by ·Comments Off on Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder)

One of those long-discussed greatest-films-ever which upon first glance (and second glance) actually does seem to be one of the greatest films ever. It’s a super story with an incredible character for Gloria Swanson and boy, she nails it, but it also helps that I am a film nerd. Swanson helped destroy Erich von Stroheim’s directoral career 20 years earlier and now Wilder casts Swanson as a washed-up super-eccentric former silent actress and Stroheim as her tragic manservant. Enter William Holden and his young friends, all wannabe writer/directors, and a cameo by Cecil DeMille and Wilder’s got room to skewer damn near everything in Hollywood. And he manages to keep the mood comical while preserving a film noir (the commentary calls it monster-movie) atmosphere, without letting anybody’s flaws go unpunished.

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Opens with William Holden dead in a swimming pool, as he introduces his own dead body then narrates his story. Sound familiar, American Beauty?

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A dead-end screenwriter, he’s trying to avoid getting his car repoed when he pulls into a faded mansion just in time to see Swanson and Stroheim preparing to bury her pet monkey. She is pleased to meet a hot young screenwriter, hires him immediately to work on her monstrous script of Salome, which is to be her long-awaited return to the silver screen.

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Holden had no clear prospects as a screenwriter, he’s got no cash and no girl and he dreads the shameful return home to the local newspaper he left to pursue his Hollywood dreams, so he hangs out working on her futile script for a clueless Cecil B. DeMille, realizing too late that he’s becoming her kept boy.

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Was up for bunches of oscars but got its clock cleaned by All About Eve at the awards. Still came away with writing, art direction and music (beating Samson & Delilah, the actual film DeMille is seen shooting on the Paramount set). I don’t know if Golden Globes were important then (or if they are now) but it got picture/director/actress over there.

DeMille and Swanson:
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Immediately preceded Ace in the Hole, a dark time for Wilder. Stroheim would only be in seven more films before his death. Holden would play Audrey Hepburn’s object of affection in Sabrina. Swanson had profitably retired from acting and did not use this as a springboard back in, though she did make quite a few TV appearances.

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Apparently was turned into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in the 90’s.

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IMDB trivia page is packed. Among the actors who turned this movie down: Double Indemnity star Fred MacMurray, Red River star Monty “Raw Deal” Clift, Mae West (who was not in silent films), early Lubitsch star Pola Negri and Greta Garbo.

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Erich von Stroheim hadn’t directed in 20 years… Queen Kelly with Gloria Swanson having been his downfall. Norma Desmond says DeMille directed her twelve times – he actually directed Swanson six times. Love interest Nancy Olson went on to Disney flicks in the 60’s and Jack Webb (her fiancee Artie) would spend the rest of his career writing and acting for Dragnet.

Holden with Webb and Olson:
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Norma’s “Waxworks” (her bridge partners): H.B. Warner (DeMille’s Jesus in King of Kings, later a Capra regular), Buster Keaton (who was actually doing alright in ’50 with his TV show, in between film roles In The Good Old Summertime and Limelight) and Anna Q. Nilsson (not pictured, who costarred with Warner and worked with DeMille).
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Film/dialogue moment #1: “There was a tennis court… or rather the ghost of a tennis court, with faded markings and a sagging net.” We see the court already, but our screenwriter/narrator feels the need to fill spaces with dialogue and also tell us about it.
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Film/dialogue moment #2: Norma Desmond wordlessly brushes away a microphone.
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Ready for her close-up:
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by ·Comments Off on Monte Carlo (1930, Ernst Lubitsch)

Another early Lubitsch musical. This one starts promisingly with wonderful shots of a wedding which the bride has abandoned (her dress deflated on a chair, the groom traveling under a row of umbrellas) and proceeds to a decent song (the foppish groom – Claud Allister – informing his guests that he will retrieve the girl). Alas, it’s to be the last decent song because after heroine Jeanette MacDonald (of Love Me Tonight) is introduced, she’ll do all the singing in Snow White screech-falsetto.

Zasu Pitts looks wary: madame could start singing at any moment.
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We quickly abandon the abandoned husband to follow Jeanette, escaping by train with loyal maid Zasu Pitts (Greed, Lazybones) to Monte Carlo, where she meets many hopeful fellows and hires 20 assistants – all on credit since she has no money. One especially hopeful fellow is smiley, overconfident Jack Buchanan, who singlemindedly goes after her, finally gaining entry to her hotel suite by posing as a hairdresser then taking over all her servant positions when she has to let everyone go since she can’t pay them.

