by ·Comments Off on Deserter (1933, Vsevolod Pudovkin)

Another Russian movie full of visual and sound innovation that wears out its welcome after an hour and forty-five minutes of tedious state propaganda. I’m lost from the beginning – when the workers strike, are we on their side? We must be – in a Russian movie we are always on the workers’ side. But then wise Zelle with his hitler mustache tells us that a strike is unwise. A newsgirl is scolded by a policeman. Police vs. striker battle. Months pass. A boat is named “the five-year plan”. Someone is killed by a car chauffeuring a bored rich gentleman. Another guy jumps into the river (in gorgeous slow-mo) after reading a headline about mechanizations that can replace ten workers with a single machine operator. Negotiations continue. Finally the strikers are machine-gunned down, then strike-breakers march in while the soundtrack still plays the moans of the dying. Meanwhile, striker Karl Renn stays home because he’s tired of the whole thing. The survivors, I suppose, hold a meeting and decide to send four reps to the Soviet Union aboard “their” ship. I wasn’t aware that shipyard workers owned the ships they built, nor did I realize until halfway through the movie that it’s set in Germany! Whoops.

They send the four least useful workers, including shirker Karl Renn, to Russia for inspiration or something. After a massive welcoming parade, Karl joins a factory for some months, and sees it pull together with shock workers to complete an important project. Much, much, much typical proletariat talk precedes and follows, culminating in an endless speech by Renn made more endless by a german-russian translator. I did learn that the enemy of the German workers is the “social democrats” – should’ve realized that. Back in Germany, Zelle is dead and Renn joins the struggle. Movie ends with a wordless montage of cops beating the shit out of protestors.

It’s a part-talkie with total silence during some scenes. There are cool sound moments in others. The newsgirl’s voice keeps cutting off the music, which immediately restarts after, cut into shreds. Extremely rapid-fire cutting at times, too fast for my computer to keep from fragmenting the DVD image, with almost subliminal shots of explosions during the machine-guns-vs.-strikers scene. More explosions are superimposed over quick-cut exciting scenes – Pudovkin was a proto-Michael Bay.

Renn: “Long live communist party!”

From one of the writers of Potemkin. The newsgirl was Tamara Makarova, a film actress through the 80’s, and Karl Renn was in October. In Germany we see a movie theater playing Madchen In Uniform.

The NY Times’ 1934 review begins: “While the crushing of the labor movement in Germany during the two years devoted by V.I. Pudovkin to the production of his first dialogue motion picture has robbed it of much of its timeliness, the main theme of Deserter remains unaffected by the triumph of Hitlerism.”

by ·Comments Off on India: Matri Bhumi (1958, Roberto Rossellini)

Starts out with a chattery narrator, dropping wordplay over straightforwardly tourist-doc images of the city. After some minutes of this it shows various episodes with very slight stories, which almost feel like they were scripted after the fact when writing the voiceover, if not for a few scenes that prove otherwise. T. Gallagher’s book says the movie was shot just how it looks like it was shot – piecemeal, one sequence at a time, as R.R. focused on raising funds, having an affair and breaking up with Ingrid Bergman.

I had subtitle problems on my copy, but managed to make it through since there’s little dialogue. Overall not one of my favorite movies, except I was blown away by the first sequence after the tourist-doc intro: loggers on elephants. The director of the Vienna film festival agrees: “The real reason for including the film in the Viennale is my love for the elephants.” After the logging (the elephants knock down threes then lift them on their tusks) the men scrub their elephants clean.

Quick time out for a puppet show, then a boy elephanter is climbing trees to catch glimpses of the girl he likes. Marriage negotiations follow. Cows, a deer, a warthog, and an old man versus a tiger.

Final story: a pet monkey’s owner dies in the desert. Awesome/sad scene as the monkey stays with the owner as long as he can, with vultures approaching and the man not responding. Then the monkey heads to the city, chain leash still trailing behind, and tries unsuccessfully to make new friends. A weird place to end the movie.

