hit the big time, but determined that Fay share the spotlight with him. When Anderson (Henry O'Neill) insists on pairing Joe with Whitmore for maximum publicity, Joe turns him down flat and is willing to sacrifice his chance at stardom, but Wheeler convinces Fay to nobly sacrifice her own ambitions so Joe can get his chance. She claims to be happy to live a life of luxury, complete with Arthur Treacher as the archetypal servant, but when the Wilsons' old burlesque producer needs an extra hand on the road, she jumps at the chance. Meanwhile, gullible Joe can't help falling for Whitmore, without realizing that she loves Wheeler. He finally sees the truth just after mailing a Dear Jane letter to Fay, prompting a final epic chase as Joe pursues the letter from mailbox to postoffice to airport to Akron, where Fay is performing. Inevitably, the film is far more star vehicle than screwball film, with the madcap heiress as little more than a plot complication, and while it's arguably more "Joe E. Brown, the Motion Picture" than his other vehicles, he's lively and likable enough to put it all over, with much help from Berkeley, who demonstrates here that he could direct a realistic backstage musical nearly as well as he managed his more famous flights of mass-choreographed fancy. <i>Bright Lights </i>catches Brown at or near the height of his popularity, but his star would dim by decade's end as the pretty faces of screwball eclipsed the grotesque nut comics of Brown's heyday.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-9956754094889270662020-03-03T17:59:00.003-05:002020-03-03T17:59:47.711-05:00THE GIANT OF MARATHON (La battaglia di Maratona, 1959)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>P</b></span>eople may still know that the length of the modern marathon race is based on the distance from the Persian War battlefield of Marathon to ancient Athens, and that a messenger from the battlefield, having run the distance, dropped dead immediately after announcing the Athenian victory. If so, those same people may take Jacques Tourneur's peplum (assisted by Mario Bava) as the ultimate travesty, since the runner lives and gets the girl at the end of the picture. For the record, however, the legend of Phillipides dates back only to the second century of the Common Era, something like 500 years after the facts. Herodotus, the great historian of the war, mentions no such dying messenger. Tourneur, Bava <i>et al</i> really are no less entitled to exercise artistic license than the Roman writer Lucian was. Their writers thus make even more of Phillipides (Steve Reeves), who in their account is a peasant landowner whose past heroism against the Persians earns him leadership of the mythical Athenian Sacred Guard and a rallying point for supporters of the city-state's still-fledgling democracy. There remains an anti-democratic opposition that hopes for the restoration by Persia of exiled tyrant Hippias. Leading the opposition in the city is Theocritus (Sergio Fantoni), who schemes to co-opt Phillipides by marrying him off to the courtesan Charis (Daniela Rocca). Our hero already has his eye on blond, athletic Andromeda (Mylene Demongeot), the daughter of Theocritus' friend Creuso (Ivo Garrani). Phillipides can't be swerved from resistance, however, and Theocritus gradually alienates everyone before taking refuge with Hippias and the Persian army. Crucially, the bad guys fail to double-tap Charis after putting an arrow in her back when she tries to escape to warn the Athenians. She comes the nearest to performing the familiar Philippidean feat, while Philippides himself saves his energy for fighting. <i>Marathon</i> is noteworthy for having unusually good battle scenes for a peplum. I don't know whether Tourneur, Bava, or some second-unit person deserves the credit for this, but credit is definitely due given how feeble the genre's battle scenes often are. Strangely enough, <i>Marathon</i> climaxes with a sea battle, showing off a decent budget with full-scale ships and an underwater-attack sequence, along with a captive Andromeda sort of living up to her mythic namesake by being tied to the prow of a Persian ship. Steve Reeves's films apparently got bigger budgets in the wake of the global success of his Hercules films, and while he is what he is -- clean-shaven this time -- the money and a certain creative enthusiasm shows even in a faded pan-and-scan print on digital cable. It's hardly history, but it's fun on a matinee-movie level without being overblown in all the ways you'd expect from a more recent film.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-51130839587324968812020-02-29T20:33:00.000-05:002020-02-29T20:40:17.668-05:00On the Big Screen: THE TRAITOR (Il traditore, 2019)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>A</b></span>t age eighty, and after more than fifty years of filmmaking Marco Bellocchio is arguably the elder statesman of Italian cinema. In the 21st century he's become an intermittent chronicler of Italy's 20th century. His latest film is a companion piece with his 2009 Mussolini film <i>Vincere</i> and his 2003 Aldo Moro-Red Brigades picture <i>Good Morning Night</i>. The "traitor" of this one is Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Pavino), Italy's answer to Joe Valachi: the first man who spilled the beans on organized crime in his country in a major way. This happened in the 1980s, after Buscetta, a career criminal and ex-con, decided to leave the business and move to Brazil, where he had done "business" before. Relatives who remain in Italy, including two sons, are killed in a Mafia war, while the Brazilian government accuses him of drug trafficking. The Brazilian government of the day didn't play around; they try to force a confession by threatening to throw Tommaso's wife (Maria Fernanda Candido) from a helicopter into the ocean. Whether he had anything to confess or not, Buscetta ends up back in Italy, where he decides that he has actual stuff to confess to crusading prosecutor and eventual martyr Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi). He becomes the star witness at the so-called Maxi Trial, which becomes the film's central spectacle. For non-Italians, the unusual trial procedures stand out, particularly allowing defendants to cross-examine witnesses. This makes possible dramatic confrontations between Buscetta and his former colleagues, who naturally call him a liar when they aren't heckling him as a cuckold from their cages in the rear of the vast courtroom. Buscetta holds his own in these encounters -- though he fares less well later when he lobs accusations at politicians who clearly can afford better lawyers than mafiosi can -- but he hardly can enjoy his victories when the bosses are convicted. He knows all too well that the Mafia's reach and memory are long. Exiled in an American witness-protection program, he retreats from New Hampshire to Colorado after a restaurant singer in a Santa costume serenades him in Sicilian dialect as if he were the coward Robert Ford. To the day of his peaceful demise he has to remain on guard, because he knows the Mafia like he knows himself....<br />
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Accustomed as U.S. audiences have become to expansive, seemingly comprehensive Scorsese-style chronicles of crime, <i>Il Traditore</i> can't help seeming incomplete no matter how well made and performed it mostly is. We're likely to become conscious of gaps or omissions as Buscetta clarifies his motives for informing. He tells Falcone and the judges at the Maxi Trial that he still considers himself a "man of honor" but that his peers, particular Salvatore Riina (Nicola Cali) were the true traitors to the traditional values of La Cosa Nostra by going all in on the heroin trade, regardless of its cost to their own families. Something can't help but seem missing when Buscetta repeatedly reiterates how Riina has ruined La Cosa Nostra, yet Riina has a relatively minimal presence in the film and we see very little of the "golden age" Buscetta idealizes -- which we definitely would see in a Scorsese epic -- before Riina took over. Rather than show this idealized past, Bellocchio challenges us to take Bruscetta's word for it or question his actual motivation. The director presents the past in non-linear fashion rather than giving us a conventional rise-and-fall narrative. The film's flashbacks aren't self-consciously narrated by Bruscetta, but arrive more like unfiltered memories, though one important reminiscence midway through the picture is interrupted and only taken up again at the very end. An exception to the general rule is a flashback to the murder of Buscetta's sons, based on the testimony of a new informer who took part in the killing. This scene, and Buscetta's reaction to the testimony, suggest guilt over abandoning his children to almost certain death as the his ultimate motive, since his indifference to whether they joined him in Brazil belies his claim that his real family ultimately mattered more to him than the Mafia family. In the end, I think, Bellocchio is too careful to offer a perfect "Rosebud" explanation for Buscetta's "treason." He keeps a certain distance from his subject that is arguably European if only by comparison to Hollywood's insistence on definitive answers. Overall, I rather like Favino's performance for its comparative understatement. He makes Buscetta seem like a real person rather than an archetype. I don't know if Favino and Bellocchio have given us the "real" Buscetta -- alternate presentations seem possible -- but they did make me want to know more about the man, and that should count as some kind of success.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-85487054873897887782020-02-09T18:19:00.001-05:002020-02-09T18:19:47.016-05:00Too Much TV: BATWOMAN (2019 - ?)<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>S</b></span>peaking of superheroes, the CW's newest DC Comics show has predictably been renewed for a second season. The bad news is that <i>Batwoman </i>doesn't emulate <i>Black Lightning</i> in departing from Greg Berlanti formulae, often looking like an utterly generic Berlanti CW show. The character is a natural for Berlanti, I suppose, since the modern version of Batwoman was heralded from her introduction in 2006 as DC Comics' first openly-gay superhero. The Batwoman show hasn't gone out of its way to make homophobia its big bad (apart from its inescapable contribution to the character's origin story) the way <i>Supergirl </i>has constantly battled sexism and other forms of bigotry. Instead, it takes inspiration from the most successful storyline from the Batwoman comics, pitting protagonist Kate Kane (Ruby Rose) against her twin sister Beth (Rachel Skarsten), who has come back from seeming death as the Lewis Carroll-obsessed Alice, a psychopathic gang leader. How Beth became Alice differs depending on whether you read comics or watch TV, but the differences don't really matter that much and need not be described here. What really matters is that in comics the Batwoman creative team finished up with Alice and moved on, while there's no sign yet that the TV team plans to do likewise. That's because the idea of an antagonist who is also family is right up the CW's alley, and not something they're likely to let go of right away. One difference between comics and TV worth emphasizing is that, in comics, the reveal of Alice as Beth comes at the last moment before Alice's apparent demise, while on TV the reveal comes very early. The TV writers want the family thing to complicate Batwoman's battle constantly, just as drama involving other family members -- her dad runs a private army that has taken over much of Gotham City's policing, while her stepmother was involved in shady dealings before Alice killed her, and her stepsister resents Kate's obsession with Alice -- takes up much of the show's time. Like nearly all TV, <i>Batwoman</i> uses "family" as a shortcut to profundity, but the family angle with Alice also underscores the larger issue of how to deal with criminals in general that runs through all the Berlanti shows.<br />
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This Berlanti preoccupation was most obvious on Sunday nights last fall when both <i>Batwoman</i> and <i>Supergirl</i> had storylines involving criminals who were family. On <i>Supergirl </i>we learned that the Martian Manhunter's brother had gone over to the bad Martians back in the day because his family had cast him out, fearing a unique mental power he possessed. He appeared on Earth and became a menace to J'onn J'onnz and his friends until the Manhunter pacified him. Doing this required J'onn to come to terms with his own guilt in having wiped the brother out of his own and his father's memory out of fear, and to perform a risky act of submission -- or atonement, if you prefer -- to the aggrieved brother. All of this worked, of course, and the brother hasn't been a threat since then. Similarly, the Kane family have to deal with Beth/Alice's grievance against their having "abandoned" her, after a long, obsessive search, while she was the captive of a mad doctor. Kate herself always felt that her dad gave up the search too soon, and both she and her dad feel the guilts after learning that stepmom had created fake evidence of Beth's death to help them move on, as it were. The larger point here, it seems, is that Berlanti and his writers want society to recognize some role in the creation of seemingly evil people rather than treating them as inherently irredeemable bad seeds. They're not consistent about this, since some villains (e.g. Damian Darhk) are portrayed as cartoonishly, disposably evil, while the great exception that seems to prove the overall rule was Andy Diggle, the brother of <i>Arrow</i> sidekick John Diggle and henchman to the aforementioned Darhk, who defied all efforts at redemption and finally goaded his virtuous sibling to shoot him down in a fit of rage. His persistent viciousness actually made Andy a breath of fresh air in Berlanti-land, but the writers seem to see him as an experiment not to be repeated again. I suspect that Berlanti doesn't believe that anyone rally deserves death for the things they do. There's nothing wrong with that as a real-world political philosophy, but it does limit one's options in creating a dramatic fantasy world, and it also means that <i>Batwoman</i> probably will be hobbled for some time to come by its constant back-and-forth over what to do with Alice.<br />
