by ·Comments Off on To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)

I guess this movie gets lots of credit for being a Hollywood anti-nazi resistance comedy released soon after U.S. entry into the war. Not a lot of funny Hitler movies going around back then, and reportedly it pissed off some audiences that German-born Lubitsch would try bringing his trademark lightness to such a heavy situation. But if anything, today it suffers from being not enough of a comedy. I couldn’t watch half the scenes without flashing back to The Great Dictator or Inglorious Basterds. Not that it has to go as far as Basterds, letting a couple of Jews machine-gun Hitler at close range as the whole theater explodes, but it came off closer in tone to 49th Parallel than Great Dictator.

One of the things that stood out about Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant a decade earlier was its pre-censors sexual frankness, and now this one gets away with having Carole Lombard (Twentieth Century star in her final role – she died in a plane crash) cheat on her husband with young bomber flyer Robert Stack (House of Bamboo, Written on the Wind – very early in his career) and get away with it.

Jack Benny (about to ditch the movies for a long TV career) leads an acting troupe along with wife Lombard and also Felix Bressart (Shop Around the Corner), Lionel Atwill (lots of Frankenstein movies) and Tom Dugan (bit player who averaged a movie per month in the 40’s). The play they’ve been rehearsing is censored by the nazis on the eve of its opening, so they go back to performing Hamlet, during which Robert Stack keeps leaving the audience at the start of Benny’s big soliloquy, brushing past everyone in the second row to meet Lombard backstage (why doesn’t he get an aisle seat?). Later at the height of the war, the theater troupe has joined the Polish resistance and Stack is fighting in the UK when a spy (Stanley Ridges of Canyon Passage, heh) with critical information about the resistance makes it into Poland and wants to meet with Lombard to inquire about the “code” he’s been given for her, “to be or not to be”. Stack flies into Poland and fills everyone in, so now the actors have to do their best impressions of nazi officials (Benny: “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?”) to get back the secret papers.

The premise got away from me towards the end, when I thought Benny and his gang, having Hitler and a thousand nazis rounded up in a theater, aimed to do some damage. But of course, that’s Basterds talking again – I think they were just trying to get away from occupied Poland by stealing Hitler’s personal plane. Remade in the 80’s with Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft and Christopher Lloyd for some weird reason.

by ·Comments Off on The Cranes are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov)

Seems like a semi-remake of A Very Long Engagement. There’s a specific scene where Veronika says if she can count to fifty before the postman arrives at the door she’ll get a letter from Boris. Then there’s the overall story, a woman looking for her man who went to war, not even stopping after she hears that he’s died. Jeunet gave his film a happy ending, but Russia in the 50’s was still mourning the millions killed a decade earlier. So, not a simply fairy tale, Veronika does not get a letter from her Boris, because he did die in the war.

It opens with the two lovers happy together, and ends with her alone, smiling but heartbroken, handing out flowers to returning soldiers. In between it’s mostly her story. She loses her family in a bombing raid and stays with Boris’s parents, then is soon coerced into marrying his brother who dodged the war. Very impressively (for 1957) mobile camera, with always excellent, careful framing, none of the indifferent framing that characterizes most handheld today (ugh, I hate saying things like that). It seems like every shot in this film has more than one purpose, making the simple close-ups that much more powerful. No surprise that the director and cinematographer went on to make the great I Am Cuba, or that this won the golden palm (over Bergman, Satyajit Ray and Mon Oncle)

C. Fujiwara for Criterion:

The film is also exceptional in refusing to condemn Veronica for her involuntary infidelity to Boris while he is at the front. In Tatiana Samoilova, The Cranes Are Flying unveiled a magnificent screen personality: expressive, sexy, dynamic. Veronica is far from a traditional war-movie heroine (not only by the standard of Soviet war movies), and Feodor’s impassioned denunciation of faithless women is clearly meant to be taken as more than just the party line, but Samoilova makes her character completely sympathetic, down to her bittersweet apotheosis in the moving final sequence. The Georgian-born Kalatozov, who began his directing career in the silent era, spent several years in Los Angeles during the war on a diplomatic assignment, and seems to have been marked by Hollywood cinema. In The Cranes Are Flying, he treats melodrama with a formal complexity worthy of Frank Borzage, King Vidor, and Vincente Minnelli – finding, with no fear of excess, potent visual correlatives to emotional states.

