by ·Comments Off on Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir)

A weird sort of (anti-)war film in that the opposing sides (mostly French vs. German) are extremely nice to each other. The great Jean Gabin (between The Lower Depths and La Bete Humaine) is pilot Marechal, flying the right proper monocle-wearing Captain Boldieu (Pierre Fresnay, star of Le Corbeau and Duvivier’s Phantom Carriage remake) when they’re shot down by the right proper monocle-wearing Erich von Stroheim – who shakes their hands and invites them to dinner.

The next section is the source of many comic/dramatic prison camp films, but without the grit and terror of many of them (although Gabin is painfully placed in solitary confinement after provoking a celebration over Germany losing a battle), since WWII forever changed the face of prison camps. The men are stationed with a series of characters digging an escape tunnel beneath their barracks, including three major Rules of the Game actors: The Engineer (jealous husband Gaston Modot), The Actor (Julien Carette, Gaston’s poacher nemesis) and Rosenthal (Marcel Dallo, the marquis), along with Jean Daste (a brush-mustached vegetarian).

That’s Daste at upper-right, and his L’Age d’Or-starring engineer companion over his shoulder:

Before they can use the tunnel, our initial two Frenchman plus Rosenthal (a rich jew who receives lavish care packages from home) are transferred to a new camp – one run by a stiffly strict Stroheim (is there any other kind of Stroheim?), now in a back/neck brace from an injury. They immediately set about planning their escape again. Boldieu causes a distraction while the other two climb down a handmade rope. Stroheim is extremely depressed to have to shoot down Boldieu, a man he considered too respectful to break the prison rules.

Gabin and Dallo on the run:

Finally, a section that proved unexpectedly resonant with Essential Killing – a prisoner on the run encounters a woman living alone (the lead actress of the film, not appearing until the last fifteen minutes) who brings him in and cares for him. Rosenthal has a leg injury, but overall the guys are in better shape than Vincent Gallo was, and Gabin falls for the lovely Dita Parlo (Renoir was always casting actors from L’Atalante), a German civilian with a young son, whose husband and brothers have all died in the war. The men walk off through Switzerland, Gabin hoping to return. But Renoir obviously doesn’t believe he will.

P. Cowie on the audio commentary:

“War is a great illusion,” said Renoir on another occasion, “with its hopes unfulfilled, its promises never kept.” Of course the interesting thing is that [Marechal and Rosenthal] say farewell to each other with no plans to meet, whereas in the original scenario, Bazin claims that the two fugitives had arranged a rendezvous at Maxime’s in Paris for the first Christmas Eve after the war, and the last shot would show “December 24, 1918,” and their table, reserved but empty in the midst of the busy restaurant, as though even their friendship had been an illusion. . . . Many years later, when Renoir was asked about war films and their effectiveness, he replied soberly, “In 1936 I made a picture named Grand Illusion in which I tried to express all my deep feelings for the cause of peace. This film was very successful. Three years later, the war broke out.”

by ·Comments Off on Kill List (2011, Ben Wheatley)

This succeeded as a horror movie because, even though I accurately predicted the final twist (the “hunchback”), I found the whole thing increasingly unsettling, to the point that the climactic flashlit race through dark tunnels was much freakier than it should have been.

Jay is a family man with a son, a pretty Swedish wife (Myanna Buring of The Descent), and a bit of a temper – possibly something to do with his former job running security in Bagdad? He’s hot and cold with his old buddy Gal (Michael Smiley, a raver in Spaced) and Gal’s new gal Fiona, a “human resources” person (she fires people).

I carefully avoided learning anything about the movie’s plot before watching, had no idea that Jay and Gal make their living as hit men. So I’m adding up facts and impressions from these initial scenes, probably needlessly. Why does Jay cook and eat a rabbit he finds dead in the yard? Is it important that the wife is Swedish, also with a military past? Why does Gal keep bringing up that Fiona is a “demon in bed”? I suppose the demon thing ties into the rest, since she turns out to be part of the weird cult that enlists the men for a murder spree.

Victims, preceded by title cards: first, The Priest, who seems grateful to be executed. Why does Gal make a sign of the cross before the execution, when Jay’s wife had earlier forbidden prayer at the dinner table and the men had raged at some campfire-singalong Christians at the hotel? Next: The Librarian, whom they torture after discovering he’s got a child-porn collection, but still manages to thank them (to Jay: “Does he know who you are? . . . Glad to have met you.”) before death by hammer. Next: The MP, but while they camp outside his house, a wicker cult parades through the woods.

Chase ensues through the catacombs, many culties are shot, and Gal doesn’t make it. Outside, Jay is captured, spun around and made to fight “the hunchback”.

