by ·Comments Off on Photographic Memory (2011, Ross McElwee)

“There were always secrets to be uncovered in the most mundane of photographs.”

I’ve waited a long time since the great Bright Leaves with its promising ending. After spending that whole movie looking into the past, Ross shows his son Adrian playing at the beach and looks towards the future. That future is now and Adrian is graduating high school, but Ross being Ross, he retreats back into the past, using his son as an excuse to revisit some people and places from when father was the same age as son, trying to find a place for himself after graduation.

The present segments don’t work for me. Ross plays the old fogey card, telling us he can’t understand his son with all the iphones and the internets and the facebooks, dismissing technology while shooting on a digital camera. Adrian seems to be doing fine, talks to his father plenty and goes on fishing trips, is taking up videography (they help on each other’s projects), so the frame story’s attempts to tell us that the two are unable to connect seem untrue, as do Ross’s claims that his son is lost and aimless, since we see Adrian stunt-skiing, writing films and developing his own media startup.

Ross retreats to France, seeking his old photographer boss (Maurice) and his girlfriend from a few months later (Maud). He marvels at the changes that time brings, finds the late Maurice’s ex-wife and finally finds Maud. Ross and Maud each thinks that they’re the one who ended the relationship, after which she married another photographer. I’m sure it was an extremely cathartic trip for Ross, and it comes off as a reasonably pleasant trip for us, really coming together when Ross gets back home with Adrian in the last few minutes.

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, Alfred Hitchcock)

Some boring rich vacationers casually befriend a spy who is immediately killed, shot whilst dancing. Their daughter is kidnapped to shut them up. The couple (Leslie Banks, star of The Fire Raisers the same year, and Edna Best of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) sulks back to Britain sans daughter, deciding that if they can’t tell the police, at least they can solve the case themselves. Actually, espionage and adventure isn’t for ladies, so Banks goes off on his own.

Banks and Wakefield go to the dentist:

A sinister dentist is dispatched with his own gas, and I didn’t exactly get the involvement of a basement-dwelling cult (“The Tabernacle of the Sun”), but wooden chairs prove to be good defence against revolvers, and the place gets trashed. Some delightful villains emerge, much more colorful than the heroes (despite an aborted attempt to involve a monocled uncle, Hugh Wakefield of Blithe Spirit, as comic relief). Prominently-chinned Frank Vosper (who’d soon die falling off an ocean liner) and frown-mouthed nurse Cicely Oates would’ve been fine, but Peter Lorre…

DCairns:

Frank Vosper is a good sleazoid bad guy (the only obvious thing Hitch took from Waltzes), but obviously Peter Lorre is the important character here. Although the plot throws out a whole gallery of malefactors, including an old lady with a revolver, a threatening dentist, and an evil hypnotist, Lorre dominates effortlessly, just by constantly making strange. Still sporting the carnival-float head of solid fat he modeled in Lang’s M, and decorated with a skunk-like white stripe and a dueling scar to match Banks’, Lorre as “Abbott” drools cigarette-smoke and apologises to the hero after striking him. He’s good-naturedly contemptuous of his own hired hitman, devoted to his nurse, and prefers to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, but his goal is to plunge the world into war.

Trying to rescue his daughter, Banks gets kidnapped too, caught in the villains’ hideout during a massive police shootout after an Edna Best-thwarted assassination attempt at the Royal Albert Hall. Best then shows up at the shootout and saves her own daughter from Vosper, some 70 minutes after the movie pointedly established her as a celebrated sharpshooter.

Pilbeam and Oates:

No insufferable child actor, daughter Nova Pilbeam is a daughter worth saving, out-acting both of her parents at times. She would return as star of Hitch’s Young and Innocent. This was the first of Hitch’s six Gaumont movies, and Lady Vanishes (more vacationers caught up with spy rings and kidnappings) was the last. Must now watch the ones in between.

by ·Comments Off on Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju)

“The dead should keep quiet.”

Now that i’ve watched Franju’s Shadowman and Judex, lesser-known masterpieces of light, shadow and creepy atmosphere with pulpy serial subjects, it’s time to revisit the original. I’m not sure how he got from Blood of the Beast to the psychiatric hospital drama Head Against the Wall, but as cofounder of the Cinematheque Francaise, perhaps he had an omnivorous love for poetic film in all forms.

Upbeat carnival music – not creepy sounding, which possibly makes it even creepier – as a woman with a pearl necklace (Alida Valli of The Third Man, schoolmistress of Suspiria) furtively dumps a trenchcoated faceless body (movie always fades out quickly after showing us anything faceless) into the river. She works for surgeon Pierre Brasseur (the actor Lemaitre in Children of Paradise), who saved her face from disfigurement and hopes to completely recreate a face for his even-more-disfigured daughter Edith Scob, who spends most of the movie behind an uncanny featureless mask, as recently spotted at the end of Holy Motors.