by ·Comments Off on Month of 121 Shorts: Animation

Allegretto (1943, Oskar Fischinger)
All colored diamonds and circles, so lovely. In close sync with the music, where in Motion Painting #1 the music seems an afterthought.
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Motion Painting No. 1 (1947, Oskar Fischinger)
Like it says, a motion painting – oil on glass, all small rectangles and big spirals. In The Mystery of Picasso the tension was in figuring how the painting would be finished, where he was heading, but in this the fun is in getting from one intermediate step to another. The process is the destination. There should be more of these!
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Franz Kafka (1992, Piotr Dumala)
Is the movie supposed to be making that sound of a cat in heat beneath the music, or is my laptop freaking out? Dark and scratchy and slow-moving, nothing actually happening. Oh wait, there’s some sex. Fulfills almost all of the Robyn Hitchcock holy keywords: sex, food and insects (what, no death?). I’m sure it’s very technically accomplished but I found it dreary and ponderous. The filmmaker made a plaster-scratch version of Crime and Punishment eight years later (or more likely he worked on it for all eight years).
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Tales from the Far Side (1994, Marv Newland)
Very inessential, slow-paced animated half-hour of Far Side cartoons. Really the most interesting bit is seeing Marv Newland’s name, 25 years after his seminal Bambi Meets Godzilla. Either he’s no longer a master of timing, or there was too much Gary Larson interference… or maybe you just can’t turn a single-panel comic strip into a 30-minute TV special. Doonesbury worked out, but that was talky and story-driven to begin with.
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Mr. Prokouk Shoots a Movie (1948, Karel Zeman)
Czech short, part of a whole series of Mr. Prokouk adventures.
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Prokouk is pointing at us, telling us to get off our asses and join the workforce!
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The Monkey’s Teeth (1960, Rene Laloux)
Intro is a three-minute doc of a group-therapy institution for depressed people, what follows is an animation of the film they wrote together. Sad man has a toothache, goes to a dentist who steals his teeth to sell to rich people (I wouldn’t think the teeth of the poor would be worth much, but maybe in France everyone practices excellent dental care). When the monkey wizard bicycles by, I figured the dentist would be put in his place and the stolen teeth returned, and that’s just what happens but first the sad man gets chased into a high school by some cops who get turned into children. Hmmm.
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Dimensions of Dialogue (1982, Jan Svankmajer)
It’s been too long since I’ve watched my Svankmajer shorts. This is an all-time fave. Faces made of identifiable objects consume each other, becoming smoother until they resemble human heads. Two clay humans make love, create an unwanted clay baby then destroy each other. And so on. Not one for brevity, J.S. takes everything to its conclusion and explores all permutations of his object manipulations – this is what makes his features seem so tedious, but his shorts seem so excellently complicated.
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Flora (1989, Jan Svankmajer)
A clay person tied to a bed and covered in rotting fruit and veg tries to reach a glass of water. Only a few seconds long, made for MTV (that’s czech for WTF).

Food (1992, Jan Svankmajer)
Oooh I love stop-motion using live actors. Guy enters a room facing a paralysed robot guy, reads instructions hanging on his neck (which are actually an MTV entry form: “Entrant must send a VHS or U-Matic, etc.”), manipulates the guy (puts money in his mouth, receives a sausage and mustard from chest, utensils from ears), then the robot guy leaves and the eater takes his place. Two guys sit at a restaurant, can’t get service so they eat their own clothes and the table. Finally, people are made gourmet meals of their own severed body parts. A classic, obviously.
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I Love To Singa (1936, Tex Avery)
“Enough is too much!” An old favorite. Owl Jolson is of course a parody of The Jazz Singer, which I’ve still never seen. Jazz and owls: a combination you don’t see often enough.
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Point Rationing of Foods (1943, Chuck Jones)
An extra tucked away on a Looney Tunes DVD, explaining the wartime canned food rationing system to the public through cheap quickie animation. Helpful to me, since I never bothered to learn how rationing worked before. Also tucked away is the Tashlin-penned The Bear That Wasn’t, probably not because of its unworthiness but because it was made at a different studio.

I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935, Friz Freling)
A variety show of children performers, with hijinks. Porky’s first appearance – the studio intended for a more generic troublemaker character (below, right) to take over, but the public demanded a shy stutterer instead. The title song is catchy, anyway.
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Roof Sex (2003, PES)
Stop-motion of chairs having sex. The cat is blamed.
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by ·Comments Off on Inglorious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)

I’m not sure that I buy Tarantino films as thrice-a-decade Big Movie Events. If guy’s gonna make his fun genre flicks, I wish he’d make them more often. The movies he is emulating didn’t take this long to shoot. I’ve been seeing (and trying not to read) reports on this for years now, while I only heard of District 9 last week and I liked ’em both just as much.