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A little while ago, after Alice poisoned her stepmom, it seemed as if Kate had given up on trying to save her sister. But then the <i>Crisis on Infinite Earths </i>crossover happened and Batwoman received fresh indoctrination from the literal Paragon of Hope, Kara Zor-El, on not giving up on people. That pretty much assures us of more frustratingly repetitive dialogues between hero and villain and contrivances to keep Alice free, while the writers retain their option to make Alice's sidekick, the master of disguise called Mouse, the real big bad so Beth can be redeemed after all -- as, I'm compelled to admit, she eventually was in the comics, though by a different writer than her creator. It may be that a significant part of the DC/CW audience responds to this sort of drama the way Berlanti wants, but others may feel that the Alice story has gone on past its proper expiration date but has been sustained artificially to no good effect. The writers may feel vindicated by the show's renewal, however inevitable that may have been, but they shouldn't think themselves truly successful until they prove they can envision a future for Batwoman beyond Alice. To be fair, the Batwoman comic hasn't had much future beyond her -- the first series was canceled after the key creators quit over an editorial veto of Kate's marriage to another woman, based not on homophobia but on a dogmatic notion that superheroes should not be happy in their personal lives, and a second series was sadly short-lived -- so it's entirely possible that the TV show will give us the definitive Batwoman. To do so, it will have to move beyond where the comics have gone, but there's no sign yet that the writers are ready to do that.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-48018584770441672732020-02-08T19:45:00.001-05:002020-02-08T19:45:24.306-05:00On the Big Screen: BIRDS OF PREY AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN (2020)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>"I'</b></span><b>m</b> telling it all wrong!" Harley Quinn confesses well into her new film, and when the film itself admits this, what more can I say? This, I guess: any half hour of the <i>Harley Quinn</i> cartoon on the DC Universe streaming service is more entertaining than this sputtering too-late spinoff of the already-awful <i>Suicide Squad</i>. If its purpose was to make a franchise out of Margot Robbie's supporting cast then it has to be judged one of the most abject failures of recent times. If its purpose, however, was to make Jared Leto's Joker look worthy of comparison to Nicholson, Ledger and Phoenix in retrospect by inviting a more favorable comparison with Ewan McGregor's vacuous performance as Black Mask, then it's probably some sort of success -- presuming, of course, that anyone remembers Leto's Joker now. In all other respects the new film falls on its face, and early reports indicate that it won't even have the popular mandate <i>Suicide Squad</i> somehow enjoyed. Maybe people see it as a vanity project, fairly or not, and are steering clear, or maybe Harley Quinn's moment as a cultural phenomenon is already over. Maybe Warner Bros.' desire to treat her as DC's Deadpool is more desperately obvious now, or at least as obvious as the inability of anyone involved in the project to do a Deadpool. But incompetence isn't <i>Birds of Prey's</i> sin as much as indifference is. The story, to the extent that I remember it after a few hours -- something to do with a diamond somebody swallowed -- is just the inescapable something, the bare minimum the film has to have to get from one action scene to the next. The action scenes themselves are okay at best but way too choppy by the standard set by <i>John Wick</i> and <i>Atomic Blonde</i> without as many sight gags as an ostensible comedy-action film should have. You can't help feeling that more talented filmmakers could have done much more with the same characters and story -- a more linear approach would have helped, for starters -- but weren't considered necessary for something so seemingly pre-sold as a Harley Quinn movie. Joke's on them, it seems -- but at least Warner Bros. may be able to console themselves at the Oscars tomorrow. Maybe they can start fresh with Harley in a <i>Joker </i>sequel ....Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-62374298350833888722020-01-26T18:23:00.002-05:002020-01-26T18:23:21.852-05:00COLD WAR (Zimna wojna, 2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>P</b></span>awel Pawlikowski's follow-up to <i>Ida</i>, though mostly praised by critics, didn't have the same impact in the U.S. as the earlier, Oscar-winning film. The lack of a Holocaust angle in the new film may be the simplest explanation for this, but <i>Cold War</i> itself may have been a little too foreign -- which is to say too nationalist -- for American art-house tastes. It marks a territory of tragic Polish exceptionalism that has no true home in either the Russian-dominated east or the American-dominated west, though the film has little or nothing to say about the U.S.A. or actual Americans. Instead, it asserts a nebulous Polish authenticity apparently incapable of true expression in the film's Cold War setting. The nebulous element finds form in the film's heroine, the aspiring singer Zula (Joanna Kulig), who pretends to be a peasant in order to join a folk-singing troupe organized in the late 1940s by musicologists Irena (Agata Kuleza) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot). Wiktor falls in love with Zula, and the romance keeps him with the troupe after Irena quits in futile protest against the Communist government transforming it into a Stalinist propaganda vehicle. Its propaganda function allows the singers to tour the eastern bloc, including East Berlin, where Wiktor, as artistically frustrated as Irena, hopes to defect with Zula to the west. Alas, Zula never makes the rendezvous, so Wiktor defects alone.<br />
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Later in the 1950s, the troupe travels the wider world, and in Paris Zula encounters Wiktor again. Our hero will find a variety of work in the west, from composing film scores to playing in a niteclub jazz band. He still hopes to bring Zula to the other side, but his efforts to transform her into a jazz singer, including arranging a cool-jazz version of the folk tune that serves effectively as her theme song, only estrange them further. The issue isn't that she dislikes modern music -- she's seen dancing to "Rock Around the Clock" almost as a form of protest -- but that Wiktor is trying to make her into something she isn't for no good reason. Wiktor seems to realize this, too, and you could argue that for him she embodies the true Poland, to such a degree that he risks certain imprisonment in order to return home to be near her. In a melodramatic scenario mercifully underplayed by all involved, Wiktor can only be freed from prison by Zula marrying the party hack (Boris Szyc) who corrupted the folk troupe in the first place. In true melodramatic fashion, she becomes a lush until Wiktor finally emerges from prison, his artistic career apparently mangled (with his hand) beyond repair. With it already established that the west offers no real escape for them, the only remaining option is romantic suicide -- again carried out with respectable understatement. A point is made nevertheless, presumably one that found an appreciative audience in a newly-nationalist Poland. <i>Cold War</i> isn't exactly saying "a plague on both your houses," but it does say quite clearly that the freedom promised by the west wasn't really freedom, at least for some people -- or else that the west's freedom wasn't enough for some people. Wiktor seals his fate, against the advice of a harshly realistic Polish diplomat, with the explanation, "I'm Polish." What being Polish entails, if not what it actually means, is <i>Cold War's</i> ultimate subject, and it should be no surprise that, good as the film is -- strongly acted, sharply shot, admirably succinct -- it doesn't travel as well as Pawlikowski's previous effort. It should do no harm to his reputation, however, and whatever he does next is sure to be, most likely deservedly, an art-house event.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-81696660814640255302020-01-19T20:38:00.003-05:002020-01-19T20:38:48.476-05:00QUEEN OF THE HIGH SEAS (Le Avventure di Mary Read, 1961)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>B</b></span>est known for horror films, Umberto Lenzi began his career making period swashbucklers, starting with this 1961 outing inspired by the crossdressing pirate of the Caribbean, Mary Read. The film takes almost nothing from the little actually reported about Read, apart from her being a pirate and occasionally dressing in men's clothes. Her cohorts Anne Bonny and Jack Rackham don't appear in this picture, which seems to be set a few generations before Read's own time. Mary (Lisa Gastoni) is introduced in England as an aspiring master thief, attended by mentor/sidekick Mangiatrippa (Agostino Salvietti). Temporarily taken prisoner, she meets cute, within the confines of her male disguise, with wastrel aristocrat Peter Goodwin (Jerome Courtland). Goodwin will later be tasked with taking down the infamous pirate Captain Poof, not knowing that this is none other than Mary, whose true identity he eventually discovers. It wasn't always this way; once upon a time, believe it or not, there was a man named Captain Poof, but having accepted Mary as part of his crew, there soon was not enough room on his ship for two domineering personalities. Almost as a matter of course, Mary kills Poof and takes his place and his name. Having already proven herself an omnicompetent sailor, she soon demonstrates her mastery of pirate strategy to a crew initially reluctant to transgress beyond Poof's privateering mandate. In time, "Captain Poof" becomes the terror of all nations, but Mary eventually must choose to love or kill Peter Goodwin. <i>Queen</i> actually was Gastoni's Italian film debut, the Italo-Irish actress having spent her teen years in England and breaking into film there. She went on to do a number of swashbucklers, as well as some of Antonio Margheriti's sci-fi films, and I'm curious now to see whether those later films followed <i>Queen's</i> example and allowed Gastoni to be an action heroine. While the historical Read seems to have been little more than Jack Rackham's psycho doxy, Lenzi's protagonist is a virtual superwoman, at least by the standards of Sixties Euro-genre movies, as well as an irresistible charmer. Lenzi himself looks impressive as an (almost) first-time director. Whatever its budget,<i> Queen</i> appears to have better production values than many of Hollywood's soundstage-bound potboiler pirate movies of the previous decade. It may not have the intensity of violence Lenzi would later be known for, but it's still more energetic than many of its genre contemporaries. I suppose he would have been recognized as a promising talent, though the fulfillment of that promise would take forms unanticipated here.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-8369092686454583892020-01-15T18:00:00.001-05:002020-01-15T18:00:31.141-05:00Too Much TV: DRACULA (2020)<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>T</b></span>he creators of <i>Sherlock</i> claim that one purpose of their free adaptation of Bram Stoker's famous character -- to call their Dracula an adaptation of Stoker's <i>novel</i> may go too far -- is to make the king vampire the central character, "the hero of his own story" as it were. They then open their first of three episodes with a framing device ensuring that, as ever, we will see Dracula through Jonathan Harker's eyes. Harker tells his story at the convent where he takes shelter in the novel, to an irreverent nun (Dolly Wells) who apparently is the sister of Abraham Van Helsing, sharing his preoccupation with the undead. Harker (John Heffernan) as narrator is an unsettling sight, far more damaged than we're used to seeing, as if Deadpool had mated with a 1980s AIDS patient. This comes to seem appropriate as Harker endures a more severe ordeal than even Stoker had imagined through the hospitality of a rapidly-youthening Count (Claes Bang). This all begins quite promisingly; for much of the first hour co-writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat succeed at making a Dracula story feel more disquietingly Gothic than Stoker's novel by introducing the idea of a secret prisoner in Dracula's castle and later showing how the Count treats some of his victims as experiments. This sets the tone for the rest of the story, establishing that Dracula, after so many centuries, remains uncertain about exactly how his vampiric powers work and whether they're inherited by his "brides," female or male. But a discordant note begins to creep in as the vampire, absorbing Harker's knowledge by drinking his blood, starts talking in a familiarly glib, almost slangy way, calling his guest Johnny and generally sounding more and more like a standard 21st century charismatic villain. At the same time, commenting throughout on Harker's story, Sister Agatha tends to quip in drastic hit-or-miss fashion. The writings clearly aspire to accessibility at whatever cost, and the tone becomes too comic -- however fun it may be to hear Sister Agatha taunt Dracula near the end of the first episode -- for its own good. But I'm probably mistaking my own idea of its own good for its creators' intentions.<br />
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The second episode -- all three run approximately 90 minutes -- comes closest to the Dracula-as-central-character idea, though it also interposes a framing device, this time with Dracula narrating his famous voyage on the <i>Demeter</i> to a surprisingly friendly yet still skeptical Sister Agatha. This second episode is also the worst by far of the three, introducing a shipload of thinly sketched passengers for the vampire to victimize before Agatha breaks out of the framing device and reclaims the upper hand. Inclusiveness substitutes for substance here as the passenger list includes an Indian scientist and his mute daughter as well as the black gay lover of this episode's walking in-joke, the decadent Lord Ruthven. Yet this group may as well have come from a Russian novel of Stoker's time compared to the cartoon characters who pass for the Demeter's crew. They all amount to vampire fodder, of course, and with Dracula the focus rather than his victims his attacks are more reminiscent of Bugs Bunny's inevitable triumphs than they are horrific to any extent. It becomes less a question of which of the crew or passengers will survive than whether the viewers will survive -- and yet it's all nearly redeemed by the episode's closing twist.<br />