1. Earlier on their mission he saw Fiona outside.
2. Fiona has been paying frequent visits to Jay’s house while the men were away, even though Gal claims he broke up with her.
3. I’ve seen movies before.
So yeah, I figured out “the hunchback.”

God forbid everything should be overexplained in a horror movie (you hear me, Rob Zombie?) but this one goes beyond a sense of mystery, ending abruptly after this final one-sided knife fight. The cult’s goal isn’t just to fuck with some poor guy and make him kill his family – Jay is implied to be some sort of demonic chosen one (the victims “recognized” him). But I hope the next step is to sacrifice the guy, because I don’t know how they expect to convince him that this was all an initiation ritual and now he needs to become their king or whatever. Instead I think they’ll end up with one angry, revenge-seeking professional killer.

A. Nayman

… a dual shift from a vague but comprehensible narrative about a pair of ex-military men-turned-contract-killers on assignment into an insane pagan scenario, and also from a skillfully wrought realist presentation into something wholly hallucinatory. Trying to pinpoint the exact moment of this slippage is next to impossible, because Wheatley has designed the film so that the two modes complement and even heighten one another. There are trace elements of the first half’s nervy naturalism in the crazed climax just as surely as tuned-in viewers will sense something uncanny intruding on those early everyday passages. In lieu of any sort of trendy bifurcation, Wheatley bleeds it all together.

by ·Comments Off on The Scarlet Empress (1934, Josef von Sternberg)

Based on the diaries of Catherine The Great of Russia, the story felt like it spanned maybe a year or two, but wikipedia says it was sixteen years between her marriage and the coup she arranged to replace her husband on the throne.

Marlene Dietrich plays Sophia (Catherine is her Russian title), at first a naive girl from the country married to a not-handsome prince (Sam Jaffe of The Day the Earth Stood Still), instead entranced by a count (John Lodge of Murders in the Zoo, future governor of Connecticut).

Marlene and the count:

Catherine is under great scrutiny until she bears her “husband” a son (he’s only momentarily bothered by the fact that they never slept together), then she’s free to run around having affairs and plotting. Nothing is done while queen Elizabeth is in charge, but once Catherine’s husband becomes emperor he doesn’t last a year before his wife has taken over. Catherine has caught the Count fooling around with the former queen, realizes he’s just sleeping around with whoever’s in power, and throws him over.

The Queen:

Katy and I would’ve liked to see more than a minute of screen time with Dietrich as the actual empress – didn’t know that would be where the movie dead-ends. Sternberg is, of course, much more concerned with his camera angles and lighting, and most importantly, shooting Dietrich through a series of filters and gauzes and screens. The wedding scene is an incredible cinematography show-reel, each shot outdoing the last.

Robin Wood:

The connecting theme of all the von Sternberg/Dietrich films might be expressed as a question: How does a woman, and at what cost, assert herself within an overwhelmingly male-dominated world? Each film offers a somewhat different answer (but none very encouraging), steadily evolving into the extreme pessimism and bitterness of The Scarlet Empress and achieving its apotheosis in their final collaboration The Devil Is a Woman.

R. Keser calls it the last great pre-code film, says it “mocks Hollywood’s conventional groveling toward royalty.”

by ·Comments Off on Shanghai Express (1932, Josef von Sternberg)

I rented The Scarlet Empress in anticipation of seeing Shanghai Express on 35mm at Emory – a screening preceded by a brief talk on the different goals of cinematography (Sternberg’s main one being glamour, not story). Empress is surely glorious-looking, but I appreciate a good story and snappy dialogue to go with my pretty pictures, and so I thought the less opulent and ornate but still exquisite-looking and more excitingly plotted Shanghai Express was the better movie.

Dietrich is Shanghai Lil, a fallen woman who runs into her old soldier boyfriend “Doc” (still-handsome Clive Brook, who played Rolls Royce in Underworld) aboard the titular train. The two of them try to avoid each other in the small first-class section of the Express, along with Marlene’s fellow traveler Anna May Wong, arrogant dog lady Louise Hale, gambler Eugene Pallette (happily closer to his croaky Preston Sturges persona than his Intolerance days), a preacher and a man named Lenard (silent film director Emile Chautard, also in Seventh Heaven) who only speaks French, much to everyone else’s annoyance. Oh, and there’s mysterious Warner Oland (returning from Dishonored), who turns out to be a head communist in the Chinese Civil War traveling undercover. He holds up the train when one of his deputies is captured, keeping Clive Brook (on his way to perform surgery on a head nationist) in exchange.

The government agrees to the exchange, releases the deputy, and Clive is allowed to return to the train. But Warner has made a damned nuisance of himself during the night. He gets Lil to agree to marry him in exchange for Clive’s life, and he rapes Wong. Wong’s not one to take things lightly, kills Warner, grabs Lil and escapes. So they’re all safe on the train together, but Clive is being a putz about Lil’s faithfulness, needs the preacher’s help to “forgive” her for a happy ending.