One would think the movie follows the Basterds as they rampage through France and Germany killing nazis, but one would be wrong. Starts with a 20-some-minute scene of nazi Col. Landa (Christoph Waltz won best actor at Cannes – nobody can shut up about him) grilling French farmer Denis Menochet about the Jews he is hiding, in Landa’s patient, wordy (duh), polite, milk-drinking manner. The murdered Jewish family’s daughter Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent of Indigènes, who will never have a better role) survives (an image reminiscent of the last-girl-standing final scenes of exploitation horror flicks) and three years later is running a movie theater she inherited from Maggie Cheung (in deleted scenes, which will hopefully surface). At that time, hero sniper Daniel Brühl (star of Goodbye Lenin and Salvador) is hot for her, arranges to hold the premiere of his new propaganda film at her theater. When she hears the entire nazi high command is attending, she plots to destroy the theater with them inside.

So what about the basterds? Well, they’ve got a plot of their own to show up at the film premiere, with the help of movie star Diane Kruger (star of Joyeux Noël), threatened when she is injured in a firefight at a group meeting place (which claims the life of my favorite basterd, Hunger star Michael Fassbender). QT allows a single scene of their nazi-scalping terror campaign (starring bat-man Eli Roth) to stand alone – the vast bulk of the movie is introduction then the week or two leading up to the film premiere.

The movie makes light of death and torture, essentially coming off as a comedy (Brad Pitt’s hilariously fake accent helps that assessment). RW Knight: “Overriding Tarantino’s gratuitous gore instincts is his allegiance to the power of the cinema, which he makes material (literal) here in the form of a combustible nitrate collection.” Surely there are tons of movie references, for once actually talked-about and plot-relevant (Goebbels, Emil Jannings, Leni Riefenstahl) instead of appearing as influences and references in Kill Bill and Jackie Brown (Death Proof had plenty of movie talk, too).

DCairns:

“It’s a film about cinema,” said Joe Dante, who was quite enthusiastic. Perhaps not a war film at all. Or a film about the victory of movies over war, somehow. Certainly, that’s literally what happens in the climax, which contains, all too briefly, the most beautiful image Tarantino has ever conceived or executed.

I have to say I didn’t take it as seriously as some, enjoying the hell out of the sight of Eli Roth machine-gunning Hitler’s lifeless body into the ground moments after the above-mentioned beautiful image (already-dead Shoshanna’s filmed face projected ghostlike on the smoke rising from the burning film stock). And the unusual structure, tense dialogue and Film Comment article’s about Tarantino’s references to American Indian massacres and other carefully thought-out pieces of writing make me think it could be worth taking more seriously. But if I take it seriously, I’ll have to consider the following.

DCairns again: “Inglourious Basterds in a way is about stealing back pleasure from horrible facts, the revenge of cinema upon tragic events, but as interesting as that is in the abstract, it doesn’t strike me as a healthy response. And the gloating nastiness is much closer to Nazism than it is to the spirit of resistance.”

by ·Comments Off on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, David Fincher)

AV Club: “The script comes from Eric Roth, who would probably by accused of borrowing too liberally from Forrest Gump if he hadn’t written that too.” Wow, dude also wrote that Eric Bana gambler love story I was just mocking yesterday, and my favorite film to hate, The Postman. No wonder writing seemed to be the weakness in this would-be-spectacular movie. Huge issues (hello, racism) were ignored, episodes (hello, Tilda Swinton) weren’t well integrated with the rest of the film, and Button ended up seeming like an unambitious blank who doesn’t do much with his so-called remarkable life.

Katy suggested the unambitious-blank part and some Forrest Gump comparisons, but I wonder if that wasn’t the point, to show a regular guy with parental issues who meets a girl, goes to war, has a kid, rambles around and never quite finds his place in the world, the whole aging-backwards thing being the only remarkable thing about him. That and the movie’s obsession with mortality make it a meaningful story about life and how to live it. Maybe we unrealistically expected Button to be some kinda sci-fi superhero, while the movie was trying to speak to us about life and death, love and loss, or maybe on Christmas day we weren’t in the mood for an extended monologue about mortality, but this came out feeling like a pretty alright movie, a tearjerker to be sure but maybe not the acclaimed masterpiece to which we’d been looking forward.