Rossellini had already shown a knack for filming children (perhaps why Truffaut loved him so), and now he proves a master at animal drama – which is good, since he’s almost forgotten to include any human drama in the movie. A four-hour India miniseries came out the same year – not sure if it’s an expanded version of this same material or something completely different.

by ·Comments Off on Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989, Hayao Miyazaki)

Surprisingly lightweight after the spectacle of Nausicaa, part two of my afternoon at the Belcourt. Again, the dubbed version, with a recognizable Phil Hartman as the cat (his final voice role), Kirsten Dunst as Kiki, Tress MacNeille (returning from Nausicaa) as the baker, Janeane Garofalo as the painter and Debbie Reynolds as the old woman with a broken oven.

Kiki is an apprentice witch, off to spend a year in an unfamiliar city to finish her studies. She doesn’t seem to refine her witch-skills much upon arrival, instead using the fact that she’s the only person in town who can fly to start a delivery service. She has maybe three delivery jobs in the whole movie (there isn’t even a delivery montage implying others), also helps out at the bakery where she stays and poses for a painter who lives in a cabin in the woods. My favorite part was actually the saddest scene: a customer hired her to deliver a baked dish but upon Kiki’s arrival the dish wasn’t ready because the oven had broken. So Kiki helps with the woman’s old brick oven, then makes the delivery, getting sick in the rain and missing her first date with a nerdy boy, only to find the recipient a spoiled rich girl who doesn’t appreciate the gift.

Anyway the nerdy boy forgives Kiki, but she begins to doubt herself and loses her powers (exit Phil Hartman). She hangs out with the painter for a while, but finally gets herself flying again when the nerdy boy has a life-threatening blimp emergency and only Kiki can save him.

by ·Comments Off on Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984, Hayao Miyazaki)

Miyazaki’s first non-series feature, and the movie that spawned Studio Ghibli. It’s a surprisingly huge-looking feature for a startup/indie flick. Watched the well-dubbed English version on day one of the Belcourt’s retrospective, a weekday matinee populated by children and die-hards. Voices I recognized: just Patrick Stewart as Lord Yupa. Voices I Did Not Recognize: Alison Drag Me To Hell Lohman as Nausicaa, Shia LaBeouf as enemy gunfighter-turned-friend Asbel, Tress MacNeille (Babs Bunny, Principal Skinner’s mom) as the blind old woman, Mark Hamill as the warlord leader of Pejite, Uma Thurman as the warlord leader of Tolmekia, and Chris Jack Skellington Sarandon as Kurotowa, Thurman’s power-hungry buffoon assistant.

Nausicaa is the uniquely smart and capable princess of the wind valley, introduced scavenging in the toxic forest and helping her uncle Yupa escape from giant marauding bugs known as Ohm. Their village is invaded by Thurman’s Tolmekians, who aim to resurrect a giant mythical warrior and annihilate other tribes. While everyone else worries about becoming the dominant human force on a dying world, Nausicaa is aiming to make peace with the insects and discover why the world’s plants have turned poisonous. In the movie’s Planet of the Apes reveal, she and Asbel learn that civilizations past fatally polluted the soil and that the plants adapted to gradually purify it. Showdown between giant warrior (not fully recomposed, it melts), hordes of undefeatable insects, and prophet Nausicaa, who brings peace to the land.

by ·Comments Off on We Have a Pope (2011, Nanni Moretti)

I only know Moretti from a couple of cute shorts in different anthology projects. This could’ve been another cute short – I expected something weightier, but it had little to say about the Pope, Vatican, religion, just an occasionally funny little story about an elected pope who disappears, spends some time on his own, and returns to proclaim that he can’t accept the job.

Michel Piccoli (in two of the movies I anxiously want to see from this year’s Cannes festival) is the confused pope and Jerzy Stuhr (star of Kieslowski’s Camera Buff) is a large-faced official spokeman who tries to take care of the situation. Moretti himself plays a psychiatrist hired to visit the vatican and help the new pope, but when the pope escapes (covered up by Stuhr by having a guard hide in the pope’s quarters, eating expensive food and rattling the curtains to indicate his presence) Moretti has nothing to do and isn’t allowed to leave, so organizes a volleyball tournament, dividing the cardinals by home country – my favorite part of the movie. Piccoli meanwhile visits Moretti’s estranged wife Margherita Buy. You’d expect something to come of this, soon-to-be-divorced psychiatrists each treating the same troubled pope, but no. The movie really amounted to a pleasurable afternoon watching the great Piccoli, nothing more.