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The finale picks up threads of Stoker's story in the present day, as Dracula wakes from more than a century of recuperative slumber underwater to walk into a trap set nearly that long ago by a vampire-hunting organization founded by none other than Mina Murray, whom Dracula spared from a bad predicament at the end of the first episode for no apparent better reason than that the writers needed someone to found this organization. Working for this shadowy group is a familiar face: Zoe Helsing, Agatha's great-great-grandniece. She survives a vampire attack because her blood sickens the Count, for the all-too-mundane reason that she has terminal cancer. Other stories make dead people's blood potentially fatal to vampires, so this arguably is a modestly plausible leap forward. Zoe's organization wants to preserve Dracula and experiment on him, but they're thwarted by, of all things, a lawyer. Try and guess his name! After this presumably powerful, possibly malevolent organization meekly gives up its prisoner, the episode introduces us to a 21st century Lucy Westenra (Lydia West) and her familiar suitors -- minus one if the gay guy was supposed to be Arthur Holmwood. Dracula becomes obsessed with this reckless girl without really understanding why as we pick up the thread that may unravel the vampire after all. Just as he's never fully understood his own powers, this show proposes that Dracula has never understood, or at least hasn't fully come to terms with, his own nature. Inquisitive Agatha had wanted to know why Dracula fears Christian symbols -- apparently, their being holy never satisfied her inquiring mind, and in any event we'd seen another vampire in the first episode regard the same stuff without fear or pain -- and the Count's own half-baked idea that Christianity's bloody history makes the cross a symbol of death isn't satisfactory either. His fascination with Lucy -- who suffers an even more horrific fate than in the novel -- offers an important clue, but Zoe needs to drink Dracula's own blood in order to get insight from her feisty precursor Agatha. The resolution of all of this is <i>weak</i>: Dracula the mighty warrior, it turns, out, has always been ashamed of his own fear of death, and flinches from the traditional portents of his extinction -- the cross, the sun, etc. -- even when they won't hurt him at all, as Zoe/Agatha proves by aping Peter Cushing's heroics from Hammer's <i>Horror of Dracula</i>. So enlightened, our protagonist decides he may as well die. I'm not sure if that follows, but I suppose it effectively preempts any talk of another season -- unless, of course, the vampire rises to shrug, "Well, that didn't work!" and goes on about his business, should the ratings require it.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-35091717055798807532020-01-13T18:24:00.000-05:002020-01-13T18:24:06.339-05:00THE KING (2019)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>H</b></span>e may not play the title character, but the true auteur of David </span>Michôd's history play may well be its co-producer, co-writer and co-star, Joel Edgerton. <i>The King</i> is an innately audacious project: a do-over of the story of King Henry V of England, the subject not only of Shakespeare's play but of two highly acclaimed films made from the play: Laurence Olivier's of 1944 and Kenneth Branagh's of 1989. Edgerton, however, has assigned himself perhaps the most audacious task of all: a dramatic makeover of one of Shakespeare's most beloved characters, Sir John Falstaff. That puts Michôd and <i>The King</i> on a collision course with Orson Welles' <i>Chimes at Midnight </i>on top of its other challenges. Edgerton himself may have written the film's most audacious line, in which his Falstaff compares the fate Michôd and Edgerton have planned for him with a more ignominious finish which is pretty much what Shakespeare gave the character, and declares the <i>King</i> version the better ending. Except that Edgerton to a great extend underplays the role, his conception of Falstaff is what you might imagine Marlon Brando doing with the character, albeit without that actor's dubious British accent. That is, Edgerton and Michôd make Falstaff the conscience if not the outright hero of their story. The fat knight's aversion to combat is here more a matter of principle than it is in the original, in keeping with the new film's overall antiwar stance. But then Falstaff is shown to be the author of the winning strategy of the Battle of Agincourt, staking his own life on it by leading a virtually-suicidal feint intended to goad the French enemy into an even-more suicidal cavalry charge against English longbowmen on muddy terrain. For what it's worth, this Falstaff is neglected for a time but never publicly shunned by his old pal Prince Hal (Timothee Chalamet), who later resents the fat knight's refusal to commit war crimes but respects his counsel too much to hold it long against him. To each his own Falstaff, of course; Welles, selectively following the letter of Shakespeare, still made the character largely a mirror of himself. If Michôd and Edgerton's Falstaff seems sometimes like a mirror-universe version of Shakespeare's, the core idea of their conception seems to be the traditional fool who can tell a king the truth -- something the writers feel that Henry V desperately needed to hear.<br />
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<i>The King's</i> Henry shares Falstaff's aversion to mass slaughter, but is dangerously sensitive to personal slights that threaten his standing as a new, young heir to a usurping father. That makes Henry even more dangerously susceptible to manipulation by war-seeking advisers, particularly the Poloniesque William Gascoigne (Sean Harris), who manufactures conspiracies against Henry to be blamed on France and expendable colleagues. It doesn't help matters that the French Dauphin (Robert Pattinson in a critic-proof performance as a complete idiot) wants to get into some kind of pissing contest with the new king, or at least wants to fart in his general direction. Falstaff and later the French princess Catherine (Lily-Rose Depp) act as Henry's conscience against the tide of war, constantly questioning the need for war and reinforcing his own instinctual skepticism, born of resentment of the belligerent ways of his father (Ben Mendelsohn). Henry's the type who prefers to settle things by single combat when possible, as he does with the archetypal Hotspur rather than see his own brother waste an army and his own life in a pointless battle. A nice touch in this film is the way it shows Henry becoming Hotspur, i.e. the son his father really wanted despite Hotspur's treason. Another touch is the way that character arc ends with a parody of the early Hotspur fight, as the Dauphin challenges Henry to single combat <i>after</i> the big battle -- Michôd acquits himself fairly well in the shadow of past auteurs, by the way, and Chalamet works hard in long, violent takes -- but can't put one armored foot in front of the other without sprawling into the mud. The film ends with Catherine replacing Falstaff as Henry's good conscience and his evil counselors done away with all too neatly. But while it's all too obvious when actors are mouthpieces for the writers' opinions rather than real characters, and the film is absolutely not to be taken seriously as history, <i>The King</i> is a nicely made piece of work and mostly quite entertaining, especially if you're a sucker for historical epics like I am. It's just too bad that as a self-conscious alternative to the Shakespearean "Henriad," it's doomed to comparison with greater films instead of facing judgment on its own terms. Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-43430343861450735702020-01-12T16:13:00.000-05:002020-01-12T16:13:15.886-05:00Happy New Year: 1917 (2019)<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><b>S</b>o what happened? Nothing, really -- if anyone was wondering. There was just a period where I didn't watch much worth writing about, or else I found myself having nothing I thought worth writing about the things I saw. The turn of the year usually encourages increased productivity, however, and by then I had seen some things I wanted to write about. It then became a matter of resuming the old habit. Finally getting back to a movie theater after a few months provided the occasion, and from here I'll backtrack a little to cover some stuff I saw less recently. Where better to start, though, then more than a century in the past?...</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>N</b></span>ow that history has taken World War I beyond living memory, it finally starts to feel like just another war. For a time, it seemed like it actually might be the war to end all war, because it seemed to be the one that discredited war as a concept. It stood for futility and tragic stupidity, an indictment of leaders military and political alike. But the most recent Great War movies -- at least in English -- have been far less bitter about the conflict than the classic familiar takes on the subject. Peter Jackson's documentary <i>They Shall Not Grow Old</i> and Sam Mendes' new film are inspired by ancestral memories on the grunt level, where the war was perceived, so it seems, as just another job of work. There is little in either film of the indignation characteristic of Great War movies going back at least to <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i> and at least as far forward as <i>Gallipoli</i>. In fact, <i>1917</i> is to some extent <i>Gallipoli </i>with a happy ending. If that exaggerates things slightly, it's still fair to say that neither the Mendes nor the Jackson film is explicitly an antiwar film, as nearly all World War I movies were implicitly for a long time. Saying this isn't an indictment, only an observation of a change in tone that comes with a change in perspective.<br />
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It may exaggerate things even more to call <i>1917</i> World War I as a video game. It certainly will look that way to some people, but the effort by Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins to make their film look like a handful of long takes -- however obvious the cutting points actually are -- really seems rooted in an engagement with past war films. <i>All Quiet </i>remains arguably the most indelible of Great War films because of Lewis Milestone's epic horizontal tracking shots of advancing troops mowed down by machine gun fire, while Stanley Kubrick's <i>Paths of Glory</i> is well remembered for its lengthy tracking shots in the trenches and on the battlefield. <i>1917</i> may not be so much an attempt to top these films but a resort to a common cinematic language that somehow seems suited to the subject. Film buffs associate that war in particular with long takes and tracking shots, so if Mendes was going to make a film about that war, this was the way to make it feel especially like a World War I movie -- at least superficially.<br />
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Watching 1917, I had the obscure thought that Mendes and Deakins would have been ideal adapters of the work of Leonard H. Nason, an unsung author whose 1920s pulp stories of American soldiers blundering their way across the western front capture something of the chaos of war with considerable black or at least hard-boiled comedy. Instead, of course, Mendes and co-writer Krysty Winston-Cairns took inspiration from tales told by Mendes' grandfather. Whether grandpa told the future director a tale with a <i>Private Ryan</i>-style "mission is a man" hook, however, I don't know. The idea is that two soldiers (Dean-Charles Chapman and George McKay) must traverse dangerous terrain on foot in order to prevent a sure-to-fail attack that will jeopardize the life of the brother of one of the protagonists. Their journey inevitably is full of incidents, and as I hinted earlier, their mission ultimately is a success by the narrowest of margins. Your archetypal World War I movie probably would have ended differently, but <i>1917</i> plays out, to mix historical metaphors, like an <i>Apocalypse Now</i> that finds the colonel at the end of the long trail a surprisingly reasonable man. Crossing historic boundaries to make that comparison feels justified because <i>1917</i> is as much a <i>tour de force</i> for Deakins as the Coppola film was for Vittorio Storaro. The beloved cinematographer not only gives you your standard Great War mudscape, but also a wide range of settings permitting a more vivid and sometimes lurid palette of colors than we might expect from the archetypically monochrome imagery of that conflict. Whatever you think about the story -- which comes with a twist or two and may actually depend on our expectations for Great War films to maintain suspense -- <i>1917</i> is a treat to look at, as long as your definition of "treat" includes lots of moldering corpses. The horrors of war are plainly there to see, but at this point in movie history Mendes feels little need to editorialize over them. That certainly doesn't make this a pro-war film, but longtime movie fans will feel a difference from earlier Great War pictures, whatever they make of it. <i>1917</i> feels more like an exercise in style for its own sake, both because of its stunt quality and because the characters aren't really that interesting, than its famous precursors, but I think it'll be safe to say that it won't make anyone wish they could have their own World War I adventure, except perhaps in the comfort of their game room.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-88324020428363522972019-10-27T19:09:00.002-04:002019-10-27T19:09:43.091-04:00On the Big Screen: THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>T</b></span>he sophomore jinx has hit Robert Eggers, whose feature-film debut was the rightly-acclaimed <i>The Witch</i> from 2015. His new film is another piece of period Americana, this time taking place in 19th century New England. Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and his new assistant Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) arrive on an island for a four-week stint as keepers of its lighthouse. Wake is a vulgar, flatulent, superstitious drunk who drives Winslow relentlessly and tries to goad the apparent teetotaler into imbibing with him at dinnertime. On top of that, he forbids Winslow from entering the light of the lighthouse itself. Ephraim has issues of his own. A scrimshaw mermaid inspires him to masturbate frequently, while one particular seagull seems to make a point of getting in his way all the time. He's warned not to harm the bird -- Wake believes that seagulls harbor the souls of drowned sailors -- but the enraged Winslow finally takes the gull in hand and dashes him to pieces on a rock. As if by coincidence, a severe storm indefinitely delays the arrival of their replacements. If Wake had been somewhat mad before, Winslow quickly catches up with him....<br />
