by ·Comments Off on La Villa Santo Sospir and other shorts

Night Music (1986, Stan Brakhage)

A brilliant-looking hand-painted montage.
Only 30 seconds long including credits.
I’ve been playing it before everything I watch.

La villa Santo Sospir (1952, Jean Cocteau)

Cocteau was hired to decorate a wealthy villa in summer 1950, and documented his own work afterwards. Even in a documentary short he can’t resist shooting in slow-motion and reversing the film.

“Being a professional, I wanted to make an amateur film without burdening myself with any rules.”

Cabale des Oursins (1991, Luc Moullet)

Comparable to Alain Resnais’ plastics short, something that seems like it should be a straightforward industrial film, but goes poetic and absurd. Beginning with a topic even less interesting than plastic factories, “slag heaps made of waste from old mines.” I couldn’t help getting the Hubleys’ rock-based songs in my head (“midnight ride down the rock bottom road, bump-de-bump-de-bump… bump-bump”).

“Coal mining is considered shameful. It has always been hidden underground. Slag heaps are an insult to this secrecy.”

The Case of Lena Smith (1929, Josef von Sternberg)

Fragment of lost Sternberg feature! Lena and friend are at a carnival, witnessing a magic act, a bit overwhelmed. Some cool superimpositions and carnival-glass effects.

Speaking of lost films, there’s also making-of footage on The Day The Clown Cried online, so everybody is talking about that movie again.

Cantico das Criaturas (2006, Miguel Gomes)

Shaky handheld music video for acoustic song by bald guitarist. At the moment this is my favorite Gomes movie. Then on to stylised poetic story of St. Francis regaining memory to anthropomorphized Francis-worshipping nature footage. Ash responded to the sounds of mice and owls.

Trains Are For Dreaming (2009, Jennifer Reeves)

People Like Us-reminiscent mashup soundscape lockgroove with flash-frame alternating strobe edits of faces with scenery. Pulsing ambient soundtrack. Screengrabs can give no indication of this.

Light Work I (2007, Jennifer Reeves)

Sepia animated industrial photography with tone drones. Bubble-chem mixology, molten metal flows. Abstract paint-motion. Aphex Airlines hatefully obnoxious audio. Superb visuals, play some Zorn over ’em next time.

Capitalism: Child Labor (2006, Ken Jacobs)

Oh my god. An historical stereoscopic photograph has been acquired, depicting children in a factory. Ken shows us left frame, right frame, black, on repeat for fourteen fucking minutes, with variations, accompanied (as all a-g movies must be) by ambient music by Rick Reed that gets increasingly hard to bear. I cannot tell a lie: I skipped ahead.

Lullaby (2007, Andrej Zolotukhin)

Among all the analog-looking pencil lines and rumpled paper, there is some sort of software manipulation and either live-action or rotoscoping. I can’t work out how it’s done, but it’s remarkable and original. It is russian, so involves death and bare wooden rooms. Bonus topics: angels and puppets, dreams, pregnancy, birds.

by ·Comments Off on Our Beloved Month of August (2008, Miguel Gomes)

A semi-documentary that eventually focuses on scraps of stories: Paolo, who jumps into the river every year during carnival, and a couple of young lovers (actually cousins). Other pieces of the movie include the filming of the movie itself, camera turned upon its own crew, Gomes tryin to explain why he’s not making the film he was supposed to make, and a series of concerts, letting awful pop songs half play out before abruptly cutting away.

I’m so in favor of the semi-doc, fiction/doc blend, experimental narrative, etc, but couldn’t get into this one, not nearly as much as Tabu. It’s kinda beloved though, and won a prize in Vienna.

M. Peranson:

Organically constructed and impressively humble, Our Beloved Month of August shows the fantastic, mythic elements present in everyday life, and the mundane realities present in filmmaking, presenting the two as links in a neverending chain of dominoes.

Gomes:

by ·Comments Off on A Letter to Three Wives (1949, Joseph Mankiewicz)

Three wives go off on a boat trip to somewhere, it’s not important, knowing that one of their husbands has run off with local temptress Addie Ross (who is cleverly not shown). Many flashbacks ensue.

