by ·Comments Off on Shorts so far, 2010

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Slow-panning shots outside looking in, but mostly inside looking out. Unique location (Nabua village in Thailand) but also unique photography style. I wonder if another filmmaker could’ve found images half as strong as these. As for the story, well, as usual with A.W. I don’t really get it. The village has a history of violence and repression, and this (fictional?) uncle is unseen, addressed by a narrator. Actually it’s more than one narrator, reading the same script, which is later critiqued for accuracy of dialect as we continue roaming the houses, looking slowly up at the trees. Makes me want to catch up with A.W.’s features that I’ve missed. Later: So I have, with Syndromes and a Century. Its dialogue repetition and shots of trees from inside buildings reminded me of this short.

Academic Hack:

In a stunning act of political avant-gardism, Joe has adapted Thai Buddhist tenets regarding reincarnation as a means for excavating the hidden history of a troubled landscape. As his camera slowly creeps and pans through darkened, abandoned homes, Apichatpong is displaying the remnants of a repressed past, in an assertion of ghostly, vertical time. … Joe’s dominant visual cue throughout Boonmee is the depiction of dark, illegible interiors whose porous walls and broken-out windows allow the bright green of the jungle to puncture the once-domestic space with light and texture. As beautiful as the effect may be, it is also chilling, since it represents the breakdown of human effort’s separation from natural encroachment, the dissolution of basic boundaries.

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We Work Again (1937)

A newsreel short about how “we” (meaning black americans, though it sounds like the regular white studio voiceover guy saying “we”) are finding jobs after the depression – mostly jobs in the arts, thanks to the federal works agency. Contains rare footage of Orson Welles’ “Voodoo Macbeth,” which used all black actors and looks like it could’ve used a higher prop budget.

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The Little White Cloud That Cried (2009, Guy Maddin)

Commissioned for a Jack Smith program. It reminded me of Kenneth Anger, with the classic pop songs strung together, the soft-focus closeups, but that’s probably because I barely know anything about Jack Smith. Lots (lots!) of nudity, largely (maybe entirely) transsexuals. Typical Maddin editing (which is to say: exhilarating). It’s either art or the best porno I’ve ever seen.

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Someone got the filmmaker by accident. He looks so intense!
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Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair (2009, Guy Maddin)

No credits. Need to get a copy someday without interlacing. Made for the Rotterdam festival for an outdoor exhibit. Isabella is in the ‘lectric chair. A man rushes to save her, too late, embraces her as the switch is pulled. Charming homemade effects: tin foil, sparklers and exercise equipment. Louis Negin (reused footage from Glorious?) dances shirtless in celebration!

Maddin: “Now, I was immediately told no nudity, I was immediately told no strobing, so strobing became the new taboo. It would throw the citizens of Rotterdam into epileptic fits flipping on the sidewalks.”

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More, from a simply fantastic interview with Maddin: “My condition for doing it was that I got permission to re-use the footage in my next feature. Whenever I accept a short film commission, I get permission to use the footage from it and so I’m slowly assembling clips… and in this financially depressed time, you need to. It’s a Frankenstein feature film built together from a bunch of dead short commissions.”

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Zoo (1962, Bert Haanstra)

One of the greatest short films ever. He must have shot for days and days to get so many great shots of animals and spectators, then associatively edited them together into a docu-comedy. I learned from the ravingly positive writeup on the official Bert site that it was all filmed with a hidden camera.

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Contact (2009, Jeremiah Kipp)

Boy and girl visit dealer, get bottled drug and take it together naked. Bad trip ensues. Girl’s concerned parents wait at home, until she shows up late, hugs daddy. Very little spoken dialogue – for artistic sake, or with international film fest distribution in mind? Heavy-handed sound design with echoey shock-horror effects with a sidetrack into 8-bit glitch noise.