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<i>The Lighthouse</i> has no real subject other than madness, and madness as an end unto itself isn't firm ground to plant a film on. While in <i>The Witch</i> Eggers arguably was saying something about Puritanism, patriarchy, family, etc., in his new film the director (co-writing with his brother) seems more interested in evoking mood or genre. It may be wrong to ask what the point is, but viewers can hardly help doing so. The real problem may be that, at 110 minutes, the film is too long for its own good. The length tempts the Eggers brothers into too many self-indulgent twists as their characters struggle for dominance and deteriorate further into insanity. At one moment Wake is challenging Winslow's (and our) sense of reality by contradicting a version of recent events that we saw play out on screen as if it were objective truth. Not long afterward, Winslow has beaten Wake into such canine submission that he will walk, on a leash, into an open grave. But then Wake recalls himself and charges back inside for a perhaps-climactic attack. By this point both men have become so repellent that no rooting interest in either man is likely. No rooting interest is strictly necessary, to be fair, but by this point most viewers have probably lost hope at getting to the bottom of the whole situation. There seems to be no point to the exercise, or to the excellent black-and-white cinematography and production design, other than to have Dafoe and Pattinson act crazy. Dafoe is an old hand at this, but more eyes will be on Pattinson, whom we find at a pivotal point in his career. He is our next cinematic Batman, and by coincidence will have a high-profile role in Christopher Nolan's next film. By two years from now the ghost of Edward Cullen may be exorcised for good and Pattinson's real movie-star career will have begun. Will he be a respected actor by then? Some may argue that his work for David Cronenberg already should have earned him respect, but for most people the jury is still out or the memory of <i>Twilight</i> is still too strong. Can we see the future Pattinson here? He has deglamorized himself with an old-school moustache, several layers of grime and a slightly erratic character voice, while what might ungenerously have been called cow eyes a few years back are now capable of a penetrating gaze. Beyond that, it's hard to judge his interpretation of a character of whom his own author seems to lack a clear conception. We learn that Ephraim Winslow isn't what he initially introduced himself as, and the pressures of his situation further assail his sense of self, but neither Pattinson nor the Eggers brothers ultimately can give him the kind of empathetic reality that even characters in psychological horror films require. The problem isn't that we don't care what happens to him, but that we lose interest in the all too-protracted process.<br />
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While Eggers fails as a writer this time, he retains a strong directorial eye. Some of the best scenes are relatively simple but well-shot bits of Winslow struggling through his daily chores. If <i>The Lighthouse</i> feels ungrounded in other respects, it does feel grounded in a particular time and place. Strange as it may be to say, while panning this film I left it with the feeling that Eggers, with his firm sense of period and a visceral sensibility, might be the person to bring Cormac McCarthy's horrific western epic <i>Blood Meridian</i> to the screen. In other words, <i>Lighthouse</i> isn't the sort of disaster that exposes its auteur as some sort of fraud or one-trick pony. Instead, it's a failure that leaves much of Eggers' potential as a filmmaker intact, while leaving us hoping he'll find more critical collaborators next time.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-6575880248261449302019-10-20T17:29:00.003-04:002019-10-20T17:29:36.003-04:00CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD (Der Fluch der grünen Augen, 1964)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>H</b></span>ungarian director Akos Rathonyi filmed this German-Yugoslav production featuring a mostly German cast, along with African-American expatriate John Kitzmiller, who ends up being the most interesting thing about the film. Known as "The Curse of the Green Eyes" in its original language, the movie follows an Interpol inspector (Adrian Hoven) into a village where a serial killer seems to be at work. There's a lot of superstitious suspicion about the deaths of several young women, but the local doctor dismisses the twin puncture marks on the most recent victim's neck as "superficial scratches." The local witch tells a different story, urging Inspector Dorin to carry protection against vampirism. We soon find ourselves in a whoisit as a number of candidates for the role of the killer emerge, including the reclusive professor (Wolfgang Preiss) conducting blood experiments in an old castle, his lovely assistant, his black servant (Kitzmiller) and a belligerent deaf-mute (Emmerich Schrenk) -- and you can throw the aggressively skeptical doctor in, too, if you're in an expansive mood. Meanwhile, Dorin sleeps through a failed vampire attack thanks to the power of the cross, while a persistently disappearing corpse finally separates the doctor from his skepticism.<br />
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Unfortunately for anyone expecting suspense, the perpetrator's true identity isn't that hard to guess, and that lack of suspense only underscores the picture's overall lack of thrills or scares. That leaves only the admirable black and white cinematography by Hrvoje Saric and the subplot involving Kitzmiller's character to admire. It's unusual if not unique for a European vampire film to go off on a tangent about racism, but that's what Rathonyi and his co-writer do here. John, the black servant, serves as sort of a red herring for a while, if only because of his color. He faces in-you-face hatred from the mute, who tosses him out of a tavern despite the innkeeper's own tolearance, and even the witch, otherwise treated as a benign character, mistakes him for a monster when he happens to look into her window one night. The film tries a tricky balancing act, since John is thisclose to being the stereotypical scaredy-cat black servant, but it also shows us that John has real reason to worry, though not so much about the supernatural. This subplot could have been better integrated into the main story; the witch's prejudice might have undermined her credibility with the more cosmopolitan inspector, for instance, maybe making him less likely to adopt her safeguards. As it is it seems all too easy to vanquish the vampires once their lair and leader are identified, but I get the impression that the filmmakers may have seen all the undead stuff as a Macguffin enabling them to say something more interesting about small-town Mitteleuropa. Their message comes across as muddled or muffled, but it's hard to say whether the English dub accurately represents what the creators actually wanted to say. But since the U.S. release was sure to maximize the film's scare quotient, the lack of real scares in that version is pretty damning. <i>Cave</i> isn't a bad film to look at, but I wouldn't make it a high priority when you're scheduling horror movies for Halloween season.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-47731634484046226642019-10-13T19:07:00.001-04:002019-10-13T19:07:15.863-04:00DVR Diary: THE VALIANT (1929)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhihLAJDL8FHiRdzFvzRbSLp7JRZxvi7IbRMSE5R9-cw-qgnc58jxeU1LwWFOH1BOl29nNefYc0kJrjmpBx87QcLF7QwJfevIG77j_vRcPxrPb6jN3n7jzCcT002ij9tFRc-NimosJQDOE5/s1600/Valiant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="1000" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhihLAJDL8FHiRdzFvzRbSLp7JRZxvi7IbRMSE5R9-cw-qgnc58jxeU1LwWFOH1BOl29nNefYc0kJrjmpBx87QcLF7QwJfevIG77j_vRcPxrPb6jN3n7jzCcT002ij9tFRc-NimosJQDOE5/s400/Valiant.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>F</b></span>uture Oscar-winner Paul Muni made his movie debut in William K. Howard's Fox Film production, adapting a Broadway play. Watching it at the time, you might not have predicted an award in Muni's future. It's not that he's bad in the lead role, but that everyone speaks their lines in that stilted early-talking fashion exemplified by the legendary "take him ... for ... a ride" from <i>The Lights of New York</i>. No one, it seems, can speak a full sentence without at least one pause, pregnant or otherwise. The artificial cadences are bad enough, but the implausible situation makes things worse. <i>The Valiant</i> is an exercise in the pathos of renunciation that thrilled Twenties audiences. The idea here is that our protagonist, a confessed and convicted murderer who's kept his real identity secret since turning himself in, will not identify himself to his sister when she visits Death Row, their aged, ailing mother suspecting from photos that "James Dyke" (he took his pseudonym from a commercial calendar at the precinct station) is the son she hasn't seen since before the Great War. He's stuck with the Dyke name despite the cops immediately recognizing the fakery in order to avoid disgracing his family, and thinks that his people will be better off believing he'd died long ago rather than say a real goodbye to a murderer. The title tells you what the filmmakers think of this. All of this sets up the centerpiece scene when the sister (Marguerite Churchill) interrogates the prisoner, hoping that he'll betray some memory of their shared youth. Instead, Dyke contrives a story of witnessing her brother's heroic death in the war as a comrade-in-arms. Believing that her boy died a decade ago supposedly will make the old lady feel better than knowing that her daughter got to see and talk to him. That's the psychology at work here, in a time when popular fiction was committed to concepts of honor that seem alien from the almost a century's distance. Muni can't do much with the material and was clearly still learning how to act for the screen; a few years would pass before he fully figured it out. The film itself is dull and stagebound except for the opening sequence. After the Muni character kills his man offscreen, he staggers onto the street, already remorseful. He looks for a cop to arrest him, wandering through several slices of city life with adults and children going about their business or play with Brueghelian indifference to the protagonist's torment. Ironically, it's in these essentially silent bits that Muni shows promise as a film actor and Howard shows some skill as a director. The rest of the picture has that obsolete quality that doomed so many early talkies to actual oblivion.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-87121297972991808392019-10-08T18:44:00.000-04:002019-10-08T18:44:13.337-04:00THE GOLEM (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>A</b></span>s portrayed by German actor Paul Wegener, the Golem was the first cinematic horror icon. Compared to other iconic monsters, there have been relatively few Golem films, the most notable in English being the 1967 film It! Now an Israeli film, with Doron and Yaov Paz directing Ariel Cohen's script, revives the legend, linking the lore of 17th century Prague with more modern concerns. In this account, a young girl witnesses the destruction of the Prague golem (and its creator) after it had massacred the congregation it was supposed to protect. A generation later, the girl has grown into a midwife and all-around wise woman in an embattled Jewish community in Lithuania. In this same village, Hanna (Hani Furstenburg), has a Yentl-like ambition to learn the Kabbala, volumes of which are smuggled to her in baskets. Hanna's son drowned some years ago and she's been barren ever since -- or so it seems. She's actually taking treatments to suppress pregnancy, but when nearby gentiles blame the Jews for a plague, and their leader threatens the midwife and the village with death if they fail to heal his daughter, Hanna suggests creating a golem for community defense. Against everyone's advice, she performs the ritual herself, but instead of the hulking entity Wegener played, or the shape we saw in the Prague sequence, her golem takes the fleshy form of a young boy, triggering a dangerous maternal instinct in his creator.<br />
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Cohen and the Paz brothers reshape the golem myth to fit their thematic concerns and genre ambitions. Hanna develops an empathetic relationship with her golem, feeling the pain it doesn't when it's attacked, while he turns his fury on people, both Jew and gentile, Hanna perceives as threats. When she's unconscious (or preoccupied with sex) the boy golem's own defense instincts kick in. Though the golem looks like a child, it remains a super-strong force of destruction, enabling some cheap and sometimes laughable gore effects. Since the filmmakers didn't have the means to show the boy fighting his enemies, those unfortunates usually get torn to pieces off-screen, their bloody limbs flying across the screen. Better still, this golem is a scanner, causing his foes' heads to explode without touching them. Meanwhile, Hanna goes through the "my precious boy can't be evil" denial arc before the golem's inevitable, indiscriminate attack on villagers and gentile attackers alike forces her to do the necessary thing. That undermines whatever feminist message or other commentary the filmmakers intended while reducing the golem legend to all-too-common horror tropes. The awkward mix of thematic ambition and genre crassness renders this golem film a disappointment and leaves this reader wishing that someone with real ambition and genius would put Marge Piercy's great golem novel (crosscut with science fiction) <i>He, She and It</i> on the big screen. Until then, however, there aren't so many golem movies that people shouldn't try again.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-3903348348839255412019-10-05T20:04:00.001-04:002019-10-05T20:04:17.858-04:00On the Big Screen: JOKER (2019)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>T</b></span>his year's winner of the Golden Lion of Venice, directed by the maker of the <i>Hangover</i> films, probably impressed festival judges more as an homage to Martin Scorsese than as anything else. Its acknowledgment of <i>King of Comedy</i> is most obvious, down to the role-reversal stunt casting of Rupert Pupkin himself, Robert De Niro, as the late night talk show host on whose show the current film's title character (Joaquin Phoenix) longs to appear. But Todd Phillips' <i>Joker </i>is as much <i>Taxi Driver's </i>Travis Bickle as he is Rupert Pupkin, ironically beginning his career of murder as a sort of vigilante and lurking at the fringes of a political movement. The film is even set in a Scorsesean epoch, sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. It's less about the DC Universe, though the protagonist's fate is linked to that of Bruce Wayne's family, than it is about society in decline, as seen in the Seventies or today. Its ultimate concern, however, is with the perception of society and people in general as unbearably cruel and whether that perception is a rational or at least comprehensible response to verifiable injustice or an irrational reaction of hopeless, useless people. Failure to distinguish between these perceptions, and the fact that proto-Joker Arthur Fleck is presented as a pathetic victim for the first half of the film, leads some to worry that moviegoers will take the new Joker as a role model to emulate, even though he proves to be a profoundly sick and fundamentally vicious individual who disavows politics and any idea of justice. People may well empathize with Fleck early on, but the star and filmmakers strive to alienate audiences from the protagonist and appear to succeed. Their success, however, depends on an assumption that audiences are rational, and between the belief that society is made up mostly of bullies and the belief that life is just a big joke, maybe that assumption can't be taken for granted.<br />