Pretty nice music by Alexandre Desplat was loud and fuckin’ clear, since 45 minutes before the end of the film our dialogue track almost entirely cut out leaving us with whispered words under a huge score… thanks heaps, Regal. At least we could still hear when we tried hard, since most of the audience was either heavily concentrating or fast asleep by then. Shot NOT by Fincher’s Zodiac guy, and boy am I relieved, cuz in the parking lot I was bemoaning the lack of surprise or interest in the camera setups (figuring the CG effects left no room for surprise), comparing it negatively to the immaculately-shot Milk, which we’d snuck into before our feature started… forgetting that the Zodiac guy actually shot Milk, and some nobody (the D.P. of the last M. McConaughey romance flick) shot The Ben Buttons, thus preserving my aesthetic intuitions.

So right, Ben kills his mom being born in New Orleans on the day WWI ends, is abandoned Penguin-style by his dad, discovered and raised by Queenie and (boyfriend?) Tizzy in an old folks’ home, where unsurprisingly, people die from time to time. Ben meets a girl who is not yet Cate Blanchett but one day will be. Ben, BTW, is incredibly old, confined to a wheelchair, then learns to walk with canes as he grows ever younger. He gets a job on a tugboat, has regular sex with married Tilda Swinton in a hotel, and helps in the WWII effort while Cate becomes a dancer with hip bohemian friends & spontaneous lovers. The time is not right for those two to get together, but one day after Cate’s career-destroying car accident the time is right and they do and are very happy and have a kid. Ben finds out that his real dad is Mr. Buttons, who dies and leaves Ben the button factory he ran. Also dying: war friends, Tizzy then Queenie. Ben is afraid when he grows too young he’ll be a burden (he is) so he leaves Cate and bums around the world instead. Interesting how as his brain becomes less developed and he gets smaller, it’s effectively alzheimer’s disease – he forgets more and reverts to childish behavior living in his childhood home. Cate’s daughter grows up, her “dad” dies, and while caring for her dying mom (still played by Cate, unrecognizably) the day before Hurricane Katrina hits, she learns the whole story in a huge framing device.

Brad Pitt, after a brief spell of manic energy in Burn After Reading, is back to his brooding-as-acting style, which should work just fine in next year’s Terence Malick picture with appropriate wistful voiceover. Cate is wonderful as fucking always – the acting highlight of the movie, she can do no wrong. Brad’s Coen-costar Tilda Swinton is fine with the tiny role she gets.

People I Thought I Should Have Recognized But Actually Shouldn’t Have include TV’s M. Etc. Ali as Tizzy, an otherwise uncredited actor as the African fella who takes young Ben to a brothel, Cap’n Mike: Jared Harris (Lady in the Water), and adoptive mom Taraji Henson (Talk To Me). People I Recognized But Didn’t Know From Where include Guy Ritchie action star Jason Flemyng as Mr. Button. People I Did Not Recognize At All include framing-story secret Button daughter Julia Ormond (Inland Empire), and People I Should Have Recognized But Somehow Missed include Elias Koteas as the blind clockmaker who kicks off the story.

by ·Comments Off on Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up And Scald Myself With Tea (1977, Jindrich Polák)

The premiere title of my personally-curated Obscure Movie Sundays monthly film screening programme was well-attended (five persons), the viewers anxious to view what my own invitation tantalizingly called “a 1977 surreal sci-fi comedy from Czechoslovakia. Set in the futuristic 1990’s, the plot involves identical twins and nazis with time machines. An obscure cult classic!” The movie lives up to the letter of that description, but wasn’t as wacky-enjoyable as it would sound. Still an affable, somewhat cheap-looking light comedy with a really good ending.

Rocket scientist Jan has an evil rocket scientist twin brother, who chokes to death on a roll at the start of the film. Jan is hot for his brother’s fiancee (an attractive girl from a family of circus performers), so Jan pretends to be his brother (barely mourned at all, so you’d think he’s a pretty crappy brother even though the two lived together) and goes to work – not knowing that this was the day the deceased brother was to participate in an evil plot to travel back in time to 1944, the turning point of WWII, and deliver a briefcase-sized atomic bomb to Adolf Hitler so the nazis would win the war. Things get fouled up royally, both in the 1990’s “present” and in 1941 (where they accidentally end up, right after Pearl Harbor, instead of ’44 like they’d planned) but finally Jan straightens everything out (easy to do when you’ve got a time machine at your disposal) and has the baddies imprisoned before they can meddle in the past. How to solve the problem of his dead brother? Jan travels back to moments after the brother’s choking accident, incinerates the body and inserts himself in its place. Result: two happy Jans are living together, one of them engaged to the evil twin’s attractive fiancee.