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The Bookworm (1939, Hugh Harman)

The crappiest little time-filler of an MGM cartoon. Can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy these as a set, so may as well parcel ’em out as bonus content on other discs. Poe’s raven wants to catch a bookworm (that’s a worm who eats books) to put in the Macbeth witches’ cauldron, but the worm is saved by characters from other books, with a complete lack of imagination, not even the har-har caricature value of those not-great Tashlin library shorts. Why would the books want to save a bookworm anyway? This seems an important part of the story, and it’s just ignored. Ted on IMDB overthinks the movie, says it’s “amazingly sophisticated in its abstraction,” no kidding. A Tashlin movie would just blow Ted’s head right off. Harman put more effort into the same year’s classic short Peace On Earth.

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Love On Tap (1939, George Sidney)

At least with The Bookworm you can tune out the story and watch the animation, but there’s no joy in this one. Well, it’s a musical short so I guess you’ve got dancing, but that’s not much of an attraction. Story goes this dude is trying to marry a gal who leads a dance troupe, but her dancers are whiny dependent brats and she caters to their every whim, putting off the guy until he threatens to leave instead of marrying her. He should’ve. Sidney later directed celebrated musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me Kate… guess you gotta start somewhere.

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Michelangelo Eye to Eye (2004, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Antonioni silently contemplates the work of another Michelangelo. 15 minutes of static or slowly tracking shots, with just room noise until an ethereal choir sings us out into the credits. Nice to see that after all these years, M.A. is still filming people dwarfed by giant structures and pillars.

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Wake Up, Freak Out, Then Get a Grip (2008, Leo Murray)

A cute cartoon illustrating how we’re all going to die from global warming. Only Leo doesn’t say we’ll all die, he says all the good species of animals will die, leaving rats and roaches, and since there won’t be enough resources left for all of us, those with the most guns and lowest morals will survive to slaughter the rest. Then he says we can’t stop things by being jolly good consumers and buying fluorescent bulbs, we must rather campaign our governments and friendly local corporations to smarten up. Not likely! Move inland.

by ·Comments Off on Another Thin Man (1939, W.S. Van Dyke)

I’d heard that the first four or five Thin Man movies were almost equally good, but to me they seem to be getting weaker. This one wisely lets up on the drunk jokes and doesn’t give Asta any solo scenes. One would think from the poster (and the finale of part two) they’d be making a big deal over Nick & Nora’s new baby, but not really – Nick Jr. factors into the first few scenes and the last one, but not much in between. There’s more detective work going on, Nick solving the crime rather than gathering all the suspects and waiting for one to slip up. And of course the film is just cluttered with characters. It’s a very watchable 90 minutes, I’ll give it that.

Katy & I figured out how to spot the killer in a Thin Man movie, anyway – it’s whoever is least likely to have done it, on whom there’s no suspicion whatsoever. That means here it’s the innocent young girl Lois (Virginia Grey, later of The Naked Kiss and All That Heaven Allows) whose dad the Colonel (blustery cowboy C. Aubrey Smith of The Scarlet Empress – he’s Nora’s lawyer, I think?) was killed, presumably by revenge-seeking neighbor Phil Church (Sheldon Leonard of Guys & Dolls).

There are a hundred more red-herring characters including a creep named Creeps, large-faced Nat Pendleton as a cop, Ruth Hussey (Jimmy Stewart’s photographer friend in Philadelphia Story), a love interest, a secretary (Tom Neal of The Brute Man!), an overly suspicious nanny, Abner Biberman as “The Cuban” (Katy points out it’s not a very Cuban-sounding name), and apparently Shemp Howard. Otto Kruger (bad guy in Power of the Press) plays lead cop Van Slack. I didn’t get a good bead on this guy because our disc skipped during his entire scene in the middle of the movie. Convoluted murder scheme involves laying a gun on the ground and covering it with a wet newspaper. Lois has a secret identity, kills Phil Church, and would’ve gotten away with it if not for those two meddling society detectives.

by ·Comments Off on After the Thin Man (1936, W.S. Van Dyke)

Second in the series, with Van Dyke returning. Whereas the first one had Brenon & Borzage cinematographer James Wong Howe, the sequel has Lubitsch & Wellman cinematographer Oliver Marsh. I am guessing nobody noticed. Only Jimmy Stewart’s second year in the movies. He obviously didn’t have his Capra persona down yet if he’s playing a murderer. Oh yeah, Jimmy Stewart is the murderer – that’s the twist ending in this one! If he’d have been played by anyone else, I might’ve seen it coming.

