Not Coming to a Theater Near You

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Lola / France / 1961

I’ve found Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg a little (actually a lot) twee for my taste, so I was a little uncertain about this one, his debut and a non-musical prequel of sorts to that film. But Lola won me over from the first frame. Part of it is the leavening effect, I think, of the setting: though made in ‘61, it takes place in the immediate post-World War II period, in a France that’s both culturally rejuvenated and a little tired of its own native charm. Everyone in Lola reminds everyone of someone else – another love, in another country, at another time. From this vantage point, it’s hard to understand their nostalgia: the city of Nantes looks so luminous, and the atmosphere of the film itself is so warm and friendly, you can’t really imagine wanting to be anywhere else. But this paradox only strengthens the movie’s overall effect, which is much more melancholy than it would first appear. Beneath the surface fluffiness, there’s a deep confusion about the future of the French way of life, especially when that way of life is partially defined as an unfettered attraction to pleasure – and what’s more attractive or pleasurable than foreignness? Indeed, I’d say this xenophilia – expressed dramatically through the historically convenient trope of Franco-American relations, and cinematically through echoes of future Demy collaborator Gene Kelly – is the keynote of the film, what keeps it from being more than just charming. Thus, while the musical brothel sequences, in which a lingerie-clad Anouk Aimée and her cohort entertain a horde of jitterbugging G.I.s, are some of the most innocent images of sex tourism I’ve ever seen, they’re also some of the most truthful, in that they don’t let you forget the realities (economic, political, libidinal) driving the production of all this naughty fun. Which is not to say it isn’t still fun. In fact, that’s the problem.

by Evan Kindley | Source: Fox Lorber DVD
08 Jul 2008 11:07 PM | Submit Comment

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The Killing Of America / Violence U.S.A. / US / 1982

“While you watched this, five of us were murdered. One was the random killing of a stranger.”

That is the final spoken narration of The Killing of America; delivered as deadpan and heavily-handed as all before it but this time accompanied by John Lennon’s “Imagine.” A few seconds earlier, we are informed that two people were murdered at Lennon’s vigil that we are currently seeing. Three and a half minutes prior we are shown the haunting photographic evidence of one of the pivotal moments in America cultural history: Lennon dutifully signing an autograph for Mark David Chapman hours before his death.

The eighty-five minutes leading up to the segment on Lennon’s murder are comprised of authentic footage of scores of violent incidences ranging from ubiquitous inclusions such as the Zapruder film to seldom seen footage of middle-America hostage situations, sniper attacks, and serial killers. The film is somewhat unfairly lumped into the Mondo genre due to its grim subject matter and adoption of the narration style that so often accompanies such films. Yet “Mondo” inevitably implies a bit of falsity; cinematic legerdemain with the truth. The entirety of the information presented in the film is from first-generation sources pulled from news footage or other on-scene cameras and at no point is anything staged. The Killing of America is as close to “truth” as one can come within the Mondo genre.

The few critics that have been able to see The Killing of America—still unavailable in the US to this day—have labeled this sentimental closing sequence as the powerful film’s lone weak point. I, however, found it to be an apt and somewhat profound conclusion to the documentary’s examination of 20th century America’s obsession with violence. The central motif of the film is a subtle but clearly communicated anti-gun stance. The film hypothesizes—not unconvincingly—that the gun-related deaths of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. desensitized the population and enforced a belief that violence was simply a part of American life. While it offers no counter argument to its claims, the material it presents paints a shockingly bleak portrait of the US at the dawn of the eighties and offers no possibility for avoiding an even more dismal future if guns continue to be an ingrained part of American culture. The Killing of America’s parting shot does what its lamentably more famous genre-mate Faces of Death claimed to do: present a world where violence and death are inescapable.

by David Carter | Source: Bootleg DVD
08 Jul 2008 10:02 PM | Comments (1)

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Kagemusha / Japan / 1980

Another Kurosawa, another huge disappointment. The man is quickly becoming for me one of the most overrated filmmakers in history. I haven’t seen all of his stuff so maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but I’ve covered his major work and the only one that can count as a legitimate masterpiece is Throne of Blood. I could make this post an omnibus gripe session but let me get to the film in question here.