The bunch of baddies (right) in ’41:
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I thought it was a funny movie, but I was the only one laughing – the others found it a little tedious. Too bad. Delightful inventions of the “future”: time travel exists but is only used for tourism, dishwashing detergent dissolves the dishes instead of bothering to clean them, and a stun-ray gun turns people to green statues (they’ll recover just fine in a few minutes, unless someone tries to move them and accidentally breaks off a limb or two). Also, the A-bomb has been miniaturized to fit in a light briefcase and the military has stopped using such weaponry, so it can only be found in museums. That’s a pretty short time window (from 1977 to 1990) from weapon advancement and miniaturization to obsolescence and declassification. Or you’d think they’d disarm the bomb they put in the museum.

My Two Jans:
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The movie’s writer (I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen and What Would You Say To Some Spinach?), the composer (Three Nuts For Cinderella) and the director (no other movies with funny titles) all died in the last decade. Three of this film’s lead actors also appeared in What Would You Say To Some Spinach?, which came out two weeks before I was born – will have to seek that one out. The actor who played Hitler died in ’84.
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by ·Comments Off on Letters From Iwo Jima (2006, Clint Eastwood)

A better movie than Flags of Our Fathers? Yes.

Most Famous Current Japanese Actor In Hollywood Ken Watanabe is the new commander on Iwo Jima and commands the troops to entrench in the mountain instead of the beaches, so they can blast the Americans from above when they roll in, a decision that made the island much harder to capture (as seen in the hit film Flags of Our Fathers). His horse-riding bud Baron Nishi (star of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe) is in charge of the mountain while Ken is stationed elsewhere making big decisions.

But most of the story is told through the eyes of Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya from Pika*nchi Life Is Hard Dakedo Happy), a regular guy who gets drafted and has no particular allegiance to the war, just wants to survive and see his wife again. Saigo is the “regular guy just caught up by circumstance” who all the film critics are cheering for putting a human Japanese face on a Hollywood depiction of WWII. True dat, but his “war is hell” attitude of just wanting to get home is almost pro-American in how little he seems to care about his own side… would’ve been nice to get more of a balance within one character. I mean, the two elder traditionalists have both dealt with Americans before, and respect them, so there’s a little of that, but during the actual battle they are all-out willing to die for Japan, and our Saigo all-out refuses to die at any cost. So there’s little internal struggle.

It’s still a very good, well-done war movie, and an interesting twist for a Hollywood (Clint Eastwood!) flick. But as I was saying to Katy (who missed the whole Eastwood saga), after The Thin Red Line, it’s not enough to just make a capable war movie. That one set my standards unreasonably high.

Flavor-of-the-last-couple-years Paul Haggis (Million $ Baby, L.A. Crash, Walker Texas Ranger) helped write these flicks, Spielberg produced, and Tom Stern, Clint’s only cinematographer since Blood Work, shot ’em.

Famous Ken:
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Our hero:
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White man:
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by ·Comments Off on Flags of Our Fathers (2006, Clint Eastwood)

From the writers of Planet of the Apes remake, Unfaithful remake, Casino Royale remake and The Last Kiss remake…

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An okay movie. Story of the guys who raised the flag on day five or six of the 30-40 day battle for Iwo Jima in WWII. Flashes back and forth at fucking random, but at least once it’s flashed, it stays on a single story for long enough to get a sense of what’s going on. Someone’s narrating about his dead father here in the present, the three surviving flag-raisers are out on a promotional tour, and meanwhile the war’s still on and they’re still in it. Oh and after the whole promo thing raises lots of money in war bonds, our guys are forgotten and left to crap jobs and suicide. But they were never heroes anyway, just some guys fighting for their buddies who got asked to put up a flag. War is stupid. And the US shits on american indians, that’s another theme.

This land is… my land?
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I never did figure out who’s who in the war scenes because all soldiers look the same, but maybe after Jesse Bradford (My Sassy Girl remake) and Adam Beach (Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things remake) get all famous, I’ll be able to watch this again and tell them apart from Ryan Phillippe.

Already famous: T-1000 formed his liquid metal body into the shape of a Colonel in the early scenes, I somehow missed recognizing Jamie Bell in any scene, Neal McDonough from Ravenous was Captain Severance (heh), and Barry Goodboy Pepper got blown up by friendly fire.

The high hat:
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Clint Eastwood wrote the music, which sounds a lot like “Hey Jude” and the cinematographer wants to remind us of the old photo at Iwo Jima by making the whole movie look like an old photo. Nice. Spielberg produced, whatever that means.

Katy didn’t watch it, but if she had, she probably would’ve paid better attention and then talked about stuff I missed and I’d pretend like I was following her.

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