Wait, getting ahead of myself… so Nick and Nora are in the movie from the beginning this time, which is nice. They’re going to visit her rich family, who disapprove of her drunken detective husband. The movie reeeally plays up what a drunk he is this time. It’s intended for comic effect, but gets increasingly disturbing. There will have to be an intervention by movie four… if those had been invented yet. Nick is still retired but gets convinced to do one more job, Nora once again wants to get involved in the detective work but “ohhh no you don’t,” Nick won’t let her. It’d be tired and repetitive if it wasn’t so light and charming. One bit of weirdness that didn’t work for me: their dog Asta gets his own solo scenes. He visits “Lady Asta” from behind a fence and chases another dog who has been visiting her, and apparently getting her pregnant. The dog scenes correlate nicely with all the other couple-infidelity in the human world of the film, but there’s no real resolution to these scenes, and they kinda made me sad for Asta.

Just as many characters as in the first one (and again, they’re all invited to a dinner party in order to determine guilt). I quote an IMDB review: “My favorite is Aunt Katherine, the battle ax to end all battles axes, played by Jessie Ralph (The Bank Dick); and Henry, the rickety old butler played by, would you believe, Tom Ricketts.” Nora’s cousin Selma (Elissa Landi, Count of Monte Cristo) is upset when her lying, cheating husband (Alan Marshal of Hunchback of Notre Dame, House on Haunted Hill) goes missing, then even more upset when he’s found and says he’s leaving her for showgirl Polly (Penny Singleton: Blondie Bumstead and the voice of Jane Jetson). Also involved: club owner Joseph Calleia (Touch of Evil), an asian thug who seems to be a hat-throwing prototype for Oddjob, Selma’s psychiatrist (George Zucco of The Pirate, House of Frankenstein) and a cop (Sam Levene of The Killers, Brute Force, a cop-assisting beardy cultist in God Told Me To).

Cute movie with no apparent quality drop from part one (except for the overdone dog scenes). Judging from the booties-knitting ending, there will be babies in part three.

by ·Comments Off on The Thin Man (1934, W.S. Van Dyke)

This must be my fourth time watching, and I still can’t remember who’s the killer (it’s the dead scientist’s lawyer!). Don’t think this counts as screwball comedy despite the fast-paced, often racy, comedic dialogue – it’s a detective comedy with screwball tendencies. Came out the same year as Twentieth Century and The Gay Divorcee – I think I like this one best of the three.

The titular thin man wasn’t meant to refer to detective William Powell (retired since marrying rich socialite Myrna Loy), but the missing, turns-out-to-be-murdered old scientist Wynant (Edward Ellis, sheriff in Fury). Nobody mentions this in the dialogue, hence all the Looney Tunes caricatures of Powell as a paper-thin man, and the carrying of the Thin Man title across the sequels.

Movie is a light joy to watch, so I won’t weigh it down by fussing over plot for three pages – there’s certainly enough of it. Powell (recently in Double Harness, not yet in My Man Godfrey) and Loy (post-Love Me Tonight, pre-Great Ziegfeld) don’t appear for a while but make up for lost time. Wynant’s death and the lawyer’s guilt aren’t revealed until the last minute at a grand suspects’ dinner party with cops as waiters (Katy thought the lawyer-as-killer was unjustified). Two older blonde women seem interchangeable until one is killed (the dead man’s girlfriend, Natalie Moorhead, no relation to Agnes). Dead man’s daughter (Maureen O’Sullivan of Devil Doll, The Big Clock, Song o’My Heart) and ex-wife Mimi (Minna Gombell, the law-breaking aunt in Wild Boys of the Road) and some other fools (including Cesar Romero, The Joker in TV’s Batman, and Porter Hall, a newsman in both Ace in the Hole and His Girl Friday) run around lying to each other for ninety minutes. All those actors, and the only one I recognize from other films is the dog, Asta, a main character in The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby.