In her full-faced years, Edith dated a handsome young doctor with plastic hair (Francois Guerin of The Aristocrats), who suspects she is still alive and involves a heavy-set inspector (Alexandre Rignault of La Chienne and Mon Oncle d’Amerique) in the case. I get the young doctor confused with a young cop (Claude Brasseur, Pierre’s son, of The Elusive Corporal), but neither of them ultimately matters.

L-R: elder Brasseur, elder cop, young doctor, young Brasseur/cop:

Paulette having her treatment:

The very reasonable-acting mad doctor kidnaps more girls, attempting to graft their faces onto his daughter’s to only temporary avail – first Edna (Juliette Mayniel of Chabrol’s Les Cousins), who escapes into the main house then suicides when she sees herself in a mirror, then police-plant Paulette (Beatrice Altariba, Cosette in the Jean Gabin Les Miserables). Faceless Edith, hidden away in her room with no entertainment except her own funeral program, finally loses her patience, frees Paulette, stabs the pearl-choker assistant in the throat and sets the lab dogs loose on her dad, then wanders outside, a walking statue surrounded by doves.

Franju made after Head Against the Wall, assisted by Claude Sautet (a noted director in the 1970’s). Cinematographer Eugen Schufftan had shot People On Sunday, worked with GW Pabst, Max Ophuls, Rene Clair and Edgar Ulmer. A quiet movie but for the judicious, counterintuitive use of upbeat music.

by ·Comments Off on Raising Arizona (1987, Coen Bros)

Habitual thief marries cop, they steal baby, then every other character in the movie (his boss, his prison buddies, the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse) try to steal him back.

Some similarities to the later Wild at Heart: Nic Cage, wide-open Western locations, amour fou, people exploding. Is it just me, or is there an Evil Dead reference in the low, traveling camera move when Mrs. Arizona discovers her missing son? And the movie has a similar ending (hazy dream of a child-filled future) to 25th Hour.

Haven’t seen Holly Hunter since The Incredibles (and haven’t seen her since O Brother). Her last movie before starring in this was Swing Shift. Tex Cobb (Police Academy 4) is the Lone Biker, a bounty hunter seemingly summoned by Cage’s nightmares. Sam McMurray (a cop in C.H.U.D.) is Cage’s boss who gets punched (and thus fires Cage) for suggesting a wife-swap, then schemes to steal the stolen tyke for wife Frances McDormand. John Goodman and William Forsythe (of the Steve Gutterberg version of The Man Who Wasn’t There) are brothers who break out of prison (then in the epilogue, back into prison) assuming Cage will join them on some heists. And Trey Wilson (a baddie in Twins who died soon after) is Nathan Arizona, father of the quints, who proves to be a decent fellow at the end.

by ·Comments Off on John Carter of Mars (2012, Andrew Stanton)

Not as bad as all that, but certainly not good – a Martian adventure full of aliens with indistinguishable-sounding names, overexplainy without making us understand or care. Could’ve taken a lesson on narrative clarity in unfamiliar worlds from Nausicaa.

Muscley Carter grumbles that he’ll fight for no cause, would rather be locked up by General Malcolm’s Dad than fight in his dirty Civil War. Carter finds a cave of gold, guarded by a bald dude who warps him to Mars, which he finds engulfed in a Civil War in which Carter grumbles he will not fight. But he meets a girl, so he fights for her instead with his amazing strength and jumping abilities, defeating McNutty, who receives orders from multidimensional bald super-alien Mark Strong (sad trailer-home sniper of Tinker Tailor, psycho-baddie of Sunshine).

Oh wait, there’s a simpering frame story in which young Edgar Rice Burroughs (Juni of Spy Kids) is supposed to inherit Carter’s fortune but is actually being entrusted to protect Carter’s body on Earth while his astral projection makes sweet love to a Martian princess. Bunch of people in the credits who I never saw turned out to play motion-capture aliens – bummer. See ya some other time, Samantha Morton and Willem Dafoe.

by ·Comments Off on Ben Rivers shorts

Ben Rivers is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50. I watched his Two Years at Sea, hated it, but then couldn’t stop thinking about it so decided that maybe Cinema Scope had a point.