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So here is a new Joker, little more than a decade after Heath Ledger's instantly-legendary portrayal, thirty years removed from Jack Nicholson's once-definitive performance, and not much further removed from Alan Moore's Joker-origin graphic novel <i>The Killing Joke</i>. I don't notice any complaints about yet another Joker reboot, perhaps because Jared Leto's interpretation in <i>Suicide Squad</i> is viewed as a failure. The idea, encouraged by Ledger's telling multiple tales in <i>The Dark Knight,</i> that there never can be a definitive origin story, may help build audience tolerance for each new attempt. There's more creative license to mold a Joker for any given historic moment than there is for comparatively canonical comics characters, and Warner Bros' retreat from their commitment to a universal continuity uniting all DC films since the catastrophe of Justice League created an opportunity for Phillips and his collaborators to do their own thing even as Matt Reeves works on the latest reboot of Batman and his rogues' gallery. All that being said, <i>Joker</i> isn't especially original in its approach. It echoes some of the pathos of <i>The Killing Joke</i>, without committing to Moore's "one bad day" account of the origin, while Phoenix's interpretation of the character is very reminiscent of his titanic performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's <i>The Master</i>, stripped of that character's redemptive cynicism. What the creators do well is to invite empathy for the downtrodden, bullied Fleck until showing the audience that Fleck himself is incapable of empathy. The crucial moment that makes him a criminal comes when Fleck becomes aware of his mother's belief that billionaire Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) is Arthur's father. Fleck visits Wayne Manor, only to learn that his mother (Frances Conroy) was insane, delusional and not his birth mother. After a visit to Arkham State Hospital confirms Alfred the butler's story, Arthur kills his mom and becomes a full-time murderer. I can't imagine anyone cheering for Joker after this point, though I guess you never can tell about some people.<br />
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<i>Joker</i> boasts impressive cinematography by Lawrence Sher, an appropriately ominous score by Hildur Guðnadóttir and plenty of Scorsesean shots by the admiring director. It grows increasingly horrific as it plumbs deeper into the protagonist's unmedicated madness, but bogs down in the homestretch with an overlong confrontation on DeNiro's show, followed by the common problem of multiple endings. The film could have ended neatly with Phoenix dancing ecstatically amid scenes of fire and riot, but presses on to a final chat between an imprisoned Joker and a psychologist. This bit may exist only because Phillips wanted a gag with Joker leaving bloody footprints in a hallway, but the final image of security chasing Joker through the halls was too reminiscent of old cartoons for its own good. Maybe that was the desired effect, but it's a weak finish for a film that otherwise hits most of the notes it aims for. Heath Ledger probably will remain the definitive Joker for our time, but Joaquin Phoenix demonstrates that the Clown Prince of Crime is the sort of folkloric character that many actors can share.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-64206905038969886172019-10-03T20:59:00.001-04:002019-10-03T20:59:17.419-04:00Too Much TV: The Wednesday Night War<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>P</b></span>rofessional wrestling is poised to make yet another comeback in American popular culture. It's been on television virtually from the beginning, of course, but it's been nearly twenty years since its last period of mass popularity. That was during the so-called Monday Night Wars, when World Championship Wrestling, the last survivor of the World Wrestling Federation's bid for nationwide dominance, made its ultimate assault on Vince McMahon's empire. Fueled by the rise of the NWO, a faction of former WWF stars joined by 80s superhero-turned-villain Hulk Hogan, WCW's <i>Nitro</i> program defeated the WWF's <i>Monday Night Raw</i> in the ratings for more than a year before a combination on WCW inmates taking over the asylum and the fortuitous emergence of such seminal WWF superstars as Stone Cold Steve Austin and future film idol Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson turned the tide. By the end of 2001 the WWF -- now World Wrestling Entertainment -- stood alone. Since then, small-scale alternatives have emerged and some, like Sinclair Broadcasting-owned Ring of Honor and Impact Wrestling, have persisted, while the overall audience for wrestling -- or as McMahon prefers, "sports entertainment," -- has withered away. Ratings for <i>Monday Night Raw</i> in 2019 are a sad fraction of its typical rating at the turn of the century. Nevertheless, Fox is paying WWE a huge amount of money to bring its <i>Smackdown</i> show to prime-time network television, starting Friday, October 4, while TNT, the long-ago home of <i>Nitro</i>, is hosting a brand-new wrestling company. A popular explanation for this is that wrestling is less expensive than scripted shows and never subjects its audience to reruns. The hope is that these higher-profile platforms may restore wrestling to something close to its <i>fin-de-siecle</i> glory, while the appearance of a new challenger to WWE raises big questions about how wrestling can be popular and buzzworthy again long after it was nearly universally acknowledged that the thing is fake. This was already widely known during the Monday Night Wars, but as wrestling slid from that peak more persistent fans asked more often how others could be made to care about pretend fighting. Those fans divide into two main schools of thought. One group emphasizes the reality at the heart of the fakery: the vastly-increased athleticism of the wrestlers. The best performers, by this standard, can pull off incredible feats of aerial acrobatics to thrill their fans. The other group, treating wrestling as essentially another scripted program, considers stories and personalities to be key. These groups' debates can be acrimonious. The "workrate" fans (wrestlers being "workers") often find the outrageous storylines and over-the-top characters favored by the other group cringeworthy, while that group sometimes finds today's heightened athleticism monotonous and meaningless without compelling stories and characters.<br />
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At first, it seemed like All Elite Wrestling's challenge to WWE would be a showdown between these competing philosophies of sports entertainment. Backed by the billionaire family that also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars, AEW is largely the brainchild of Cody Runnels, the son of Southern wrestling icon Dusty Rhodes and brother to former WWE superstar Goldust. Runnels spent time in WWE as "Stardust" but really made his name in Ring of Honor and New Japan Pro Wrestling, where a generation of American talent circulated through a faction known as Bullet Club. Until AEW, New Japan was seen as the most viable alternative to WWE, but Runnels took with him the Japanese company's most popular American talent, including their former champion Kenny Omega and tag-team brothers The Young Bucks, the latter being Cody's main creative partners in the new company. New Japan's "strong style" emphasized athleticism while downplaying without entirely dispensing with the angles and "heat" that define American wrestling. Fans who had grown bored with WWE during the John Cena era, finding the McMahon product hopelessly diluted by marketing impreatives, regarded Omega, who could go 60 relentless minutes at a time with his Japanese opponents, as the best wrestler on Earth. Cody has never enjoyed that sort of acclaim -- many regard him as a mediocre worker -- but he enjoys underdog appeal as someone typically underutilized by the increasingly stodgy WWE. Before the premiere of <b><i>AEW Dynamite</i></b> on October 2, the new promotion held several pay-per-view events while Omega and the Young Bucks promoted themselves on YouTube's "Being the Elite" series. AEW thus arrived with a built-in audience, though its true dimensions were uncertain until this week.<br />
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But if AEW was meant to be an anti-WWE, McMahon met the indirect challenge -- <i>Dynamite</i> doesn't go head-to-head with <i>Raw</i> or <i>Smackdown's</i> new Friday night time slot -- by fighting fire with fire. WWE has its own anti-WWE in the form of <b><i>NXT</i>,</b> previously a staple of the federation's streaming service. Originally conceived as a developmental company for new talent with a game-show TV format, NXT is run by McMahon's son-in-law and creative heir apparent, Paul "Triple H" Levesque. He turned NXT into the jewel in the WWE crown, in some eyes, by stressing athleticism and bringing in top talent from independent U.S. promotions and Japanese outfits. Critics argue that by appealing to "smarks" -- the pejorative for those who value workrate over everything else in wrestling -- Triple H has lost sight of the original goal of preparing talent for the main WWE roster. <i>Raw</i> and <i>Smackdown</i> have a larger proportion of more casual fans, so the argument goes, who need something more than in-ring action to hold their attention, while the regular NXT audience are like those aficionados who enthuse over instrumental solos while others just want a catchy tune. For every NXT talent who has succeeded in WWE, there's at least one other that has failed to catch on, their failures usually being blamed, by NXT fans, on McMahon's failure to understand their inherent appeal, and by NXT critics on their failure to develop interesting "larger than life" characters or speak (i.e. "cut promos") in a compelling manner. Ironically, in light of what was to come, NXT's promo class used to be taught by Dusty Rhodes. That aside, McMahon calculated that NXT's established appeal among hardcore wrestling fans would cut into AEW's potential audience. At the same time, bringing NXT to the USA Network would make up somewhat for taking <i>Smackdown</i> from them. While NXT's weekly show on the streaming service was a pre-recorded hour, it's a two-hour live broadcast on USA, to match <i>Dynamite's</i> running time. For the first week of head-to-head competition, at least, the advantage lies with AEW, which easily outdrew NXT. It should be noted, however, that the combined audiences for the two shows is roughly equal to the average audience for recent <i>Smackdown</i> episodes on USA. There's no indication that either show has brought new eyes to professional wrestling. If that's going to happen, it'll be on Fridays on Fox.<br />
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In any event, and in a further irony, competing with NXT makes AEW look more like the WWE. That happens without AEW compromising its founders' workrate standards, though NXT arguably had the better workrate on October 2. To some extent, however, critics of both could argue with reason that the workrate grew repetitive as the same stunts (e.g. "suicide dives" out of the ring) recurred from match to match. The big difference between the two shows, really, was <i>Dynamite's</i> stronger focus on generating heat with traditional villainy. NXT has plenty of bad guys on its roster, but its heels often win without blatant cheating, though there was some outside interference in the tag-team championship match that ended the show. By contrast, there were clearly defined heels in every AEW match, and by the time the show was over an overarching heel faction had formed, led by their world champion Chris Jericho. Another former star of both WCW and WWE, as well as a rock band frontman and popular podcaster, the 49 year-old Jericho can be depended on to draw heat with words and deeds and share it with younger talent who have a shot at stardom. Not all AEW heels are affiliated with Jericho, but every match on the show was meant to create heat, on the obvious assumption that viewers will keep watching to see the bad guys get their comeuppances. On the other hand, NXT did a better job of making its several championship matches look and feel dramatic, with devices as simple as dimming the lights and spotlighting the wrestlers during their introductions, but as some have noted already it'll be a challenge to maintain that intensity from week to week, while <i>Dynamite</i> can only escalate its feuds from this beginning point. In short, both shows were good this week, but <i>Dynamite</i> seems more likely to improve as it goes forward. Whether the new rivals, along with <i>Smackdown</i> on Fox, can elevate wrestling back into pop prominence remains to be seen.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-1981100291140177132019-09-29T19:14:00.000-04:002019-09-29T19:14:24.035-04:00SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA (1969)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZsK7W4diagApRdvAhTFIIFoz4HIk7X0AtTlGSZHmIOTVZphrXSZoxCTOQqnA4TshiHrTs15uuUj3hKW-53cpiGcRq9gZlVuIokJb-WroTAYAT4VOQFB8cCXHulzpjwMPqGUaeGA2vH8ak/s1600/20190927_180639.