by ·Comments Off on Man On Wire (2008, James Marsh)

Marsh, director of Wisconsin Death Trip, weaves stock footage (shot by the participants), current interviews and re-enactments to show how Philippe Petit and associates snuck to the top of both Twin Towers one night in ’74 and shot a line across their roofs for Petit to walk and dance upon. Pretty unbelievable stuff, kinda sad and inspiring. I flashed back to Maddin’s comments on lost buildings of his youth in My Winnipeg as much as I paid attention to the screen.

I wanted a lock-groove Michael Nyman score to propel the movie into a screaming intensity, but that never happened. Recognized a few other music pieces, which I suppose were “In The Hall Of The Mountain King”, “A Fifth of Beethoven” and Erik Satie.

David Edelstein: “It goes without saying — and happily, Man on Wire doesn’t say it — that all this took place in a more naive time, that the notion of foreigners with fake IDs slipping past guards into the Twin Towers has a different meaning now. So does the prospect of falling from the top.”

by ·Comments Off on William Wellman double-feature

Wild Boys of the Road (1933)
TCM presented some pre-code treats from Wellman, who made a bunch of them. This was one of six films Wellman directed that year – those were the days.

A fully action-packed youth depression drama that wastes no time. Well-made and, incredibly (since I hate child performances in early movies), well-acted too. I kinda loved it.

Eddie (played Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet!) is a cool kid who proudly drives a junker car with impenetrable 30’s slang phrases scrawled all over it. He and his best friend Tommy (22-year-old Edwin Phillips) drive around, sneak into school dances and make out with their girlfriends a whole lot. Unfortunately, Tommy’s got The Great Depression, and he passes it on to Eddie, whose dad gets laid off, leading the kids to sell the car and flee the city to look for work elsewhere. While rail-riding, they meet a girl named Sally (Dorothy Coonan, 18, who married 37-yr-old Wellman the following year) who later gets raped by a train brakeman (Ward Bond, John Wayne’s murdered friend in Rio Bravo) – that and all the hot high-school kissing earlier in the picture justify the movie’s inclusion in whatever “forbidden” pre-code DVD set is coming out this week. One scene on the trains is memorably wonderful: rail cops ducking behind a barrier on the ground while being pelted with eggs by a hundred kids on the moving train – the one time the movie goes into giddy Zero For Conduct territory. But during all the fun, Sally is getting raped on a train car, and the kids take bloody offscreen revenge when the perpetrator is discovered, immediately and severely darkening the mood set by the egg-tossing scene.

Sally and the boys make it to Sally’s aunt’s house in Chicago. The aunt (Minna Gombell of a couple Borzage films) is extremely friendly and welcoming and feeds them all cake, but she’s also running a speakeasy, a brothel, or something else (it wasn’t very clear) and is immediately busted by the cops, leaving our kids on the run again.

Hard-luck kids from around the nation build a sort of youth shantytown in Ohio. Tommy loses a leg to a train. The kids flee to New York where Eddie finally finds a job, but in order to earn a quick buck to afford respectable clothes he accidentally gets mixed up with a holdup gang and is arrested. The judge, with a hard-luck kid of his own, buys their story and sends them home… maybe not the most believable ending in the world, but a deserved bit of relief.

Other Men’s Women (1931)

Back a couple years for this next one, the sound quality is noticeably worse. The movie is noticeably worse too… I’m not sorry I watched it, but I wouldn’t have missed much if I’d just gone to sleep dreaming of troubled youth.