I Know Where I’m Going (2009)

Single-person episodes separated by driving scenes and barren landscapes with wrecked cars:
– Lumberjack at work, creatively (mysteriously) filmed
– Beekeeper/Geologist discusses man’s overall impact on the planet 100 million years from now (answer: none, but for a very few well-buried relics)
– Red-bearded Jake in his quirky house full of repurposed junk
– Grey-bearded Jake (Williams from Two Years at Sea) in snowy house

Rivers: “A fragmented road trip through Britain on the peripheries. Down empty roads, off in the wilderness, a few lone stragglers.”

From an interview: “If I hadn’t seen [George] Kuchar I may have made the mistake of going to film school.”

This Is My Land (2006)

Primitive looking and sounding, with some Begotten film processing.
Scraps of dialogue, jarring scraps of music.
Halfway through the 15-minute movie, an intermission, then it’s winter.
Ben’s first visit to Jake Williams is also the one where you hear Jake’s voice the most.

Origin of the Species (2008)

“I can’t see the world surviving.”
Darwinist whose face is never seen lives out in the woods (of course he does) discussing (again, in brief snatches) evolution and philosophy.

We The People (2004)

The soundtrack has a lively crowd scene, but we are only shown empty streets, corners and buildings from where these sounds might have sprung.

House (2007)

A cinematography experiment inside a decaying house, with evidence of phantoms – a candle travels by itself, a cellar door opens, a piece of cloth is suspended. Something about the way he shot this and We The People make them look like model miniatures. No sound.

by ·Comments Off on Charlie’s Angels (2000, McG)

I know the top twelve billed actors except Sam Rockwell’s associate baddy Kelly Lynch. Who is she? The girl Matt Dillon’s hugging on the Drugstore Cowboy poster, love interest in Curly Sue and Road House, lead character’s mom in Kaboom.

You don’t see Tom Green much anymore.

by ·Comments Off on Morocco (1930, Josef von Sternberg)

Marlene Dietrich sails away from a troubled past, becoming a nightclub singer in Morocco. She takes up with young Legionnaire Gary Cooper (three years before Design for Living, sans his stammery, wooden persona), who has his own problems, having slept with his commanding officer’s wife. Gary gives her up and marches into battle, where his boss (Ullrich Haupt, who’d die in a hunting “accident” in under a year) is killed, while Marlene prepares to marry wealthy Adolphe Menjou (anti-Lincoln conspirator in The Tall Target and anti-communist conspirator in the McCarthy hearings) instead. But she ditches Adolphe at their wedding party, returning to Gary, finally throwing away her pride and independence to follow him sheepishly into the desert.

Sternberg’s and Dietrich’s first American picture, a follow-up to The Blue Angel but beating it into U.S. theaters. Dietrich got an oscar nomination despite delivering her lines phonetically. She was beaten by Marie Dressler, with Cimarron, Norman Taurog and Tabu winning out for Morocco’s other nominations. It’s not my favorite Sternberg movie, but Dietrich’s obsessive performance towards the end is among her best. Sternberg loves his tragedies: nobody gets out of this one easily, and Dietrich’s final humiliation reminds of the Emil Jannings pictures that preceded. Controversial at the time: Dietrich wears a tux and kisses a woman. “Battling” Butler was sixth-billed, but I didn’t recognize him.

Film Quarterly in 1948: “The story itself was exceedingly simple, romantic .. However, it was not von Sternberg’s intention to produce a film of reflected reality, but rather to evoke cinematically an exotic locale peopled with extraordinary characters. .. [the] absence of background music gave the film a sharp, immediate quality seldom found in films today, generally burdened, as they are, with a lush musical score.”

by ·Comments Off on As Tears Go By (1988, Wong Kar-Wai)

Maggie Cheung has health problems, comes to stay with her older cousin Andy Lau, a loanshark enforcer who acts completely recklessly along with his fuckup buddy Jacky Cheung. This movie and Days of Being Wild could definitely have swapped titles.

Ronald Wong (sort of an HK Bud Cort) manages to get out of the gangster life, marries, is given a bunch of money. Jacky fails hard in every direction though, tries to quit and run a food stand but ends up where he came from: getting the shit beaten out of him until he’s rescued by Andy. These two have their moments of brilliance, but by refusing to play the gangster game by the rules, soon everyone is tired of their shit. Crazy Tony (Alex Man) is set up as the “bad guy” who wants our heroes dead, but that’s all our heroes deserve, and soon what they get. Meanwhile, a bit of a love story has developed between Maggie and Andy, set to a Chinese version of “Take My Breath Away” and a 1980’s synth score. But just when Andy thought he was out, the bastards pulled him back in, then shot him in the head.

Jackie on right:

Ang Wong only has two scenes, but makes an impression: