Brandon's movie memory

From the opening scene (David’s birth during a windy storm) onward, this is funny and fantastic. Great acting + production from the artist Cukor and the mighty David O. Selznick. The quality of light is especially mesmerizing, and the sets held my attention as much as the performances.

That’s no slight on the performances. Professional child actor Freddie Bartholomew (Anna Karenina) plays David for the first half (passable Frank Lawton for the second half) and does very well. Occasionally he falls into that annoying overly-cute-and-naive groove that child actors rode for the first fifty years of Hollywood, but when asked to convey feeling he does a better job than most of the grown-ups.

Other stand-outs:
Edna May Oliver (the red queen in ’33 “alice in wonderland”) as DC’s aunt, who opens the picture, disappears, then returns in the second half.
W.C. Fields as DC’s broke landlord turned assistant at the law offices.
Lennox Pawle (died the following year) as idiot savant Mr. Dick.
Maureen O’Sullivan (“the tall t”, famous for playing tarzan’s jane) as DC’s sickly child bride.
Madge Evans (romantic lead in “hallelujah i’m a bum” and bing crosby’s “pennies from heaven”) as Agnes, the girl DC is supposed to end up with.
Basil Rathbone (pointy-faced sherlock holmes) as evil stepdad Mr. Murdstone
Jessie Ralph (40+ films in the 30′s incl. “les miserables”) as Nurse Peggotty

Three of these actors would star together in Tod Browning’s “Devil Doll” the next year.

I missed “The Informer” actress Una O’Connor and “It’s a Wonderful Life” co-star Lionel Barrymore. Either too many actors to keep straight, or their scenes were during the ice cream break.

The giant novel is obviously very compressed to fit a two-hour movie. Katy says whole characters and eras and episodes are missing. It worked just fine for me, knowing I was watching a condensed version (if it’d been a standalone movie with no giant novel behind it, I might think it underdeveloped). Each character gets enough of a defining introduction scene so we remember him when he pops up later in the story… and it helps that the actors all look as distinctive as they do. I thought the movie was great. Katy half-watched and helped me connect story threads.

The only other features I’ve seen from 1935 are “The 39 Steps” and “Bride of Frankenstein”, both wonderful. “Mutiny on the Bounty” beat this out for best picture.

Less of a feel-good-about-war movie than a salute to war veterans, with Bing Crosby and his partner Danny Kaye (of Secret Life of Walter Mitty) coming across their old general by chance and staging a christmastime salute to him with all the old guys. Movie was pretty okay with good enough music, didn’t feel as lightweight as most of the musicals we’ve seen but also not as exciting / high-quality. Paramount’s first widescreen movie, funny since so much of it takes place indoors on stages.

The guys fall for a sister act that sings about being sisters (like in Young Girls of Rochefort, but the American sister song isn’t half as good as the French) played by glorious Rosemary Clooney (one of her only other film roles besides Red Garters) and Vera-Ellen (of some other Danny Kaye movies, not much else). V-E had to wear high collars in the movie to cover her neck which was gross-looking from anorexia. The ol’ general Dean Jagger played the sheriff in Fuller’s Forty Guns.

Kaye’s part was written for Sinatra to reunite the duo from “Holiday Inn”, the movie that premiered the Irving Berlin song “White Christmas” 12 years earlier. They even used sets from “Holiday Inn”, which I’m starting to suspect might be a better movie. Highest-grossing film of 1954, oscar-nom for Berlin’s new “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep”. I preferred “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army.” This was Michael Curtiz’s 25th movie since Casablanca – he doesn’t seem a very distinctive or celebrated director. Shot by a guy named Loyal, written by a guy named Melvin and two guys named Norman.

Pretty bearable anime. I’d been warned that it’s such a mindblowingly twisted movie that most people can’t follow… but it’s not that I couldn’t follow, it’s that I didn’t care enough to. Some of the visuals are neat, but the story and movie are just so uninteresting, I barely made it all the way through. A plot description would take too long, but it involves a lot of scientists and a dream machine that makes some of ‘em go hudsucker-proxy nuts and makes others think they can take over the world in dreams. I don’t remember how it ends.

Beautiful Keira K. (domino) lives in a fancy house with her writer kid-sister Briony (globe-nom Saoirse Ronan, appearing in the next Peter Jackson movie) and mom Harriet Walter (from Katy’s Pride & Prejudice, not Wright’s) and older brother (?) Patrick Kennedy from Bleak House. College hottie James McAvoy lives in a little house on their property with mom Brenda Blethyn (Wright’s P&P, Little Voice). The two are in love but (gasp) from different social classes. Will they defy society and marry anyway? Of course.