Everything seems to revolve around trains in these movies. This time all our heroes work on the trains, starting with our cheesy lead, alcoholic Bill (Grant Withers, would play Judge Priest’s political rival 30 years later in The Sun Shines Bright), who is always handing out gum with his puzzling catchphrase “have a little chew on me.” He’s dating Marie, a big-eyed blond-wigged waitress played by Joan Blondell (popular in ’31 with Blonde Crazy and The Public Enemy, much later in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter), but he’s fond of Lily (Mary Astor, the princess in The Palm Beach Story, far less outrageous here), the wife of his best friend Jack (Regis Toomey of The Big Sleep, played older salvation army man in Guys & Dolls). Bill, staying with the couple while he sobers up, presents it to Jack one day at work like this: “Lily and I found out all of a sudden we loved each other.” A fistfight ensues and somehow Jack is blinded… blinded! Things couldn’t get sillier – but wait – a rainstorm is flooding the river and threatening to knock down the dam. Bill figures if he drives a loaded train out onto the dam the extra weight will stabilize it. While more sensible supporting characters (have I mentioned James Cagney, a few months before The Public Enemy?) try talking him out of it, blind Jack sneaks onto the train and drives it onto the dam himself, resulting in a spectacular suicide. A few months later when things settle down, Lily and Bill are happily together, a weird sort of happy ending.

Written by Maude Fulton, who adapted a film of The Maltese Falcon the same year (not the one starring Mary Astor). I’m not sure if this is sordid enough to count as a naughty pre-code movie. I guess married Lily kisses another man. Bill acts gay for a laugh in an early scene, but that’d probably still be allowed. There’s another guy with one leg. Clever bit where Bill jumps off the head of a train slowly rolling past a coffee joint, gets himself a cup while counting the cars that pass, then jumping back on at the end. Nothing wrong with the film or the acting (though Bill and Marie suck at playing drunk – the illusion falls apart in close-up) but nothing especially exciting either.

by ·Comments Off on Son of Rambow (2007, Garth Jennings)

From the director of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It seems that after British directors make flop sci-fi epics, they then crank out a life-affirming children-starring film-fest pic to make up for it. Oooh, Jennings also made Blur’s “Coffee & TV” video. That makes up for a lot.

The movie, with cinematography by Jess Hall (Hot Fuzz), was very, very small, all 2.35 letterboxed on our little hotel TV way across the room. But what we managed to see was pretty good, a fun little movie totally worth the rental. Katy says I said it was better than the trailer, which I think is a weird thing to have said but I suppose is true.

by ·Comments Off on Duplicity (2009, Tony Gilroy)

When Clive Owen is drugged and scammed by Julia Roberts at the start of the movie, you know they’ll be together a few scenes later. It doesn’t look like the kind of romantic comedy that’s going to artificially keep them apart for eighty minutes followed by a super-romantic get-together at the end, especially after such a confrontational intro to their characters. But when they end up working together – sure enough, a few scenes later – are they going to stay together, or end up tricking each other in a series of unsatisfying twist endings?

Surprisingly, their relationship is real and they stay together through the whole picture, though pretending they hate each other in public. Plot revolves around their counter-intelligence jobs at Paul Giamatti’s huge faux-Proctor & Gamble company, trying to steal a big secret formula from Tom Wilkinson’s rival company, with Roberts as the inside man. Giamatti’s plan is to beat Tom to the patent office and take his product public before he has the chance, and Roberts/Owen’s plan is to let Giamatti think he’s won while they take the formula to Europe and sell it for millions. The Big Twist: Wilkinson and his company’s superior counter-intel program knew everything all along and the formula was a fake.

A very fun movie with classy, classic style and charming acting. Some floaty split-screen montages give the light Soderbergh feeling of an Ocean’s Eleven sequel. Opening title sequence featuring a slow-motion airport-runway throwdown between the two CEO’s sets the comic tone. Chronology-juggling gradually, effectively reveals the depth of Roberts and Owen’s relationship and their scam, seems more purposeful than the chronojuggling he did in Michael Clayton. Same producers, cinematographer (Robert Elswitt, There Will Be Blood), editor (the director’s brother) and composer (James Newton Howard) as the previous movie. I am already looking forward to whatever Gilroy does next. Critics would disagree, judging from the rotten tomatometer, and Katy thought it was just pretty good.

by ·Comments Off on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001, Chris Columbus)

Yep, they put the most beloved children’s book franchise in generations into the hands of the director of Bicentennial Man and Stepmom. Why… because he’d made Home Alone a decade earlier? Anyway, everyone knows good filmmaking doesn’t matter when it comes to franchise entertainment. And since I’d been watching all things Potter, with works by Sally (Orlando), H.C. (Hellzapoppin’) and Dennis (Secret Friends), figured it was time we gave old Harry another chance.