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Of course Buchanan is secretly wealthy, so after Jeanette gives up hope of escape and is again going out with her prince from the beginning, Jack makes his move and she escapes again.

A train embrace:
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Perfectly decent movie, though I didn’t notice many attention-grabbing Lubitschisms after the intro. Felt more like a simply-plotted cheapie. The only real disappointment (besides Jeanette’s singing) was a hollow-eyed, sad-mouthed Zasu Pitts, seeming to slow down the film whenever on screen. My favorite was the prince, so winning a being a loser in the opening scenes.

by ·3 Comments

Pol Pot’s Birthday (2004, Talmage Cooley)
In 1985, the scrappy dictator’s men throw him a super-weak budget surprise birthday party, with grey cake and music on an old tape player. Awkward conversation ensues… P-P gets peed on by a dog and “Walking On Sunshine” plays over the credits. Kim Rew got paid?
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Meet King Joe (1949, John Sutherland)
More generic propaganda with no direct sense of purpose. Joe is “the king of the workers of the world” because here in America, competition and investment in infrastructure make our jobs easier with more disposable income than anywhere else. Take that, dirt-poor chinaman! Statistics to be proud of: “Americans own practically all the refrigerators in existence. Bathtubs? We’ve got 92% of them.”
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Hymn to Merde (2009, Leos Carax)
I agree that Merde/Lavant is wonderful to watch, but Carax doesn’t seem to know what to do with him. Protracted death-sentence courtroom drama wasn’t it, nor is a lo-res music video of him singing a Kills song translated into his own head-slapping language.
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.tibbaR (2004, Leo Wentink)
Eerie music and nervous sound effects accompany time-remapped footage of lab rabbit breeding. I never know why anything is happening in short films anymore.
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Go! Go! Go! (1964, Marie Menken)
So damn jittery it gave me an eye-ache, exactly what I was getting away from the computer in order to avoid. All nervous time-lapse footage shot around the city. Some real nice high-angle shots of construction sites and traffic patterns, superimpositions on a wedding, lots of boats and bridges. Color/picture looked perfect on my tube TV.
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The Spook Speaks (1940, Jules White)
Not-at-all-good short full of corny sound effects and sub-stooges gags, but it’s better than the others I’ve watched on these DVDs since it has a roller-skating penguin. Buster’s costar Elsie Ames (she was in most of these shorts, then showed up 30 years later in Minnie & Moskowitz for some reason) is terrible, but then, Buster is terrible too. Thanks Sony for slapping warnings and disclaimers and legal shit before every short on the disc. They must’ve known it wouldn’t get tiresome because we’d only watch one before quitting.
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Who Am I? (1989, Faith Hubley)
Things morph into other things, illustrating the five (or six or seven) senses. Short!
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Blake Ball (1988, Emily Hubley)
Didn’t love the narration in this one. The woman who says “some are born to sweet delight/some are born to endless night” (without the preceding lines) has got nothing on Nobody. I guess all the lines are the words of William Blake, but they’re not making much of an impact, and I never figured out Blake’s connection to all the baseball stuff. There’s more five senses stuff anyway. A bit too laboriously new-agey, but some great moments (like below).
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O Dreamland (1953, Lindsay Anderson)
Boy did I ever botch the Free Cinema box set, buying it then deciding I didn’t want to watch it after all and letting it sit on the shelf for years. Finally checked this out and I kinda really like it. Could do without the evil laughing clown all over the soundtrack. Kind of like Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice which, given If….‘s resonance with Zero For Conduct, proves Anderson saw a Vigo retrospective at some point.

by ·Comments Off on Caprice (1967, Frank Tashlin)

These were the waning years of Doris Day (her third to last film before retirement) and Frank Tashlin (his second to last before death). Doesn’t play like anybody’s final film, just a trying-too-hard jumble of ideas. Doris still has cute comic reactions, but she’s got lump-o-nuthin Richard “Dumbledore” Harris (hope he’s better in This Sporting Life) and a young (relatively) Ray Walston to play off – so, not much.

Doris works for a beauty products company, trying to be a corporate spy and steal another company’s formula. She’s fake-caught trading her boss’s secrets and fake-fired so she’ll be hired by the competitor and steal their product for making hair waterproof. This sounds awfully familiar, and someone needs to investigate that this became available on DVD exactly two years before Duplicity opened.