Military farmgirl Jeanne Crain (Leave Her to Heaven) is married to Brad, and even though she’s kinda the movie’s lead, neither of them has much going on. Ann Sothern (The Blue Gardenia) is a radio writer whose husband Kirk Douglas (between Out of the Past and Ace in the Hole) tells off her insufferable bosses when they come for dinner. Oh, and she forgets Kirk’s birthday and she works too much. Linda Darnell (Unfaithfully Yours, also a movie about imagined cheating) is a hot gold digger from a poor family who landed dumpy, rich shop owner Paul Douglas (Clash By Night). He’s the husband who ran off with the unseen Addie, though he comes back, and all three wives get happy endings, though oddly we don’t see Jeannie’s.

Also: the great Thelma Ritter plays a family friend of Linda’s. Based on A Letter to Five Wives – two wives got cut. Remade in 1985 with Ben Gazzara as the shop owner.

by ·Comments Off on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951, Albert Lewin)

Pandora (Ava Gardner) is immediately set up as destructive and impulsive, getting the man who loves her (Nigel Patrick of The League of Gentlemen) to wreck his prize racecar in exchange for engagement. Her other suitors don’t take this well – Marius Goring (young lovestruck composer of The Red Shoes) kills himself, and a vain, famous matador gets jealous. All this depresses poor Sheila Sim (star of A Canterbury Tale), who always thought she’d marry the racer.

But none of it matters, because Flying Dutchman James Mason (two years after The Reckless Moment) joins the party, doomed to sail the seas until he finds a faithful woman, and surprised to see that Pandora is the image of his own wife, murdered centuries ago. So they are obviously destined to be together (and soon die together, as the prologue already revealed). Before that, the matador is (justly) killed, Sheila’s uncle reads us the Dutchman’s diary to fill in backstory, and John Laurie (sideburned village elder in Edge of the World) is occasionally spotted in a supporting role.

Mostly the movie is known as a gorgeously-shot (by Jack Cardiff) technicolor spectacular, which looks just great on blu-ray. And there’s a remarkable chess set by Man Ray, who also did the paintings in the Dutchman’s cabin.

by ·Comments Off on Wartime Comedy Double-Feature

Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942, Leo McCarey)

Another nazi comedy, this one McCarey’s follow-up to Love Affair. Ginger Rogers has finally landed a rich baron (Walter Slezak, title star of Dreyer’s Michael, also in Lifeboat), follows him to various countries, each of which falls to Hitler soon after. This gets the attention of reporter Cary Grant, and French secret agent Albert Dekker (ultimate baddie of Kiss Me Deadly). Ginger proves her loyalty to the viewer by rescuing her Jewish maid (Natasha Lytess, Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach) before agreeing to spy for Dekker, while Cary takes a nazi radio propagandist job, like if Mother Night was a comedy. The spy game doesn’t work too well, so Ginger pushes the baron overboard on an ocean liner and sails away with Cary.

The More The Merrier (1943 George Stevens)

A different kind of wartime picture than Once Upon a Honeymoon. This one focuses on the high women-to-men ratio in the D.C. area, and a housing shortage that forced people to take roommates. The story is short on logic, but the cast is super cute – and I don’t mean Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea, I’m talking about Charles “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” Coburn, great scammer of The Lady Eve. It’s the usual setup, where sweetie Jean is engages to a boring dude (Richard Gaines, Edward G. Robinson’s boss in Double Indemnity) but oughtta be with Joel instead, so Coburn invents complicated ways to make that happen, but all while the three are roommates.

Nominated for most major oscars, but up against Casablanca. Coburn still won an award. Remade as Walk, Don’t Run with Cary Grant. The last comedy Stevens would make before heading to war. IMDB: “Joining the Army Signal Corps, Stevens headed up a combat motion picture unit from 1944 to 1946. In addition to filming the Normandy landings, his unit shot both the liberation of Paris and the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp Dachau, and his unit’s footage was used both as evidence in the Nuremberg trials and in the de-Nazification program after the war.”

by ·Comments Off on Bestiaire (2012, Denis Côté)

Katy thought this was a boring movie where nothing happens until I told her to treat it not as a movie but as a series of motion photographs. Camera is mostly still, and half the frame is usually a wall – a favorite trick is to shoot only wall and let animals slowly wander into view. Shot at a Quebec zoo, with the occasional custodian and a parade of customers at the very end (plus a taxidermist, some sketch artists, but mostly animals and walls). Côté’s statement in the press notes declares that it can’t be a documentary since it has no subject, but he doesn’t offer what it might be instead. “Something indefinable.”