Van Dyke directed three of the five sequels before dying of cancer. Prior to this, he made MGM’s first sound picture, White Shadows in the South Seas, which somehow involved Robert Flaherty.

by ·Comments Off on It Happened In Hollywood (1937, Harry Lachman)

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From Sam Fuller’s autobiography:

[Writer/producer Myles Connolly] and I started throwing around ideas for his picture. It was supposed to be about a character based on Tom Mix, the cowboy star of silent films who’d made scores of Westerns. Then came the talkies, and Mix didn’t make the transition successfully. Myles and I came up with a story about a silent cowboy star who doesn’t want to play a gangster role in a talkie because he wants to be loyal to his fans. He doesn’t want to disappoint the kids who are crazy about his Westerns. We called it Once a Hero, but after the movie went into production, they gave it the more commercial title of It Happened in Hollywood.

Harry Lachman, who’d been a successful painter in Paris, directed the picture. Lachman is forgotten today, but he made over thirty movies before he stopped directing in the early forties. Fay Wray played the female lead. This was after King Kong distinguished her from all the pretty blondes of the day as the one who could scream the best. the Tom Mix character, Tim Bart, was played by Richard Dix. It Happened in Hollywood was my first real credit on a picture.

Fay Wray, the one who could scream the best:
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The name wasn’t changed soon enough – the Once a Hero title card made it onto the film. Celeb cowboy actor Bart is introduced screening his latest movie to sick kids, a real white-hat good-guy honest friendly lunkhead. He and his leading lady Gloria are called back to Hollywood for sound tests – she makes it but Bart, dressed in a silly period suit and made to speak out-of-character flowery dialogue, gets cut. Gloria later gets him a bit part as a gangster but he walks when the script is changed to make him a cop killer.

“The day of Westerns is over. We have to make the pictures indoors from now on.” Recalls The Naked City, which we watched the same week, finally making the pictures outdoors again.

Bart in gangster getup with his director:
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Out of work and unpopular when a young fan comes to visit, Bart throws a party and invites all the stars’ doubles and stand-ins to delight the kid – the highlight of the picture. Some stand-ins do the voices better than others – Chaplin’s and Harold Lloyd’s have no problem since they don’t speak.

This is not W.C. Fields:
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The improbabilities pile up… a realtor, after Bart to repossess his mansion while the party is being held, is kidnapped. Bart and Gloria tearfully confess to each other that they’re broke. The boy falls ill and the doctor says he can’t be moved. Tim hits his low point, about to reenact the bank robbery for real, ends up foiling a more serious bank robbery and shooting the criminals. Now a hero in the papers, he’s hired back by the studio, Westerns make a comeback and Tim opens a ranch for sick kids. That’s a better ending than Tom Mix got, touring with a circus after leaving the movies, marrying for the fifth time then dying when his car plunged into a ravine.

Did anybody realize that Blake Edwards made a movie in which Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) teams up with Wyatt Earp to solve a murder at the Academy Awards? It came out three months before Die Hard.

A boy in trouble:
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Decent movie. I liked Richard Dix (who’d really been a silent film star, and not exclusively in Westerns) but Fay Wray made more of an impression. It all confused Katy, who knows Sam Fuller is some kind of badass and didn’t follow his connection with this movie. I didn’t either, honestly – assuming Power of the Press and Scandal Sheet will show off more of his style (I already know that Shockproof does).

by ·Comments Off on Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938, Ernst Lubitsch)

“The class of people who comes here seems to get worse every year… and this year we seem to have next year’s crowd already.” Lubitsch movies always have such great dialogue, but he didn’t write ’em and English wasn’t his first language, so why is it?