The movie has a meta-theme-song… they’re in a movie theater watching a film with the theme song Caprice. There’s a Tashlinesque bit of trickery for ya. Also featured: a scene where kids are watching cartoons on television and not noticing the real chase scene happening around them.

At the end Richard Harris turns out to be a secret interpol agent, Ray Walston is dressed like a cleaning lady and I’m not sure who is the bad guy anymore. Tried to check out the commentary, but a few minutes in, Kent Jones said that the city of Paris is the third character in the film so I had to turn it off.

by ·Comments Off on Friday Night (2002, Claire Denis)

The movie dares you to stay awake, like a french Archangel.

Tried to watch this with Katy back in the apartment, but something went wrong. I remember her getting tired then mad, and I never tried to finish it. Then finally I watched again – then took a trip right afterwards and didn’t write anything until now, a month later. There’s not much to remember, plot-wise. A girl is packing her apartment preparing to move in with her fiancee. Stuck on the road during a transportation strike, she offers a ride to a guy (star of La Moustache). He plays it cool and eventually she’s chasing after him. Will they end up in a hotel bed together? Why yes, it’s shown there on the DVD menu, nice. Some computer animation and an iris-shot imagination scene weirdly spice up what’s otherwise a dreamy-distracted natural film. It needs its own sense of time though, maybe its own week, and I don’t give movies that sort of personal space, so I have a feeling this one’s sensitivity will get swallowed up by whatever Takashi Miike flick I watch next. Maybe I’ll try again with Katy sometime.

From E. Hynes’s just-published article in Reverse Shot:

Many films foreground, and take full advantage of, the fact that we like to watch. Rare is the film that considers and satisfies these desires equally. Rarer still is one that doesn’t make us feel guilty for our desires or their satisfaction. Friday Night is aware of guilt as an emotional response but doesn’t make it a moral imperative. … It carves out a space where desires and curiosities can be explored without corrective regret. If only for a night we’re set free to touch and feel and immerse ourselves in the moment. And our conduit—our eyes, ears, and hands—is a woman. As are our director, authors (Denis and Emmanuèle Bernheim, adapting her novel), and cinematographer (Agnès Godard). Denis’s film is radical not just for being so casually yet utterly feminist, but also for forwarding a feminine point of view as frankly universal.

by ·Comments Off on Sansho The Bailiff (1954, Kenji Mizoguchi)

More miserable, miserable misery from the ol’ misery-monger Mizoguchi. I never like his movies, then I keep hearing they’re masterpieces so I watch another. This one and Ugetsu are universally acclaimed, and while I liked ’em better than Street of Shame and Life of Oharu, I can’t say I really liked ’em. So, laying off the Mizoguchi for a while after this.

Isn’t life torture? Sister Kyôko Kagawa was big-time, starring in movies for Akira Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse. Her mom played the wife in Equinox Flower.
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Near Fukuoka in south of Japan in the 1100’s, this government guy who we never see is unpopular with the higher-ups because he actually wants to help people, so he’s banished to the other side of the country. His wife Tamaki packs up the kids (Zushio and his little sister Anju) to follow, and together they set off on a wonderful adventure! No just kidding, after the kids are kidnapped and sold into slavery, the wife becomes a prostitute, eventually goes blind and never sees her husband or daughter again.

Tha Bailiff:
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Mostly focuses on the son Zushio. As a boy he learns his dad’s humanistic ways, but in the slave camp he gives in to authority, becoming a tormentor of his fellow slaves under the rule of Spiky-bearded badman Sansho. Finally he repents, takes a chance to escape (stays with ex-slave Taro, now a priest, who used to be in Zushio’s position), promising he’d be back for his sister. Z goes to Kyoto to appeal to the law, finds sympathy among men who knew his father, and they make Z a governor. He goes down and challenges Sanso’s authority, ordering all slaves freed. When Z says, “My mother and sister will be delighted. Now I can make a happy life for them,” those of us who’ve seen other Mizoguchi movies know what’s coming… he discovers his sister has drowned herself rather than face torture by the guards asking where her brother had gone (as if he’d even told her). Meanwhile mom has been living blind by the sea for years, her song “Isn’t Life Torture” about her kidnapped children spreading throughout the land, so now, having been fired from his post for trying to be nice to people, he manages to track her down and they hug each other and cry.