Côté:

But where is the salvation between the puppies on YouTube and a boa constrictor’s reproductive cycle narrated in eight chapters? How should one look at an animal (and find a cinematic language specific to this act)? Is it possible to shoot animals other than through the lens of entertainment or for a non-educational purpose? Neither actor nor story catalyzer, cannot an animal be contemplated and filmed simply for what it is? … The immense field of contemplative cinema offers elements of an answer.

by ·Comments Off on Hobson’s Choice (1954, David Lean)

Charles Laughton is Hobson, self-important shoe salesman, who talks of getting his youngest daughters married, but not the severe elder daughter since she’s far too old. So she elopes with the underpaid cobbler from dad’s basement and opens their own shop, while dad falls further into drunken ruin, until the final reconciliation.

It’s a fine story, but also an excuse for Laughton to pull out every doughy facial expression in the book and Lean to have a bit of fun. My favorite scene combines the two, as a near-fatally drunk Hobson stupidly chases the moon’s reflection across street puddles and window glass.

The DVD extras told me that the movie was named after an expression – a “Hobson’s choice” is when you’re superficially given a choice that has already been decided for you, like when Laughton is offered the chance to become partners with his wayward daughter and traitor ex-employee, but his business and personal affairs have fallen so far without them, he has to accept. One of Laughton’s last films, the year before directing Night of the Hunter. Especially good was John Mills (Pip in Lean’s Great Expectations) as the shoemaker/unwitting husband. His wife/business manager is Brenda de Banzie of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much remake, and not-Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps remake.

by ·Comments Off on Behind the Candelabra (2013, Steven Soderbergh)

Matt Damon is Scott, who gets introduced to Liberace (Lee to his friends) by laid-back mustache dude Scott Bakula in the late 1970’s, beginning an affair/family/employee situation that lasts until Lee (Michael Douglas) finally kicks out Scott in favor of a new, younger, less-drug-addicted, less-contentious boy. It comes full circle from when Scott replaced gloomy pretty-boy Cheyenne Jackson (Danny, the new cast member on 30 Rock) at Lee’s house. Liberace dies of AIDS, but Scott is cut out of the will, Lee’s verbal promises not carrying any legal weight, so Scott writes a tell-all memoir.

Performances are great, storytelling is effective, costumes and period details are spot-on, but it can’t break out of the “bio-pic based on tell-all memoir” genre. A squinty Rob Lowe is the highlight as a plastic surgeon who makes Douglas look younger and Damon look weirder with shiny cheeks. Dan Aykroyd plays Lee’s manager and Debbie Reynolds (Tammy and the Bachelor, Susan Slept Here) his mother. Adapted from Scott’s book by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King).

A. Cook: “I don’t know if any other American filmmaker is more inventive right now with choosing where to place the camera, how to frame the image, how to use focus, etc.” I get what he’s saying – in this and Haywire and Contagion I notice unusual editing and shot choices – but the movies’ standard Hollywood storytelling and starpower get in the way. If I was dedicated enough, I might rewatch Haywire paying attention only to its framing and technical qualities, but maybe instead Soderbergh needs more interesting scripts to go with his artistic filmmaking intentions – The Informant being a good example.

by ·Comments Off on The Great Gatsby (2013, Baz Lurhmann)

The only version of the Gatsby story I know, so I can only positively compare this to Moulin Rouge rather than bitch about how he ruined the novel. Got all my hatred at the editing out of the way early, spent the rest of the movie enjoying the script, the acting, the visual excess in a story that seems to demand excess.

Leo Gatsby struck it super-rich, wants to reconnect with old flame Carey Mulligan who’s now married to Brolin-looking Joel Edgerton (star of The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello), enlists the reliably young-and-foolish-looking Tobey Maguire to help. Along the way they piss off dirty Jason Clarke (Death Race) by running down his wife Isla Fisher in Gatsby’s car, so the gun-toting Clarke obligingly shoots Gatsby, providing the tragic ending that all great literature demands.

Gatsbies: There’s a 2000 version with Paul Rudd and Martin Donovan, a 1970’s with Bruce Dern and Karen Black, a 1958 with Robert Ryan, 1955 with Gena Rowlands, 1949 with Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters and 1926 with William Powell and Georgia Hale.