It was a bad week for staying awake all the way through movies. Shout out to Gold Diggers of 1933 (I hardly remember anything) and Ninotchka (some awful Russian spies who reminded me of the encyclopedaeists in Ball of Fire were cashing in when I checked out), both of which Katy finished after I’d fallen asleep, and Hollywood Canteen which she didn’t feel like finishing after it got repetitive (army man and buddies are fawned over by actors, including huge star Joan Leslie (who? the girl from Yankee Doodle Dandy?)). I liked this one the most, at least its first half, so I came back the next day to watch the ending.

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Opens with a racy scene about sleeping in and out of pajamas. Bank owner, cheapskate and stickler for everything Gary Cooper meets Claudette Colbert whose father the marquis is trying to hold onto his status despite being flat broke. CC falls for Gary and they’re to be married when he confesses he’s had seven ex-wives. Angry as hell, she signs a lucrative pre-nup agreement, marries Gary then spends his money while trying her best to provoke a divorce. Hilarity ensues.

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Gary Cooper’s gruff phonetic pronunciation of French words adds to the humor. He’s actually not bad as a comic actor. Apparently a remake of a Gloria Swanson silent film. That’s David Niven on the beach above as Colbert’s friend (and a bank employee) whom Colbert sets up as a fall guy in her divorce plot. And the great E. Everett Horton as the marquis. Great looking movie with a perfect cast.

by ·Comments Off on Fury (1936, Fritz Lang)

Mob violence must’ve been on Fritz Lang’s mind, after making M and fleeing nazis. This is my second or third favorite of his films, a powerhouse drama with a simmering Spencer Tracy, a wrong-man revenge tale. Makes me all upset every time I watch it. I always forget the incriminating word slip that reveals to Tracy’s girl that he’s still alive: it’s memento/momentum.

It’s hard to skim Patrick McGilligan’s Lang bio since it’s full of conflicting stories told by Lang himself, a notorious fabricator. It seems in the original script, Joe was an honest lawyer and after he’s presumed dead his wife (not fiancee) falls in love with a rival attorney. Joe plans to let the townsfolk/mob hang after some are convicted, but he’s discovered by the attorney/wife who run to stop the hanging. No redemption for Joe – he pulls a gun to stop them. Lang suggested Joe become more likable and the wife take over the story after Joe is “killed” so women will have more to enjoy from the film. “There was indeed a tremendous amount of social awareness in the early versions, which featured breadlines, black characters, even a settlement house where Katherine worked. [Newspaperman, The Front Page screenwriter] Cormack’s first rewrite cleared away some of the social commentary; more would disappear as he honed the script.” Lang had shot scenes to visualize Joe’s guilt: ghosts emerging from behind trees to chase him. At the first test screening, which was Lang’s own cut, “after the ghosts came on the public didn’t stop laughing.” So producer Joe Mankiewicz recut the film, removing the ghosts and shooting a final scene where Joe’s wife hugs him forgivingly (which was never in the Lang version) and the movie opened to acclaim. Lang began a lifelong feud with Mankiewicz and studio head Louis Mayer swore Lang would never work at MGM again – some way to begin his Hollywood career. Fury made a star out of Spencer Tracy and exiled Fritz Lang to make westerns and sequels.

by ·Comments Off on Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, John Ford)

Katy said it didn’t feel very JohnFordian, but it did to me, because two thirds of my previous John Ford experience consisted of Judge Priest and The Sun Shines Bright. Takes place in a small town in the south – there’s mob violence and a courtroom climax, and along the way we hear “Dixie” more than once. Sounds extremely Fordian to me. In fact I’m thinking Atlanta-born writer Lamar Trotti, who also cowrote Judge Priest, could stand to vary his game.