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="801" data-original-width="1062" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZsK7W4diagApRdvAhTFIIFoz4HIk7X0AtTlGSZHmIOTVZphrXSZoxCTOQqnA4TshiHrTs15uuUj3hKW-53cpiGcRq9gZlVuIokJb-WroTAYAT4VOQFB8cCXHulzpjwMPqGUaeGA2vH8ak/s400/20190927_180639.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>A</b></span>s El Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask, Rodolfo Guzman Huerta was Mexico's own action hero of the 1960s and 1970s. A champion <i>luchador</i> at a time when wrestling was banned from Mexican television, El Santo reached a wider public through movies that portrayed him as part Batman, part James Bond: a nearly superhuman troubleshooter with official ties who wrestled on the side and wore his mask everywhere he went. In 1969 director Rene Cardona teamed Santo with one of Mexico's top comedy stars. As Capulina, Gaspar Henaine Perez had only recently ended his long partnership with Marco Antonion "Viruta" Campos. The team-up with Santo may have reflected some uncertainty over Capulina's ability to carry a film on his own. The Capulina character was simply a big bumbler, distinguished by his topless hat. <i>Santo Contra Capulina</i> is more a Capulina than a Santo film. The comic is introduced first, accompanied by heavyhanded "waa-waa" comedy music, as a lazy night watchman at some warehouse. As he takes a nap in a furnished shipping crate, two robbers infiltrate the warehouse. They in turn are attacked by the masked man Capulina immediately recognizes as the famous El Santo. His fandom doesn't stop him from preventing the hero from catching the thieves after a very protracted fight scene. Initially annoyed, Santo's good-guy instincts kick in as he recruits Capulina into the effort to catch the thieves. He even gives the watchman a signal watch like Jimmy Olsen's, though he isn't even out of the building before Capulina summons him back to his crate, just to see if the watch works. The comic also manages to cage an autograph and testimonial from the mighty luchador in return for information he doesn't have. Kids love Capulina, you see, and Santo's endorsement will only make them love him more as he leads them -- usually from the rear -- on their daily race-walking workouts.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">El Santo (above) and Capulina (below)</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>in characteristic settings </i> </span> </div>
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Meanwhile, we learn that the thefts are part of a larger plan by some old enemy of Santo's to lure the luchador into a death trap. The mastermind is assisted by a scientist and his pretty daughter, who disguises herself as a reporter in hopes of getting Santo to unmask. The scientist, we learn later still, is working reluctantly for his daughter's sake, while the daughter has somehow been convinced that Santo is some sort of murderer. The scientist's specialty is the making of robot duplicates who take the places of kidnapped men -- eventually including Capulina. The robot-vs.-wrestler fight justifies the title and looks more plausible than you'd first assume, once you see that Capulina is actually bigger than Santo. Eventually, though, the real Capulina escapes his captors but must pretend that he's his own robot duplicate or, as he understands it, a "rubber man." As well, the scientist's daughter realizes the error of her ways and helps our heroes defeat the mastermind. Good inevitably prevails.<br />
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By American standards, there's not much humor here beyond the inherent absurdity of the cinematic El Santo concept. He gets an understatedly weird solo moment set at his presumably impressive home, where he interrupts his breakfast to dump his secretary/mistress (?) into his pool, her explosion revealing her as one of the villains' robots. It's too bad such genius can't be used for humanity's betterment, Santo muses. That bit amused me more than all of Capulina's antics, but the comic's amiable idiocy sort of made me understand his popularity, which endured to the end of the 20th century. There's an audience for such bumblers in most places, but comedy, especially in the sound era, doesn't travel as well as fighting men in masks. Genre film buffs around the world know El Santo, I expect, but fewer know Capulina. Both are Mexican cultural icons, but Capulina seems more exclusively Mexican -- and they can have him.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-42893591298882619952019-09-22T18:38:00.003-04:002019-09-22T18:39:09.633-04:00DVR Diary: THE LONG SHIPS (1964)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFzQhFi9VjfCYOlxP39p8JxRlKnTzE3RoWBe-Tx7Hso0CqArjm9qi5k3CcJgtWMm4MNT38WyFEaqgd3EvZQ4xxeEfO91MXtuAhygCNYqmFeW3vALw1aHKdjfNtSLxiPksmxJS-fG1b9FFS/s1600/LongShips.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="644" data-original-width="444" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFzQhFi9VjfCYOlxP39p8JxRlKnTzE3RoWBe-Tx7Hso0CqArjm9qi5k3CcJgtWMm4MNT38WyFEaqgd3EvZQ4xxeEfO91MXtuAhygCNYqmFeW3vALw1aHKdjfNtSLxiPksmxJS-fG1b9FFS/s400/LongShips.JPG" width="275" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>R</b></span>ichard Fleischer's <i>The Vikings</i> (1958) inspired a cycle of Viking films in Europe, including two by Mario Bava, but U.S. audiences apparently had seen enough the first time. Jack Cardiff's <i>The Long Ships</i>, a British-Yugoslavian co-production boasting Hollywood stars, was enough of a bomb at the U.S. box office to earn a mention in the Medved brothers' <i>Hollywood Hall of Shame</i> book. It's perhaps the most eccentric item in Sidney Poitier's filmography: a rare if not sole outing as a villain, reportedly ballyhooed as his first "non-Negro" role. He plays a Moorish ruler, al-Mansuh, who covets a legendary golden bell forged by Christian monks generations earlier. A storytelling beggar in his territory, Rolfe (Richard Widmark), claims to know where the bell can be found. Rolfe boasts of his Viking credentials, but you might share al-Mansuh's skepticism when this clean-shaven man throws off his robes to reveal the vest and shorts that supposedly serve as his bona fides. Chased from the territory, Rolfe appears to swim all the way back home to Norse-land, to reunite with his brother Orm (the actual protagonist of Frans Bengtsson's source novel, played by Russ Tamblyn, also clean-shaven) and his troubled lord and father (Oscar Homolka in comedy relief). The bell story gets him a crew who help him steal the longship dad had just handed over to his overlord, King Harald (Clifford Evans). While Rolfe has been built up as a rogue if not an outright liar, it turns out that he does know where the bell can be found, but he doesn't quite know how to land his ship in the right location. Wrecked in a whirlpool, he and his men fall into al-Mansuh's hands, but the lure of gold convinces the Moor to build Rolfe a fresh ship for one more try at the bell. If he fails, Rolfe and his men will have to ride the steel mare, and one doesn't do that and live to tell about it....<br />
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Poitier as a Moor with Widmark as his antagonist can't help making you wonder what they could have done as Othello and Iago. That seems more in Widmark's line than the role of Rolfe. Widmark had a respectable range, encompassing irascible authority figures and psychopathic imbeciles, but he lacks the swashbuckling panache that Rolfe requires. Similarly, Poitier doesn't fully take advantage of this one great opportunity to go over the top, though he could be excused for thinking that his costumes and his pompadour wig had already done the work for him. Neither is awful, but neither is really up for the type of performance this story seems to need. Russ Tamblyn's dance background makes him more of an action-hero type, but he would have been better served by a more faithful filming of the novel. As an action film, <i>The Long Ships</i> is a mixed bag. There's a terribly shot battle on a beach in which Rolfe's Vikings throw a wave of spears at Moorish cavalry. Cardiff cuts to horses and men tumbling under the impact of apparently invisible missiles. On the other hand, a disastrous attempt to drag the great bell down from its perch atop a cliff is very well done, and as far as special effects are concerned the waterborne model work is mostly quite good. The film veers in tone from tragic violence to dubiously broad comedy, e.g. the Viking's lusty invasion of al-Mansuh's harem and the general abuse of a comedy-relief eunuch. Overall, it's a more comical film than I remember from childhood viewings, and also somewhat better than my dim memories. But while it's the sort of thing I'm tempted to find inherently entertaining, I can also see why American audiences left it rather than taking it to heart.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-22807026902197884472019-09-19T20:19:00.001-04:002019-09-19T20:19:20.440-04:00DVR Diary: EMITAI (1971)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>W</b></span>orld War II wasn't the "good war" everywhere. Far from Europe, in Europe's colonies, what Hitler was up to hardly mattered. In some places the Allies, the good guys of the usual narrative were the oppressors. That's the context of Ousmane Sembene's war picture, which shows the war's impact on the Diola people in French-ruled Senegal. They and their crops are resources for France to draw upon at will. <i>Emitai</i> starts with colonial troops pressing villagers into military service. The young men must listen to a French officer praise them for volunteering and exhort them to revere and obey Marshal Petain, at that moment (Spring 1940) France's last hope against the Nazis. One year later, Petain leads a collaborationist regime, but France's alignment means little to the Diola, who are now required to give up their rice crops to the colonial power. The village elders debate the necessity for revolt and, perhaps more importantly, the will of the gods. Their chief has grown skeptical toward the pantheon -- if not toward their existence, then toward their effectiveness in this modern crisis. Ironically, it's he, mortally wounded in a futile uprising, who receives a vision of the gods. They chide him for his lack of faith, while he reproaches them for their apparent indifference to their worshipers' dire situation. After he dies, the film slows down as the village prepares for the chief's funeral, the remaining elders -- in hiding from the colonial troops -- ponder how to appease the gods and/or the French, while two French officers and their native troops hold the women and children hostage, with rice as the ransom. Sembene's deliberate, novelistic pacing -- he was a novelist before taking up the camera -- immerses the viewer in the life of the embattled village while steadily heating up indignation against the elders' preoccupation with the gods. They balk (rightly) at sacrificing rice to the French, but then one sacrifices a goat to the gods on impulse. The bawling animal has its throat cut and bleeds out before being dumped like so much garbage. Sembene respects Diola culture in the broadest sense but is clearly secular in his sympathies, or at least highly critical toward religion. The elders' folly sometimes nearly overshadows the oppression of the French, who switch sides in the world war, abandoning Petain for de Gaulle, with no change in their treatment of the Diola. But the film ends with a sharp reminder that, whatever their faults, the elders, like their fellow villagers, are essentially villagers of a regime that must have seemed little better to them than any tale of Nazi rule the French might have told them. Unsurprisingly, several years passed before either Senegalese or French people could see Emitai, but films like Sembene's are valuable, not necessarily as correctives to a particular narrative of World War II, but as examples of perspectives from which the moral drama of that conflict is not and never will be central, and the winners of it may never be the good guys.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-91339244287721660982019-09-16T19:29:00.000-04:002019-09-16T19:29:05.132-04:001984 x 2<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>G</b></span>eorge Orwell's dystopian classic <i>1984</i> was published in 1949. Between 1953 and 1956 it was filmed three times: first as an American teleplay, then for British television and finally as a British movie with an American star. Worries about the reputed brainwashing of American POWs during the Korean War may have sparked this Orwellian spree. The first rendering, for the hourlong <i>Studio One</i> anthology program, I haven't seen yet. Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame wrote the British adaptation and gave Peter Cushing a big push toward stardom. For the movie version, William Templeton, who did the <i>Studio One</i> condensation, collaborated on the screenplay, which was directed by Michael Anderson, whose <i>Around the World in 80 Days </i>appeared that same year. Edmond O'Brien played a relatively well-fed Winston Smith for the movie, presumably as a draw for American audiences. An American Winston wasn't entirely implausible, since the novel's Oceania was an Anglo-American superstate. More to the point, however husky he appeared, O'Brien often played weaklings and mediocrities like Orwell's protagonist. His participation in the film, however, apparently made it necessary to change the name of the novel's inquisitor from O'Brien to O'Connor. The movie also changes the name of Big Brother's arch-enemy, the Trotsky to B.B.'s Stalin, from Goldstein to the (less Jewish-sounding?) Cellador. For what it's worth, the Kneale and Templeton scripts have in common Donald Pleasance, who plays Winston's co-worker in the British version and his neighbor in the movie, in essentially the same sniveling mode.<br />