Sadly, Katy agreed that it’s pretty crap overall. Good scene where Hagrid busts down a door is the last good scene in the movie. There’s something about a traitorous teacher (who was it?) resurrecting the main evil dude using the titular stone, but I was ignoring most of that and wondering why they couldn’t hire kids who could act. Nice to see John Cleese and Alan Rickman anyway. I’m sure Richard Harris was a very fine performer, but I prefer Michael Gambon’s less-boring Dumbledore.

by ·Comments Off on Secret Friends (1991, Dennis Potter)

I don’t especially want to talk about Secret Friends. On one hand, it was interesting to compare to Potter’s book Ticket To Ride, which I just read, and the flashbacks and ambiguous dream sequences a la Alain Resnais’s Providence should be worth discussing, but on the other hand I’ve overdosed on Potter’s poisonous misanthropy and just want to move past this one for now.

Our hero on the train, looking like he is wearing a wig and false eyebrows:
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Alan Bates (Losey’s The Go-Between) is our guy, scheming against his wife Helen (Gina Bellman, title character in Blackeyes, later starred in the show Coupling) who doesn’t actually seem so bad. Riding the train to attempt to sell his obsessively detailed paintings of wildflowers, he has an identity crisis. Plenty of weirdness follows involving hotel prostitutes, affairs with neighbors, our contemptible protagonist’s painful upbringing, confused passers-by, and stuff that is happening which is not happening… which does not seem to be happening at all. Potter directed his own adaptation of his own novel.

Helen, spooked:
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Strangers on a train:
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by ·Comments Off on Brimstone and Treacle (1976, Barry Davis)

I’ve always wondered about this one. In my mind it represented all the non-musical Potter plays, the other half of his career, and so I had to coax myself into finally watching it for fear it’d damage my image of the great man. Liked it for sure, but don’t think I would’ve been hooked if this was the first one of his plays/adaptations I’d seen. Well-written, subversive, but dark as all hell… I am surprised this guy was allowed to work in television.

Over two decades before The Blair Witch Project:
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Michael Kitchen (Out of Africa, recurring role in recent James Bond flicks) is Martin, an evil young man who bumps into strangers on the street and tries to convince them that they know each other. Denholm Elliott (A Room with a View, Bad Timing, best known as a good guy in the Indiana Jones movies) almost falls for it then ditches him, but Martin stole Elliott’s wallet, takes it home and easily talks his way into the house with the wife Patricia Lawrence (in Potter’s Son of Man a few years earlier). Martin sees that their daughter Pattie is lying brain-damaged at home and fakes that he was an ex of hers who was turned down for marriage, offers to help care for her, acts ever so polite. Elliott is suspicious but doesn’t move fast enough, and Martin integrates himself. The wife might be gullible, but she’s also so weary from taking care of Pattie constantly and jumps at the chance to leave her in compassionate hands for a few hours each day. One night when Martin is about to rape Pattie for at least the second time, she wakes up screaming, aware of herself at last, and Martin flees, immediately starts looking for a new family.

Move mouse over image to see Michael Kitchen get over-excited:
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Barry Davis (who also directed Potter’s Schmoedipus the same year) keeps things lively on a miniscule budget. The not-at-all-naturalistic lighting effects (see first screenshot) are especially nice. From the initial street scene on, it stays remarkably intense, bizarre and horrifying. Martin has supernatural powers and hairy demon feet. He talks politics with the family, encourages their own worst impulses. Potter writes: “Deport them, that’s what I say. England for the English” into the mouth of the devil. Then of course there’s the home invasion aspect, the rape of a mentally damaged girl and the miracle ending. This was banned for eleven years (“brilliantly written and made, but nauseating”) – that’s why IMDB lists it as a 1987 release. The theatrical remake starring Sting was actually the first version released in the UK.