Two simple men and their simple mother (Alice Brady, the mom in My Man Godfrey, in her final film) were enjoying simple pleasures in town when they got in a fight with a blowhard and he ended up dead. Blowhard’s buddy Ward Bond (John Wayne’s old friend in Rio Bravo) says they stabbed the blowhard, so off to jail they go. Fortunately, hat-wearing slave-freeing superhero Abe Lincoln (Henry Fonda with a fake nose, looking spookily Lincolnesque in the occasional profile shot) stops the angry lynch mob by picking on them one at a time (a la Sun Shines Bright) and agrees to defend the kids, in between watching his girlfriend (Pauline Moore) die and meeting a new girlfriend (Marjorie Weaver, the lady in The Cisco Kid And The Lady). It’s all based on a completely true story! Except that it was a blunt weapon, not a knife, and the accused men weren’t brothers, and one of them (the one not defended by Lincoln) was convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned for six years, and Lincoln got the other guy acquitted but there was no sneaky buddy to take the fall instead.

Movie slides along peacefully and slowly builds. Very pretty in parts. I’d need to read more or study further to figure why this was one of Sergei Eisenstein’s favorite films… missing something, as usual.

by ·Comments Off on Month of 121 Shorts: Oscar-winning cartoons 1

The Country Cousin (1936, Wilfred Jackson)
A Disney Silly Symphony. Country mouse loves all the expensive food in the city, but isn’t fond of cats, cars or roller-skaters so he hauls ass back to the country. Includes an extended drunky joke. It beat a Popeye cartoon and an MGM jazz short of racial caricatures.
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The Milky Way (1940, Rudolf Ising)
Finally someone other than Disney takes the prize. Disney wasn’t even nominated – competition included the first Bugs vs. Elmer short and the first Tom & Jerry cartoon.
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The Cat Concerto (1946, Hanna & Barbera)
Won the oscar despite allegations that the story was ripped off from W-B’s Rhapsody Rabbit, beating a George Pal puppetoon about John Henry, a Woody Woodpecker musical, and early appearances by Chip ‘n Dale and Foghorn Leghorn.
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For Scent-imental Reasons (1949, Chuck Jones)
“Ahhh, le belle femme skunk fatale!”
The greatest sexual predator in the cartoons makes his fifth appearance. This beat a piece John Hubley made for UPA which I’d like to see.
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Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950, Robert Cannon)
Gerald makes noises, is shunned, finds his place and everyone learns a valuable lesson. Beat out a Mr. Magoo cartoon (also from UPA) and one of my favorite Tom & Jerrys.
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Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953, Ward Kimball)
Full-on Disney animation plus outlines and photographs. I’ve seen part of this on those Disney Sing-Along Songs tapes that Trevor played on repeat for two years. The history of musical instruments in ten minutes. Possibly my favorite of all the oscar shorts so far, though I’ll bet it’s not widely played because of the racial stereotypes on display.
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The first CinemaScope cartoon, originally released to accompany Fantasia – should be a required classic. Tough competition: Chuck Jones, UPA, Donald Duck and Ted Parmelee’s awesome The Tell-Tale Heart.
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When Magoo Flew (1954, Pete Burness)
Ridiculous picture (and not always in a good way) complete with weird self-referential ending and a crabby complaint about television. Maybe Tashlin was hiding under a desk somewhere. Not a big Magoo fan, don’t know how this beat a Tom & Jerry mouseketeer short, tweety bird, Disney and Tex Avery. Dig the Ted Parmelee reference in the screenshot.
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Speedy Gonzales (1955, Friz Freling)
This one doesn’t have the line I remember about wanting to get the cheese but being too lazy, but it does have the line “he’s a friend of my sister” / “Speedy is friend of everybody’s seester!” Another no-longer-politically-correct classic. Surprisingly beat the Hanna/Barbera holiday classic Good Will To Men and an acclaimed Tex Avery piece.