Wait, no. They’ve long been infatuated with each other, and during the summer when they are completely exploding for each other, a visitor to the estate rapes another visitor, and young peeping Briony tells the cops it was McAvoy, leading to his arrest and getting sent to war to die instead of going back to college and marrying his true love, who also went to war and died, but as a nurse. Briony also becomes a nurse (now played by spooky Romola Garai, Wilbur’s love interest in “Amazing Grace”) then an author. Fifty years later (now Vanessa Redgrave of “Cradle Will Rock” and “The Devils”) she’s on a TV interview show explaining that her new book is an attempt at atonement, the story of the long life the two lovers could have had together if not for her young meddling.

I loved the movie, beautiful and sad. I might just think it’s pretty good if I see it a second time, since my expectations were pretty low before the first time (period literary adaptation starring McAvoy, who was not good at all in Last King of Scotland), but this time I was enthralled. Sound design / music used typewriter key effects as percussion, my favorite part.

Guy from Slate says the epic single-shot at the beach is unnecessary and showoffy. Robbie on Reverse Shot calls it “tonally awkward” and says: “Wright’s grandstanding in this sequence bespeaks of a decidedly disjointed approach, as well as disappoints after his gloriously measured 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which smartly employed the long take as a coherent, unifying device.” Elsewhere I’d read that the shot is there to show off (even Wright admits he was showing off) the enormity of war, to take it beyond our doomed male protagonist, open up the world of the film beyond the intensely personal closed-off world of the first half. Some part of that latter explanation clicked for me, because towards the end of the shot I’d decided that McAvoy wouldn’t make it out alive. Tonally consistent or not, the shot is terrific on its own.

Comedians: Patton Oswalt (with his star wars bit), Sarah Silverman (scripted as always), Blaine Capatch (then wastes half his running time on lame stephen hawking jokes), David Cross (dog jokes?), Jasper Redd, Eugene Mirman (keeps the props and charts to a minimum), Maria Bamford (voices), Brian Posehn.

“Comedy”: Dana Gould (extended blowjob joke not as good as louis ck), Zach G (had nothing to say), Steve Agee (the gay neighbor who is not posehn in sarah silverman’s show), Jon Benjamin (as usual with prepped material that overstays its welcome), Andy Kindler, Morgan Murphy, “Seth” G.

Movie is shot on batman-bad-guy angle and edited in a way that does not pretend it was a seamless show, which is kinda refreshing for being more truthful than usual, but kinda sad because we get the full-length intros of each comic but abbreviated actual comedy.

More shorts from “The Movies Begin” disc 1.

President McKinley at Home (1897): the first president on film plays with his hat and looks uncomfortable.

Pack Train at Chilkoot Pass (1898), reportedly recreated at the start of chaplin’s gold rush but I couldn’t say for sure.

Sky Scrapers of New York City from North River (1903)

Georgetown Loop, Colorado (1903) – those are passengers waving their hankies out the window to be on camera.

San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake (1906) – awesome film, I had no idea.

The Dog and His Various Merits (1908)

Moscow Clad In Snow (1908) – just what it says

Aeroplane Flight and Wreck (1910)

The faces of the leads are not shown until the fifteen minute mark. For the first sixth of the movie there’s only the poetic narration faded with shots of their bodies and hands.

I don’t know what to say when confronted with Resnais or Marker movies, keep throwing out “poetic narration”.

Rest of the movie is conventional by comparison with the intro and with 90% of “Last Year at Marienbad”, but then “Marienbad” came afterwards and I’ve watched it a bunch of times, so I would have to say that.

IMDB plot: “While shooting an international movie about peace in Hiroshima, a married French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) has a torrid one night stand with a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). They feel a deep passion for each other and she discloses her first love in times of war in the French town of Nevers to him. He falls in love with her and asks her to stay with him in Hiroshima.”

The film is such a dream that when I finish watching it I seem to wake up and forget most of the details. This is the second time I’ve seen it and it never quite sticks. Ahh, dvd commentary will help.