Zushio and the mad monk:
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Sistercide:
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Movie jumps back and forth in time, pretty unusual. The music, hailed on the DVD commentary for being authentic, is either tuneless twanging on a single guitar string or tuneless piercing flute.

by ·Comments Off on Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008, Guillermo del Toro)

Let’s see, this opened last July and apparently I was too busy watching classic Hollywood comedies, french auteur cinema, documentaries and Wall*E to go see it. Also I wasn’t so wowed by Pan’s Labyrinth and I figured an action-comedy sequel could only be worse than that. Turns out it’s a very good action-comedy sequel. I should’ve guessed. Anyway, looked great in high-def.

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I guess Hellboy was dating fire woman Selma Blair in the first one – I barely remember the movie even though I’ve seen it twice. Anyway she’s pregnant in this one with twin fire demons, but that’s hardly discussed because we are busy being introduced to, then figuring out how to kill, various wonderful creatures.

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Also Doug “Silver Surfer” Jones is back as Abe the aquatic poetry-reading scientist psychic fellow, Jeffrey Tambor as the comic relief operations manager, and introducing the voice of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane as the ectoplasmic being encased in a steamy glass-topped robot suit.

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This time the crew goes to Ireland (actually filmed in Budapest) to fight some Lord of the Rings holdovers.

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They win at the end.

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Did I mention John Hurt appears in the intro?

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by ·Comments Off on Snake Eyes (1998, Brian De Palma)

If we are to become mighty auteurist film scholars, there are worse hazards than having to declare Public Enemies the greatest film of the year when it’s clearly not; we must also face up to people who question our devotion to the less acclaimed directors working in commercial cinema – specifically, girlfriends who frown incredulously, asking “Snake Eyes? The Nicolas Cage movie? I thought you hated him” and co-workers who say, mockingly, “De Palma isn’t even an auteur… he sucks!”

True, Cage is known for being goofy/awful, but I’ve got a soft spot for his early goofy/awesome roles in Raising Arizona and Wild At Heart (and even Bringing Out The Dead), and I still fancy a good Cage cameo in Grindhouse or his less-crazy role in Lord of War. De Palma seems to have been too concerned with his own gigantor-budgeted bag of tricks to worry about Nic’s wild, yelling performance in the opening scenes. After that, he and best friend/worst enemy Gary Sinise calm down to the standard cop-investigation double-cross game.

The quickly-forgotten Round 7 Girl who’s hot for Cage and his pretend hollywood connections, with the assassin above her to the right.
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Back to Brian’s bag of tricks: we’ve got cameras through walls and ceilings, split-screen, playback, point-of-view, and long, long shots (the opening sequence, awesomely filmed as it is, has plenty of hidden cuts). It’s bravo filmmaking, but the story dies so hard at the end it seems like Brian has just been giving a turd unprecedented amounts of polish. Everyone online seems to know that a massive sfx tidal-wave-flooding-the-casino ending was cut and replaced by the WTF ending of Sinise shooting open the door where informant Carla Gugino (mom in the Spy Kids series, also in Watchmen) is hiding just as the storm rips the outer wall off the building so an arriving police car can catch him, but why? The current ending (and unnecessary epilogue where Gugino catches up with Cage months later) sucks so hard that throwing a giant tidal wave at the movie could only have improved it. No deleted scenes on the disc, so those of us who don’t buy copies of scripts on L.A. street corners will never know what ending was deemed even worse.

Even if Femme Fatale outdid this one in audacity of plot, this has got plenty to recommend it from a purely De Palma geek-out standpoint.

De Palma takes the split-screen next-level, showing simultaneous actions at one moment, and present-tense Cage split with his recreation of past events at the next:
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Ends with a cheesy theme song – what is this, a Bond movie? Batman? Nobody does that anymore.

by ·Comments Off on Do The Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

I’ve become obsessed with this since watching it again at the Fox. Found a book about the making-of, which I’ve just begun to read. The post-film Q&A with Spike and Joie and fellow Atlanta college grad Radio Raheem was nothing earth-shattering, but it’s an honor to be in the same room as Spike Lee. Learned about the cast: Ruby Dee is still alive and working, Richard Edson (Turturro’s friendly brother Vito) was Sonic Youth’s original drummer, one of the shit-talking guys on the corner is Commissioner Burrell on The Wire, and Martin Lawrence’s comic-relief role cracks people up more than it probably should. Looked beautiful on the big screen. Must watch again soon and show to Katy.