Expensive-looking, but it was the top-grossing film of 1932 so I guess that’s fine. Won the best cinematography oscar, lost the rest to Grand Hotel. Never seen Anna May Wong before – she’s very good. Remade a couple times, with Ellen Drew then Joseph Cotten.

by ·Comments Off on Sileni (2005, Jan Svankmajer)

“Ladies and gentleman, what you’re about to see is a horror film… it is not a work of art.” I’ll bet that line was much quoted in reviews when this came out, but I don’t feel like doing much research on this one. Because I wasn’t heavily invested in the question of whether it would be art – I find all of Svankmajer’s features to be fun (with some tedious stretches) entertainments with some signature shots (the dead-on close-ups) and stop-motion.

Ah, the stop-motion – if not for that, Svank would be Borowczyk with better subject matter. In this one it’s used to create disturbing little vignettes between live-action scenes, which will sometimes (nearly) overlap. It’s all meat. Meat in motion, set to grating, rickety carnival music.

The story itself isn’t bad. Svank’s got a decent lead actor in Pavel Liska, the Czech Keanu Reeves, and a good back-and-forth plot when Pavel is invited to stay with a Marquis, who alternately seems like a benevolent uncle and a total madman. In the end, as befitting its title and carnival music, everyone in the film is mad, and Pavel seems the sanest. He has wicked night terrors, but at least he’s self-conscious enough to be embarrassed about them and realize where they come from. Everybody else is either exercising their crazy whims openly or biding their time until they can do so. But I’m glad there was more to it than the whole “everyone is mad” premise, which was apparent from the title. It’s also about the treatment of madness – we see all kinds, none of them any good.

Pavel was visiting his mother in an asylum – was he staying there too? Anyway, he takes up with the Marquis, who self-treats his fear of being buried alive by faking death regularly and being buried alive (with the tools to escape). He also holds sacreligious orgies in the basement, and all of this makes Pavel nervous. The Marquis takes him to Dr. Murlloppe, who runs an asylum where the patients are allowed to do whatever they please (feathers fly, a nude woman is a paint-therapy canvas). Pavel doesn’t fit in, vows to save Murlloppe’s “daughter” (Marquis warns that she’s a lying hysteric nympho). He frees the “real” doctors, tarred and feathered and imprisoned in the cellar, and they take charge using their methods of cure-via-torture, holding Pavel as a patient.

DCairns:

For the first time Svankmajer makes real use of his actors as actors, not merely as self-operating meat puppets. In particular, Jan Triska as the Marquis (de Sade) brings a malevolence, a twinkle, and a vulnerable humanity to this film which hasn’t been seen in the Czech alchemist’s movies before. . . unlike the previous features which had used actors largely to occupy screen space where puppets would have been too expensive and time-consuming, Lunacy revels in the possibilities of unpredictable humanity let loose in an artist’s cinematic canvas.

by ·Comments Off on Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1967, Nagisa Oshima)

This is another one like Death By Hanging where Oshima seems to be making broad artistic statements using archetype characters rather than creating any sort of realistic drama. But this one is more sensual, less intellectual than Death By Hanging, and possibly my favorite Oshima movie so far.

A wandering sex-obsessed streaky-haired misfit meets a slow-moving, angsty suicidal army deserter (Kei Sato, male lead in Onibaba). They walk off together when they come across gangsters digging up a cache of guns – so they follow, or possibly are taken prisoner (but she never stops acting like she’s in charge). Soon added to the mix are a gun-crazy boy and two killers: a double-knife-wielding psycho killer and a calm older man with a pistol (Taiji Tonoyama, armor merchant in Onibaba).

Up until now, I don’t think the characters had any names, but the internet tells me she is Nejiko and her death-obsessed man is Otoko. Along comes head honcho Television (Rokko Toura, the doctor in Death By Hanging), bringing news that a white sniper is on the loose, and that the gang fight they’ve been preparing for is cancelled because the bosses were caught by police at the airport.

What’s a bunch of battle-hungry armed criminals to do? The gun-nut kid wanders away and kills a couple people, but that’s not enough. So Television drives them out to the city (stopping to murder the knife guy) where they cautiously approach the sniper, then join him shooting at cops.

Recurring person-shaped indentations, water spots and stains strangely remind me of Pulse. Criterion calls this a “devilish, absurdist portrait of what [Oshima] deemed the death drive in Japanese youth culture.” Glad I watched this the same month as Black Sun, another movie featuring a murderous American teaming with death-defying youth.