Writer Marguerite Duras is a novelist whose book is sitting on my bedside waiting for me to read (update: oooh, it was good). Lead actor Okada was in Naruse’s “Mother”, “Rififi In Tokyo”, “X From Outer Space” and “Lady Snowblood”. He played the lead in “Woman in the Dunes”, the main character’s boss in “The Face of Another” and the man in white in “Stairway to the Distant Past” (released the same year Okada died). Riva (still alive) was in “Kapo” the same year, then starred in “I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse” and played Binoche’s mother (?) in “Blue”. Shot by super master Sacha Vierny (“Marienbad”, “Muriel”, Bunuel, Ruiz, Greenaway) and Michio Takahashi (“Gamera vs. Barugon”). Editor Henri Colpi won the palme d’or at cannes two years later (tying with Viridiana) with his directorial debut.

Below is from the commentary track.

The intro reminds of Pompeii and “evokes the very beginnings of life”.

On the woman’s visit to Hiroshima’s hospitals and landmarks: “it will never be more than a theme-park experience”

Scenes from “Children of Hiroshima” are used precisely for their lack of authenticity, and the images remind of Nazi death camps.

Resnais was commissioned to make a film about the atomic bomb with Marker scripting, but it fell through, leading instead to this film.

Resnais and Varda both love cats (surely not as much as Marker does!)

Duras “would become the high priestess of French literature in the 1960′s and 70′s”

Despite not writing his own screenplays, “Resnais can fairly be described as an auteur because a majority of his feature films and many of his shorts deal with the nature of memory and its relationship to the present. Memories have a vivid present-tense quality in Resnais’s cinema and in Marienbad… they are almost indistinguishable from current incidents.”

Hey wow, he mentions “The Koumiko Mystery”.

The star of “Children of Paradise” had a similar thing happen – an affair with a german officer, then publically shamed with hair cut off after the war.

Resnais is an expert on comic books.

“Innocence will overcome destruction.”

More poetry (written and filmed) on death and war. Narration is about the town of Guernica destroyed by German (film says Nazi?) bombings in ’37 during the Spanish Civil War, while the visuals are of Picasso paintings, then a sculpture at the end. Mournful in tone, dark, with crossfades between paintings and segments, a few lighting and editing tricks to tell the story. Most of the screen time is not the Guernica painting – that’s just one of the ones they use. The writing by Paul Éluard is good but didn’t strike me as great as the “Night and Fog” narration. I enjoyed the score by Guy Bernard (Statues Also Die). The visuals are more of a Picasso showcase than a filmmaker showoff, though it’s all cut together very effectively.

Co-directed by Robert Hessens, Resnais’s Oscar-winning accomplice on the “Van Gogh” short.

Paul Éluard was a poet who associated with Dali, appeared in “L’Age d’or”, was quoted in “Alphaville”, and died shortly after this film was released. Same photographer as on “Gauguin” and “Van Gogh”. Resnais credited as editing himself. Narration by the princess from Cocteau’s “Orpheus”.

Starts with a Jean Cocteau quote and animated/drawn images on TV. It’s “un film de Chris Marker”, no fooling around with that. Music by Toru Takemitsu (uncredited on IMDB) who scored a bunch of classics like “Double Suicide”, “Kwaidan”, “Pitfall” and “Ran”. Co-produced by “Le chat Pompon” (hmmm).

Marker meets “by chance” a young girl at the ’64 Tokyo Olympics, quickly loses interest in the Olympics themselves and instead follows her around the city, pondering shops and trinkets, symbols and national and personal identity as in Sans Soleil. Halfway through the picture, Marker “disappears”, goes back to France, and the narration is taken over by Koumiko, tape-recordings of her answers to his interview questions about current events, beauty, love, animals, and finally WWII. Catherine Lupton’s book notes that “this premise enables Marker to synthesize all the widely disparate methods and idioms explored in his films so far: a light-hearted personal travelogue, the investigative interview and the melancholy and disquieting fiction.”

Koumiko stops under a billboard for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, then the camera follows pedestrians with umbrellas while the theme song from that film plays… nice.

Marker’s trademark animal appearances: a googly-eyed owl on an outdoor sign, a whole cat montage, and Koumiko imitating both animals.

Beautiful movie, just as essential as the other Marker films I’ve managed to see. I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would, despite the horrid video quality.

“Marker’s fond and playful homage to the French New Wave… The fluid roles that Koumiko plays for the camera mesh with the presentation of Japan as a ‘world of appearances,’ as Marker would later call it in Sans Soleil”.