The Guardian points out that the movie got mixed reviews from Vatican reviewers, then proceed to give it a mixed review themselves. In competition at Cannes the year Tree of Life won.

Moretti quoted in Indiewire: “People may have wanted me to do something different, but I wanted to surprise them actually. Some people thought I’d denounce some areas of the Vatican but that is why I chose not to do that… I wanted the story to be a surprise.”

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White-hatted Gaston is visiting Dr. Maillard’s psychiatric hospital when they’re met at the gate by a loony-acting guard, and I suddenly realized this was based on the same Poe story as Svankmajer’s Sileni, and is going to suffer in comparison. Gaston is welcomed into the asylum, led by the swirly-robed man on the DVD cover, while his red-hatted friend (Martin LaSalle, star of Pickpocket) is attacked in the woods and his woman raped. It just isn’t a bad 1970’s movie unless a woman gets raped.

The guy from the DVD cover:

The girl from Alucarda’s DVD cover – what’s she doing here?

The movie’s in English, which the actors are having trouble getting used to – some words are pronounced differently each time they’re spoken. Gaston’s straight Rod Serling line delivery conflicts badly with Maillard’s strangely-accented rapid-fire drama. It wants to look like Vadim’s Spirits of the Dead segment with the careful posing of actors and scenery before the camera. One of those euro-art films, but from Mexico. Moctezuma also made the Satan-in-a-convent movie Alucarda, which I saw but can’t much remember.

White hat and red hat:

Lunacy:

This one is more masculine than Sileni, less interested in the daughter/prisoner character Eugenie than in Gaston and Maillard (Claudio Brook – Simon of the Desert himself), but really it doesn’t seem too interested in any of them. There are some half-hearted pursuits and mysteries, and even the tarred/feathered “real doctors” in the basement scenes have little explanation (and nothing like the terribly doomed finale of Svankmajer’s version). The “hero” never does a thing; the prisoners escape on their own. It’s a series of crazy scenes, signifying nothing.

Claudio having an epic shout:

Eugenie’s revenge:

by ·Comments Off on What To Expect When You’re Expecting (2012, Kirk Jones)

A happy movie full of good smiling people, including J-Lo, Up in the Air‘s Anna Kendrick and The State‘s Thomas Lennon. Based on a self-help book, which AV Club points out makes it a similar adaptation to Fast Food Nation, building stories from a non-fiction book to convey its general idea. Mostly I looked past the actors and focused on the Atlanta locations (lots of Piedmont Park, the Woodruff Arts center, someplace on/near Highland, and a whole scene at Smith’s Olde Bar). Katy says it makes adoption seem preferable.

At least it was written by women, even if it was directed, produced, shot, edited, scored and designed by men – bland men, if you ask me. One of the writers did Whip It, the other the Jamie Lee Curtis Freaky Friday.

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This is the fifth post-’68 Godard movie to put me to sleep, after Letter to Jane, Histoire(s) du Cinema (in installments), In Praise of Love and Notre Musique (in a theater). In this case, I was tired and angry at the movie and fell asleep on purpose, to make the movie feel bad about itself (assuming Godard doesn’t take it as a compliment when you sleep through his movies, like Guy Maddin does).

techno-rasta godard:

Tried to watch it without paying heed to the stories surrounding its production, which turn out to be more interesting than the film itself. Godard signed the “contract” on a bar napkin, over a year later got calls from the “producer” asking where’s our film?, JLG read the first few pages of King Lear and got bored with it, hired a bunch of overqualified actors and pissed them off. Writer/actor Norman Mailer walked out after one day, and Godard put this and his voicemails from the producer into the final cut. Something like that, anyway – I can’t be arsed to look it up.