Oshima:

Otoko definitely does not want to die. He wants to live, and that is precisely why he has premonitions of death. In other words, in instances where Otoko appears at a glance to want to die, he actually wants to live, and that is beautiful -more so than Nekijo’s straightforward desire to live. In this way, the two embrace two things that have something basic in common, and they are attracted to each other because it is manifested in polar opposite forms. It is absolutely incorrect to judge this work as a diagram that reads: Nekijo = Life, Otoko = Death.

by ·Comments Off on Kikujiro (1999, Takeshi Kitano)

Another quiet movie with gangsters in it and quick bursts of excitement which ends up at the sea. The missing link (for me) between Fireworks and Dolls.

Young Masao ditches his gramma (Kazuko Yoshiyuki, star of Empire of Passion) and hits the road with a few bucks looking for his mother. A neighbor sees what’s happening and sends her ex-yakuza husband (Kitano) to look after him. Kitano/Kikujiro (for some reason, his name is withheld until the final minute) is generally bad-tempered, but still protective. He drags the kid to a racetrack and blows all their money, then spends the rest of the movie hitching rides.

Once they find Masao’s mother (she’s started another family), Kikujiro changes his tune, decides he needs to provide the kid with a pleasantly memorable adventure instead of letting it end in bitterness. So he recruits a hippie with a van and two bikers (Baldy and Fatso) for a camp-out weekend of games and costumes. It has a similar tone to what I remember of Fireworks, but more fun and without all the killing.

Senses of Cinema:

The narrative rambles along through a series of chapters, all laid out in advance with the key words featuring in a picture postcard opening. We wait for the moment to see just what is to occur that has produced the sometimes bizarre, sometimes banal images that eventually form a series of childhood memories.

Kitano:

What I find most congenial is the idea of a bad guy who does something good pretty much by accident, so that’s what I went with. It became the basic rule of the film’s game: good results accidentally coming from bad actions.

by ·1 Comment

Leisurely-paced, straightforward story of silent film star George Valentin and early talkie star Peppy Miller. He’s struck by her early on, helps her career get started, and they stay acquaintances, but he’s more focused on his career. He sinks his savings into a big film, written produced and starring himself, which comes out and flops the day after the stock market crash and the same day as Peppy’s massive hit Beauty Spot. After she becomes famous she stalks him, buying up his pawned and auctioned belongings, and putting him up in her mansion when he’s hospitalized after burning up all his films and nearly himself. Another suicide attempt, with a gun this time (punchline provided by George’s dog) before Peppy manages to find him a worthwhile job as a film dancer.

Good supporting cast. John Goodman is the film producer, James Cromwell is Valentin’s extremely loyal chauffeur/assistant, Penelope Ann Miller (who played Edna Purviance in Chaplin) is Valentin’s wife (then ex-wife), and a weird little appearance by Malcolm McDowell, who must’ve been spotted near the set that day and hastily recruited. Writer/director Hazanavicius and stars Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo made the OSS 117 spy comedies before this.

UPDATE:
It’s been commonly reported that The Artist is the first silent film since the first academy awards in 1928 to win best picture. But it’s also the first novelty film since 1929’s weak (but with sound! and in color!) Broadway Melody to win the award.

by ·Comments Off on Black Sun (1964, Koreyoshi Kurahara)

A kid called Akira (Tamio Kawaji of Tokyo Drifter, Youth of the Beast) buys a Max Roach record called Black Sun, bumps into a woman outside who smashes the record by accident, so he steals their car and sells it. Gets “home” to the crumbling church tower he illegally occupies with his dog Thelonious Monk and finds the cops are searching it for a murderous American GI.

It’s a reasonable setup – we learn a little about Akira (a carefree criminal who loves jazz) and are prepped for a meeting between Akira and the GI. Good jazzy score, and high-energy filmmaking (plus a weird fisheye effect when the camera moves). But it soon gets much crazier than expected.

Turns out Gill, the shell-shocked American (Chico Roland, who I just saw as a disgraced pastor in Gate of Flesh), doesn’t care for jazz – or dogs. Akira is honored beyond belief to have an actual black man at his place, but Gill trashes it and kills the dog. They go back and forth with the machine gun threatening each other, then Akira steals an idea from a jazz record sleeve so they can go out in public – puts himself in blackface and Gill in clownface.

Gill is badly hurt from a bullet he caught before we met him, starts raving that he wants to visit the sea. Akira’s tower gets torn down, all his remaining jazz records and paraphenalia destroyed, so with nothing to lose, he helps Gill (who has never been nice to him, really) get to the shore. And if you’d have told me a few minutes into this movie that it would end with Gill floating away over the ocean tied to a giant balloon while Akira holds off the cops with a machine gun, I wouldn’t have believed you.