Denholm Elliott:
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My favorite line… having some brandy – “There’s fluoride in the water, so are you able to drink it neat, dear?”

by ·Comments Off on Africa paradis (2006, Sylvestre Amoussou)

The rarest thing: a smart, funny satire that actually works. Europe is falling into chaos with raging unemployment, while in the “United States of Africa” the people prosper. Immigration is strictly controlled, so our young white protagonist lovers, despite their education and training (teacher and engineer, I think), can’t get meaningful work in Africa. They try it anyway, paying a smuggler to fly them into Africa to take their chances. They’re caught and quite humanely imprisoned in a high-tech facility. She (Pauline: Charlotte Vermeil) takes a job as a domestic servant to Modibo Koudossou (played by the director), a tolerant pro-immigration-reform politician, while he (Olivier: Stéphane Roux, voice of the narrator in Ratatouille) escapes and goes on the run, taken in by a group of poor whites who live in the housing projects.

Meanwhile, Modibo’s rival politician Yokossi (Emile Abossolo M’bo: Ezra, Night On Earth) has got the crooked police chief (Eriq Ebouaney, star of Lumumba, also in Femme Fatale, Kingdom of Heaven, 35 Shots of Rum) gunning for Modibo. Yes, there are crooked cops even in a utopian African film. Modibo doesn’t get to pass his reform bill, but at least he escapes assassination and our lovable white kids help defeat the bad cop. Reunited, Olivier offers Pauline the chance to return home to Europe in shame and poverty with him, but she elects to stay and marry noble Modibo, who has fallen for her, instead. Olivier, though proven good with electronics, was always kind of a douche so this is a happy ending.

Movie is definitely cheap-looking, but not The President Has AIDS-cheap, a respectable made-for-TV-looking cheap. The writing is full of fun satirical tidbits and race-reversal jokes that delighted the High audience. Katy liked it too, and we can’t account for the 4/10 rating on the IMDB…

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched March 2009

The Ugly Duckling (1939, Jack Cutting)
Katy said the baby swan wasn’t ugly enough, but I think it’s that (1) he’s different from the ducks and therefore ugly to them, and (2) when he sees his reflection in the funhouse ripples of the water he appears ugly. IMDB says it was the final Silly Symphony cartoon, but it wasn’t very musical… no songs about what it’s like to be a duckling.

Katy: “They’ve turned The Ugly Duckling into a marital dispute.”
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Me: “Hey there were six baby swans in that shot! There are only s’posed to be five.”
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–
Atlanta (1996, Miranda July)
Miranda July’s performance as both the 12-year-old swimmer and her overbearing mother is wonderful. However, this is “video art”, which means it’s like a short film but it’s full of video static and looks like shit. The sound was defective on my copy, and since it’s all interviews, the sound is kinda important.
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The Summit (1995, The Bros. Quay)
For the first minute I thought “hey wow, the Quays have made something totally different from their usual pretentious goth stop-motion” and I was happy. A few minutes later that thought still stands, but I am not happy. In what language are these guys giving monologues in a featureless room? Oh wait, I get it, “summit”. Funny. Some sites list this as a short satirical art piece, another calls it a 70-minute failed pilot. I saw the short version. The Quays come out and shake their hands at the end. Jonathan Stone, one of the two guys, was in Institute Benjamenta.
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Jumping (1984, Osamu Tezuka)
Half a funny concept piece about someone who is an awfully good jumper and the places he ends up (incl. stereotype-africa and hell itself), and half a showoff reel of first-person perspective animation. Excels at both… wonderful.
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Sisyphus (1975, Marcell Jankovics)
Another showoff reel, this time of bodily poses and stress as Sis. rolls the rock uphill, but this one not as delightfully enjoyable as Jumping, and all full of horrible gasping groaning noises.
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5/4 (1974, Hieronim Neumann)
A split-screen stunt used to more wonderful effect than Timecode (or About Time 2), sometimes seeming to fragment a single image, and sometimes looking like different takes of the same action. Playful. Music is light and quiet and not in 5-4 and there are spacey 70’s-sci-fi sound effects whenever something cool happens, which is most of the time.
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