Shakespeare Jr. or whatever:

Burgess Meredith (in his follow-up to a Dudley Moore Santa Claus movie) is apparently the King, talking some nonsense with Molly Ringwald (her inexplicable follow-up to Pretty In Pink) in a hotel room. Downstairs in the restaurant, a wiry, spike-haired Peter Sellars (dir of something called The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez) is real interested in what everyone else is doing. As I drifted awake again later, Godard (with RCA cables wound through his hair and indecipherable English speech) and Woody Allen caught my attention for a few moments each. Might be a nice-looking movie – the DP had shot the last couple of Eric Rohmer movies – but you can’t tell from my VHS copy. And I doubt it, anyway.

Molly:

from Canby’s original NYTimes review: “a late Godardian practical joke . . . as sad and embarrassing as the spectacle of a great, dignified man wearing a fishbowl over his head to get a laugh. . . . After making what is possibly the most lyrical film on language in the history of the cinema (Le Gai Savoir), Mr. Godard has now made the silliest.”

Rosenbaum would disagree: “It may drive you nuts, but it is probably the most inventive and original Godard film since Passion,” and he talks about the complex surround-sound mix, which again, I’m sadly missing on my VHS version.

Typically, JR has put more thought into the film than anyone else, his analysis revealing the film’s fundamental link to the spirit of the play.

Excerpts:

Sellars “introduces himself offscreen as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, and roughly describes his job as restoring what he can of his ancestor’s plays after a massive cultural memory loss was brought about by Chernobyl.”

As the film proceeds . . . we get snatches of Shakespeare’s Lear, snatches of what appears to be Mailer’s Don Learo, and snatches of what appears to be an earlier, unrealized Godard project, The Story, about Jewish gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky in Las Vegas. (Three Journeys Into King Lear, as one printed title puts it. But does “King Lear” in this case refer to the play, the character, or the Cannon Films project?)

For Godard, it’s a legitimate source of pride that he won’t film anything to illustrate a scriptwriter’s point or provide continuity; his disdain for ordinary filmmaking practice becomes a creative challenge, and, in terms of his limited capacities for story telling, a calculated risk. . . . This originality often seems to be driven by hatred and anger, emotions that are undervalued in more cowardly periods such as the present, just as they were probably overvalued 20 years ago. It is a source of energy that remains crucial to much of the avant-garde.

by ·Comments Off on Seisaku’s Wife (1965, Yasuzo Masumura)

Okane (Ayako Wakao, star of Red Angel) comes from a poor family, is the young bride of a gross old man. So she poisons him to death, claims her inheritance and returns to her mother’s village, where the people completely ostracize her. When her mother dies from illness, Okane agrees to watch her retarded cousin Heisuke, and they live in their rich, lonely house.

When golden boy Seisaku (Takahiro Tamura, murdered husband in Empire of Passion) returns to the village, he gets the opposite reaction – constant praise and a parade in his honor. He takes to ringing a bell every morning to awaken the whole town and inspire them to get to work. He enlists people to help with Okane’s mother’s burial, chastising them for being terrible to her. Inevitably the two get together, but brave Seisaku returns to war, and everyone goes back to being shitty towards Okane for the next six months.

Okane, hated:

Seisaku, loved:

Seisaku returns wounded, and as full of honor as ever, promising next time he’ll die for his country. The two are unofficially married, sleeping together but nobody in town (and certainly not Seisaku’s family) takes her seriously. He’s all she has, and life is horrible without him, so she pokes out his eyes with a giant nail as he prepares to leave again.

Okane with Heisuke:

Okane with nail:

She’s sentenced to two years, and since Japan doesn’t understand logic, the whole town hates Seisaku for dishonorably failing to return to war, figuring he was in on the plot with his wife – a woman none of them ever trusted. During that time, he understands how it feels to be an outcast, and after Okane returns, they go away together. “Without you I would have stayed a stupid role model soldier.” Good story, but I was sick of the hateful villagers and wished for a Carrie ending: punishment for all.

Written by Kaneto Shindo, who also made the great Onibaba and died a month ago at the age of 100.