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The basic story remains the same: Winston, discovering fellow party member Julia's love for him, gradually works himself up into potential rebellion against the Big Brother regime, but both are duped by O'Brien/O'Connor, who tricks them into thinking that he is an underground leader. Instead, the inquisitor systematically breaks them down, though we only see his handling of Winston. His goal is to reduce them to such a state of self-loathing that they find solace and meaning only in love for Big Brother. Each version has its virtues. While the Anderson film, actually shorter than the Kneale teleplay, spends more time, to more dramatic effect, on the physical and mental torture of Winston, Kneale actually drives home more effectively the sadism Orwell, embittered by his experiences in Spain and elsewhere, saw underlying totalitarian movements. The novel's famous line about imagining the future as a boot stomping a face forever is quoted by Kneale but not by Templeton and Ralph Bettison. The film tries to make the breaking of Winston more stark and tragic by establishing the protagonist as something of a rebel from the very beginning, first showing him starting a clandestine diary and questioning the party after abjectly unpacking his bags in front of his interactive home telescreen. Cushing's Winston awakens more gradually, but it's implicit that Smith's work at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites news reports to confirm Big Brother's infallibility, is bound to make him question the party's bending of reality. Kneale spends more time explaining the insidious design of Newspeak to reduce people's ability to think outside the parameters set by the party, while the film, again presumably looking to the U.S. market, eschews such egghead talk. The rewriting of history Winston must do is awful enough.<br />
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The two versions are roughly equal in my eyes, with a slight advantage going to Kneale, but watching both in quick sequence regrettably made Orwell's dystopia seem quaint, and not just because of everyone's limited imagination regarding the telescreen. Neither Orwell nor his cinematic translators could be expected to anticipate how the thing they warned against most passionately -- the willful distortion of reality by power and self-interest -- has spread beyond the totalitarian sector. When appeals to objective reality are widely seen as little more than power grabs, many people today seem to find the insistence that two and two make four oppressive. Freedom may not yet be slavery, but when freedom becomes a matter of believing whatever you want to believe -- on climate, on vaccines, elections, people, etc. -- with no reality beyond people's opinions to constrain you, it can be an Orwellian word in a not quite Orwellian world.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-70613993624873319632019-09-08T17:43:00.000-04:002019-09-08T17:43:17.235-04:00DVR Diary: RINGO AND HIS GOLDEN PISTOL (Johnny Oro, 1966)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVYhekXDBGOfiQbtmhT0Z2A9Z9cCevXG1ijJrsb_xLABO_FI_mWP5stP_gCPHXORodHulDH3oJUjupK6knQqO6bockiIzfQQWqSPyTGCj48-5-FYVDCmH-D7pSyb7nRQRNmke5bw2mQmxr/s1600/RingoGP.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="954" data-original-width="661" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVYhekXDBGOfiQbtmhT0Z2A9Z9cCevXG1ijJrsb_xLABO_FI_mWP5stP_gCPHXORodHulDH3oJUjupK6knQqO6bockiIzfQQWqSPyTGCj48-5-FYVDCmH-D7pSyb7nRQRNmke5bw2mQmxr/s400/RingoGP.jpg" width="276" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>S</b></span>ergio Corbucci's follow-up to <i>Django</i> feels more like a conventional American "adult" western than the more exotic product we think of as a spaghetti western. Its protagonist does have a sort of gimmick weapon or two -- in addition to the golden pistol he has a canteen he can convert into a grenade -- but the story is more character-driven and moralistic than Italian westerns in general are thought to be. Bolzoni and Rossetti's screenplay is less a celebration of the amorality of the bounty killer than an affirmation of the rule of law. Accordingly, it really has two protagonists: not just Johnny Ringo aka Johnny Oro (Mark Damon) but the sheriff of Coldstone (Ettore Manni), with whom Ringo, momentarily his prisoner, allies against lawless outsiders. Johnny Oro may seem not merely conventional but conservative in its treatment of Mexicans and especially Indians -- relatively rare figures in spaghetti westerns -- as pure villains. Matching the film's two heroes are two villains: the bandit heir Junaito Perez (Franco de Rosa), who seeks vengeance on Johnny for the deaths of his brothers, and the Apache chief Sebastian (Giovanni Cianfrigia), first seen getting thrown out of a Coldstone saloon by the sheriff. The crux of the story is Johnny's arrest by the sheriff for a petty crime that will keep him in jail for less than a week. During this time, Perez demands that Johnny be delivered to him for revenge, or else he and Sebastian's warriors will descend on the town. As a bounty killer, Johnny isn't especially popular with many of the townsfolk, some of whom, wanting to restore the <i>modus vivendi</i> that existed with Juanito's brothers, urge Norton to turn him over to Perez. They realize too late that it's no longer possible to negotiate with Perez. Having made his alliance with the Apaches, Juanito is committed to letting them sack the town, so long as he has his way with Johnny. This news provokes a mass exodus from Coldstone, while the remaning people, led by the sheriff and ultimately joined by Johnny, resolve to resist the invasion. Corbucci had what looks like a decent budget to work with here, so the flight and the subsequent attack are impressively if not excessively staged, the latter climaxing in some massive explosions before the final showdown between Johnny and Juanito. <i>Johnny Oro</i> doesn't appear to rank high in the Corbucci canon, perhaps because it's relatively square and maybe because Mark Damon lacks the badass charisma of Franco Nero or other Cobucci stars. But Damon is personable enough as a cynic who shows he has a conscience, or at least some compassion after all, and the screenplay boasts a nice range of well-defined, well-performed characters, including a saloon girl (Valeria Fabrizi) whose love-hate relationship with Johnny ends tragically without particularly embittering our hero. He keeps up his blithe front even at the ultimate moment, when he seems helpless before a gloating Juanito but for a convenient bit of reflective material. Johnny Oro -- or Johnny Ringo for those markets where the Ringo name had Django-like magnetism -- is a likable enough rogue who might have been worth following in later adventures had Corbucci not moved on to ultimately better things.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-37551618804659124262019-08-27T18:08:00.002-04:002019-08-27T18:08:52.400-04:00Pre-Code Parade: DOUGHBOYS (1930)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2IQmGAEAZ5O8QNIzpyQuwAiyrhQtf3sQUqvqDtC0D3OIRpSypOfy7Pfuy1UqRyp33CT5qBk5b3812OdmXECe_FkKfo6SQzOJIYD_Cdqzf8HFAhRlwASwgaZkVPgRUT7FUwMTaWgphD6Sn/s1600/Doughboys.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="684" data-original-width="449" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2IQmGAEAZ5O8QNIzpyQuwAiyrhQtf3sQUqvqDtC0D3OIRpSypOfy7Pfuy1UqRyp33CT5qBk5b3812OdmXECe_FkKfo6SQzOJIYD_Cdqzf8HFAhRlwASwgaZkVPgRUT7FUwMTaWgphD6Sn/s400/Doughboys.JPG" width="262" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>B</b></span>uster Keaton reportedly liked <i>Doughboys</i>, his second talking feature, the best of his pictures for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Keaton fans realize that this isn't saying much, but the film apparently appealed to Buster's nostalgia for his time entertaining the troops in Europe. It was one of a cycle of war comedies that included Harry Langdon's <i>A Soldier's Plaything</i>, Wheeler and Woolsey's <i>Half Shot at Sunrise</i> and <i>Anybody's War</i>, featuring the blackface team of Moran and Mack. These films were contemporaries of <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i>, and their advertising could play, as the newspaper ad shown here did, on the already-famous title. Whatever personal meaning <i>Doughboys</i> had for Keaton, there's really little to distinguish it, apart from the military setting, from his soul-crushing output under Metro's creative control. It's the talkie debut of Keaton's millionaire persona -- like Harold Lloyd, he could play any social class, at least in silent film, as each film required. At the same time, however, Keaton is the pathetic "Elmer" character Metro had burdened him with since his last silent feature, <i>Spite Marriage</i>. In fact, there's little consistency in Keaton's performance. He tries to put on airs appropriate to Elmer Stuyvesant's class in some scenes, but whenever he tries to court Mary, the girl of the picture (Sally Eilers), he comes across as more pathetically awkward than a wealthy man probably should have been. In those courting scenes -- for starters, Elmer awaits Mary's departure from work every afternoon, attended by his butler and chauffeur, only to be rebuffed daily -- he resembles a drunk vaguely recalling some of Langdon's baby-man shtick. Even at his most aristocratic, Keaton is obliged to speak demoralizing joke-book dialogue. Mistakenly enlisting for the Great War, Elmer is asked where he was born, and of course says it was in a hospital. "Were you sick?" the recruiting officer asks sarcastically, and of course Elmer answers that he can't remember exactly because he was very young at the time. From there, it's standard service-comedy stuff. Keaton is supported by more vocally-interesting performers, including ukulele-strumming Cliff Edwards as his eventual buddy and Edward Brophy as a drill instructor and romantic rival for ambulance-driver Mary. With his gruff yet high-pitched voice, the bloodthirsty and often apoplectic Brophy nearly steals the picture from Keaton, whose physical comedy here is mostly uninspired, howevermuch he enjoyed the material.<br />
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Things do pick up a little when the awkward squad reaches Europe. One of the intended highlights is a show put on by the troops in which some of the performers, including Elmer, hit the stage in drag. The joke is that Elmer's out of sync with the other "ladies," and that's about it, as if Keaton's mere awkwardness was supposed to be hilarious. Somewhat better is his performance, still in drag, in the dreaded Apache dance, but it's merely violent without the grace a silent Keaton might have lent the scene. My favorite bit is when Elmer blunders into a German trench, only to find his former butler (Arnold Korff) leading a band of starving but friendly troops. Tasked with taking prisoners, Elmer takes their orders for dinner -- they want all the stereotypical Teutonic favorites -- but gets involved in a final adventure with Mary and an unexploded shell before the war ends and the enemy can be fed. There's something dimly Keatonesque about Elmer and Mary's pathetic attempts to deactivate the shell, but it'll only make you think of what a Keaton with full creative control might have made of the war. The ending at least has some redeeming nastiness. Elmer has inherited the family business in peacetime and has installed his war buddies as directors, while hiring Brophy the drill instructor to be a humble janitor, but this scene of triumph is disrupted by the riveting at a nearby construction project, which sends all the veterans scampering for cover. I guess we don't laugh at such moments anymore, but in an M-G-M Keaton picture you take your laughs wherever you can.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-87467986569047958882019-08-25T18:22:00.003-04:002019-08-25T18:22:56.138-04:00On the Big Screen: ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigXfupc9RdymkVX3c_c3KgyeE1lST3H4krCwrD1mJElCIOzieDvkxhaie2hlDlhzyekWOEpTucIdvRzVvrg8YJs0g4jiwNRQEZxRcjlL04SRVu2469suLogKF2LZAsjY5QGm4BTgA1qgii/s1600/OUAT-Hollywood.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="621" data-original-width="338" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigXfupc9RdymkVX3c_c3KgyeE1lST3H4krCwrD1mJElCIOzieDvkxhaie2hlDlhzyekWOEpTucIdvRzVvrg8YJs0g4jiwNRQEZxRcjlL04SRVu2469suLogKF2LZAsjY5QGm4BTgA1qgii/s400/OUAT-Hollywood.JPG" width="217" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>T</b></span>he ninth film by Quentin Tarantino has become slightly controversial for a bit of historic revisionism. It appears to assert that Bruce Lee was not the greatest fighting machine ever to live, but rather more of a pretentious braggart than most who knew him recall him being. In the film, stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) fights Lee (Mike Moh) to at least a standstill after throwing the martial-arts master into the side of a car, having caught him in mid-flying kick. This brawl, provoked by Lee claiming that he could beat "Cassius Clay" in a fight, gets Booth blacklisted as a stuntman, forcing him to work full-time as a chauffeur, handyman and overall stooge for Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the actor for whom Cliff doubled on the western series <i>Bounty Law</i>. But before we get too deep into the main story of the picture, let's linger on the Bruce Lee scene. It's interesting that, while Booth is a co-protagonist of the movie, Tarantino doesn't make him the obvious good guy of the scene by having him, unlike Lee, call Muhammad Ali by what was then his proper name. The writer-director shows impressive discipline here, since by showing Hollywood 1969 from the point of view of two white male has-beens, he adopts a reactionary perspective that's not necessarily his own. There's no objective corrective to Booth's implicit disdain for Lee's kung fu prowess, for instance, nor for Dalton's disdain for spaghetti westerns or both character's contempt for hippies. Tellingly, <i>Hollywood</i> is the first Tarantino film in almost forever with no participation whatsoever by Samuel L. Jackson, whose footnote-narrator function in <i>Inglourious Basterds </i>is taken over by Kurt Russell, who also has an onscreen role as the stunt coordinator who blacklists Booth. It actually surprises me that people don't think of <i>Hollywood</i> as a Trumpian film, though I have no idea whether Tarantino sympathizes to any extent for the current President or his agenda. This is a film which, like <i>Basterds</i>, rewrites history on the assumption that history is already changed by the existence of the auteur's creations, though the extent to which history is rewritten is left unclear at the end.<br />
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Why Tarantino stops where and when he does no doubt means something, but let's stick with Bruce Lee a bit more. In his pretentious speech to the <i>Green Hornet </i>stuntmen, Lee complains that martial-arts exhibitions are mere stylized fakery compared to the genuine mortal combat in the boxing ring. While Tarantino's Lee is wrong to say that boxers like Ali and Sonny Liston literally are trying to kill each other, his distinction between fakery and reality sounds like a thematic statement for the film as a whole. This seems most apparent in the central section of the film, which intercuts between Dalton's struggles on the set of the <i>Lancer</i> show, where he plays a villain, and Booth's visit to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where old-timer George Spahn (Bruce Dern) is held a virtual prisoner by the Manson Family. A hungover Dalton suffers some existential lunchtime agony after blowing his lines a couple of times, but nails his last scene of the day. Oddly, while Tarantino has shown us clips of <i>Bounty Law</i> and other Dalton TV appearances in a realistic pastiche of Sixties techniques, he films the <i>Lancer</i> shoot with no regard for realism, framing the action to fill the widescreen and magnify the moment to suit its presumed significance for Dalton's career. Meanwhile, Booth rides into a scene of real menace, a lone hero against a potential mob (albeit without its leader; Manson himself only appears once in the picture). The sense of danger is real and strong, and yet it's fair to say that this scene above all establishes Hollywood as Tarantino's third consecutive western, even if it also serves as a bookend companion to <i>Basterds</i> bracketing the two more obvious westerns, <i>Django Unchained </i>and <i>The Hateful Eight</i>. In any event, Booth seems to embody a reality principle -- he's a real-life killer as both a war hero and the reputed murderer of his wife -- while Dalton represents a fantasy TV world. By establishing Dalton as the next-door neighbor of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Tarantino seems to be setting up the ultimate intrusion of lethal reality into the TV star's fantasy world by giving Dalton a front-row seat to Tate's murder. It should be clear by now, however, that Tarantino plays by his own rules, but we still need to find the point of his doing so this time.<br />
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So, to spoil the ending a month after the film's release, Dalton's mere existence as a drunken TV cowboy diverts the Manson killers from their original mission. After he berates them for stalling their noisy car outside his house, the Mansonites decide that Dalton is a more fitting target since he and his generation of TV stars taught the hippie generation to kill. Their attack on <i>chez</i> Dalton ends in happy disaster thanks to the presence of an acid-addled Booth and his pitbull buddy, though Dalton himself gets to carry out the <i>coup de grace</i> with a flamethrower left over from one of his movie projects. His reward is to be admitted into the presence of Sharon Tate and her un-doomed friends, while the wounded Booth is taken to a hospital. During the first half of the film, Tate has been a rising star while Dalton has struggled to arrest his decline. While they are next-door neighbors, Dalton actually sees Tate and Roman Polanski for the first time on the February 1969 day that takes up the film's first act. It's like having a version of <i>A Star is Born </i>where the falling and rising stars actually don't know each other. Unlike the hippies who so bother Dalton and Booth, Tate is a benign embodiment of the youth movement that's driving the likes of Dalton out of the spotlight. Tarantino finally finds an artistic use for his foot fetish by having Tate kick off her shoes while watching her performance in <i>The Wrecking Crew</i> on the big screen, linking her with the barefoot girls who both tempt and repel the middle-aged protagonists. I'm not much younger than Tarantino so I can testify to the scandalous symbolic power of bare feet in this period, even if it isn't something the protagonists themselves comment on. In her idealized form here, Tate represents a reconciliation of youth with old Hollywood. By changing history to rescue Tate, Dalton reconciles old Hollywood with now-grateful youth on a fantasy level, after gratifying a darker fantasy by helping exterminate less-grateful youth. Tarantino presumably depends on us knowing that all of this was not to be, and assumes that he can indulge in this fakery precisely because it's only a movie. It's the sort of fantasy men like Dalton and Booth might have more than it is Quentin Tarantino's own fantasy, and while Kurt Russell occasionally speaks up to correct Dalton's misstatements, this final fantasy is allowed to stand, presumably out of sympathy for the Daltons of real life who continued to decline -- unless they lived long enough to be embraced by Tarantino himself. The director has given us not an unreliable narrator but an unreliable narrative or an unreliable experience of how things might have been had some people had their way, or if the world worked the way they presumed it would.<br />
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Whether the exercise was worth the effort, posterity will judge. That being said, <i>Hollywood </i>boasts what may be Leonardo DiCaprio's greatest performance to date, a total immersion into a character to a point, once Dalton adopts a new hairstyle, where the star almost ceases to be recognizable. Playing a more conventional hero type, Pitt isn't as impressive but is still convincing as a man's man of the time. Overall, the film's a dense audio-visual collage combining a wide range of soundbites with detailed recreations of the 1969 cityscape with inevitable echoes of <i>Zabriskie Point</i>, while the violent climax owes something, at least, to the conclusion of <i>Last House on the Left</i>, another attempted exorcism of violent youth. While it's a long film, in some ways it feels less Tarantinian than previous films, with fewer digressive conversations, though Rick Dalton's attempt to describe the novel <i>Ride a Wild Bronco</i> (is it real???) to a precocious child actor is a poignant moment. A day after watching it, I'm not sure how I'd rank <i>Hollywood</i> in the Tarantino canon, or among films in general. Whether it's a point in its favor or not, this one, more than the others, feels like one that needs to be seen more than once to be fully understood or appreciated -- yet I could understand people not wanting to give it that extra time. It's definitely a more ambiguous film than its apparent popularity indicates, and I expect that discussions of it will get more interesting as the momentary controversies subside.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-36946910643556978842019-08-10T20:45:00.001-04:002019-08-10T20:45:22.046-04:00Pre-Code Parade: PEACH O'RENO (1931)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b> <span style="font-size: x-small;">Indignant Matron: </span></b><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">How can you look me in the face?</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Robert Woolsey:</b> <i>Well, I guess I've gotten used to it.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>O</b></span>nce upon a time, Reno NV was the divorce capital of the United States. It was a resort town where people stayed for the minimal period that made them eligible for a divorce under Nevada law as of the early 1930s. Gambling had been made legal in the state around the same time, and the combination of easy divorce and the promise of easy money made Reno "the biggest little city in America." It was an almost inevitable destination for Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, as directed this time by William A. Seiter. I was growing used to a Wheeler and Woolsey formula that starts them off as desperate transients living by their wits, i.e. not particularly well until an improbable opportunity enables Woolsey to flex his con-man -- er, I mean entrepreneurial muscles. <i>Peach O'Reno</i> skips the origin stage to present our heroes, here calling themselves Wattles and Swift, as established, aggressively entrepreneurial divorce lawyers. In the fantasy land of Reno, their bustling office, staffed by girls in bellhop livery, transforms into a casino, the girls stripping down (and almost going overboard until ordered to halt) into skimpy waitress costumes. The transformation sight gags make <i>Peach</i> of a piece with RKO's contemporary cartoonishly absurd musical comedies like <i>Melody Cruise</i> and <i>Down to Their Last Yacht</i> and it all makes me wonder how Wheeler and Woolsey never crossed paths with Astaire and Rogers at their shared studio. We can ponder that another time. For now, know that Wattles and Swift's aggressive business practices have made bitter enemies of the more established firm of Jackson, Jackson, Jackson and Jackson, one of whom arranges for his election as a judge in order to thwart their rivals, regardless of the self-evident conflict of interests. Worse, their success as divorce lawyers has made Wattles, at least, a mortal enemy in the rancher and gambler Ace Crosby (Mitchell Harris). He appears in Reno as Wattles and Swift take on the case, one on each side, of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Bruno, who are determined to separate after a bitter fight at their silver anniversary party. Their daughters hope to prevent the breakup; one of them, inevitably, is Wheeler's regular song-and-dance partner Dorothy Lee.<br />
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To secure a divorce, Wattles and Swift must provide evidence of unfaithful correspondence; their clients must catch their spouses with companions of the opposite sex. Somehow Mrs. Bruno (Cora Witherspoon) is hooked up with Crosby the gambler, while Mr. Bruno (Joseph Cawthorn) is attached to a cross-dressing Wattles, whose coquettish ways attract the worrisome attention of Crosby. This is a great film if you want to see Bert Wheeler in drag, and it'll also make you reflect on how poor a shot a westerner can be. Once Crosby figures out Wattles' disguise, a bullet-proof vest saves the lawyer from an early demise, but he then makes the mistake of taking off his vest and walking out of the death-chamber before Crosby is safely out of the casino. Crosby resumes fire at near point-blank range, always aiming for the ass as you do in comedies, but always manages to miss the crawling, scurrying Wattles until the police collect him. That leaves the big divorce trial, at which point the filmmakers lose track of the narrative. Judge Jackson (Sam Hardy) presides, but rather than sabotage the lawyers he seems perfectly content, if not outright amused, to play his part in a vaudeville sketch, alongside the jurors and an intrusive radio announcer. No matter: this is the sort of film where a divorcing couple thinks better of their plans at the last minute and fall sobbing into each other's arms. Not only are they reunited, but they now have sons-in-law in Wattles and Swift. It lacks the anarchic edge of Wheeler and Woolsey's most outrageous films but <i>Peach O'Reno</i> is amiable enough and if you like the RKO team as a matter of habit you'll definitely like them here.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9149411832127844385.post-9430732635523600122019-08-04T11:24:00.001-04:002019-08-04T11:24:18.773-04:00DVR Diary: L'AINE DES FERCHAUX (1963)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>A</b></span>lso known as "Doom Magnet" and "An Honorable Young Man," Jean-Pierre Melville's first color film is widely regarded as the weakest film of his great 1960s run, and that looks like a fair assessment. Something's off right from the start. Star Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a mediocre boxer entering the ring for a make-or-break fight. The crowd is entirely unresponsive as the fighters are introduced and while they fight during the opening credits. After Michel, Belmondo's character, loses on points, part of the crowd comes to life to heckle him as he leaves the arena. Perhaps we've learned something about Michel; to lose the way he did in an uneventful bout suggests that he lacks heart. He definitely lacks something. After two weeks he's reduced to abandoning his apartment to avoid paying rent and selling his and his girlfriend Lina's spare clothes, and the only reason he doesn't sell her heirloom necklace, regardless of what he tells her later, is that the thing is actually worthless. To be fair, Michel is looking for work and manages to land a promising gig as a "secretary" to Dieudonne Ferchaux (Charles Vanel), a banker who's fleeing France to avoid prosecution for murdering some Africans back in colonial days. The only catch is that Michel has to leave with Ferchaux immediately. That means sneaking out on Lina (Malvina Silberberg) as she sits at an outdoor cafe table without a sou to her name. Our protagonist has been established as just about as unlikable as possible.<br />
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Ferchaux is bound for the U.S., where he has funds stashed in a safe-deposit box. He can't get the bulk of his money out of his American bank accounts because of the extradition threat, however, and to keep one step ahead he heads south with Michel, toward the ultimate goal of Venezuela and another safe-deposit box. The second half of the film takes place around New Orleans and includes a nice little travelogue of the city's red-light district. Michel grows increasingly weary of Ferchaux as the older man, less lordly on the run, grows more emotionally needy -- almost like a girlfriend. He thinks of taking the money and running, but a group of unsavory locals led by Jeff (American character actor Todd Martin), a French-speaking veteran who runs a diner, is getting the same idea. By now Michel has an American girlfriend (Michele Mercier), which gives him extra motivation to grab the money. But once he does so, he has second thoughts that reach back a great distance. He reminds himself of what he did to Lina back home, and that seems to inspire him to return the money. When he goes back to Ferchaux's lair, he finds the old man fighting with Todd and his crew. Michel comes to the rescue, but Ferchaux is already mortally wounded. As a final act of generosity, the dying man offers Michel the key to the safe-deposit box in Caracas. "You and your money can go to hell," Michel answers as the film fades out. You get the impression that he did the right thing at the end not so much out of loyalty to Ferchaux but to make virtual amends to Lina, if not simply to do the right thing for once. While Melville based this film on a novel by Georges Simenon, France's 20th-century master of mystery and crime fiction, it comes across as an inflated anecdote, padded with second-unit American footage. Melville's protagonists are rarely good guys, but they often have some quality that earns some sympathy from the audience, but Michel is too much of a selfish mediocrity for most of the film to be worth caring about, while Vanel's Ferchaux is a monster who turns into a wretch. I get the impression that we were supposed to appreciate the color and the atmosphere more than anything else while waiting for Michel's moral awakening, but that wasn't enough. This wasn't a terrible film, only unengaging beyond its value as a travelogue for parts of 1960s America. Fortunately, Melville's best work was still ahead of him.Samuel Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00934870299522899944noreply@blogger.com0