Kagemusha is simply bad. Let’s stop cutting it so much slack as the “warm-up” for Ran (which is no excuse, especially when Ran itself isn’t that good) and for Chrissakes let’s not toss “masterpiece” anywhere near it. Aside from the incredible opening scene, where the Lord and his double (both played by the extraordinary Tatsuya Nakadai) are both in the same tense, stationary shot, the film lacks any sense of drama, consequence, excitement, characterization, thematic heft, or even basic storytelling flow. Granted, thanks mostly to Nakadai, the character of the Double is able to generate some sympathy toward the end but by then there’s only one reel left, which is devoted to cinema’s least engaging and most non-sensical battle sequence. Wait, I take that back—the earlier nighttime battle sequence is even less engaging and makes even less sense.

To be frank, I have to assume that the reason this film is as well regarded as it is is because Kurosawa came up with the admittedly brilliant idea of sticking a colored flag on the backs of all his extras. This makes even the endlessly repeated shot of a horseman (or horsemen) galloping across the screen look like a visual wonder. There are times in the film, as in Ran, where it seems that the sole purpose of the picture is to photograph thousands of color-coded extras march across the screen. The majesty of these images is not lost on me, and there is one shot in particular of soldiers backlit by the sun, which looks like at least three different composite images layered on top of each other, that is truly breathtaking. But lots of extras and colored banners does not a masterpiece make. There needs to be a reason for all the pomp and circumstance. Here, there is none. After a plodding hour-long expository setup, battle finally erupts, but without any context. It just happens. And it makes no sense. As in Ran, Kurosawa’s idea of medieval warfare is a bunch of guys shooting at an endless stream of other guys either running or riding parallel to the shooters—that’s right, parallel. I’m no military expert, but shouldn’t an attacking army be either going toward (perpendicular) to the enemy line or, if they retreat, away from the line? But parallel to? The way Kurosawa films the action, they are like ducks in a shooting gallery. This makes for a pretty picture, what with all those banners and backlighting, but is entirely nonsensical. Worse, though, is the complete anonymity of the action—there is no build up of tension, no excitement in the action, just bodies in motion. If you took a still frame from one of these sequences and hung it up on a wall somewhere, I’d say great photo. Watching it as part of a narrative film, I say bad filmmaking.

But this instance isn’t even as bad as it gets. The previously mentioned nighttime battle sequence is a master class in boring and confusing the audience. First of all, this sequence is some of the worst night(or day-for-night, I couldn’t quite tell) cinematography ever. Even in a brand new print, the image was muddy and egregiously dark, to the point of barely being able to make out figures on screen (those colored flags finally came in handy). Again, instead of any real action, all we get is off-screen commands to troops, who then shuffle across the sand dunes to make new formations, another excuse for Kurosawa to use all those flags and extras. There is no drama, no narrative rhythm, just constant, vaguely defined motion. Throughout this sequence, I had no idea where troops were in relation to each other, what was going on in the larger battle, why the attacking general halted his troops even though he greatly outnumbered the enemy ahead of him, or, most importantly, why I should care. The purpose of this scene is to show the Double’s reaction to all the killing around him, but when the audience has no idea what’s happening, the effect is lost. It just becomes the usual “war is bad” mantra that every war movie needs to make clear, even while they trumpet its glories and revel in its aesthetic pleasure. This paradox is all the more apparent in Kurosawa’s films, where the pictoral choreography of men in action is paramount.

The final, (anti)climactic battle sequence wasn’t quite as disappointing as the one in Ran, where, after a massive build-up of people and anticipation, the battle devolves into a repeated shot of a couple extras falling off their horses, but it came pretty close. My complaint here isn’t that Kurosawa skimps on the money shot of troops actually engaging in combat (which he does, choosing instead to cut to reaction shots of the non-combatants), but that the setup for the sequence, again, doesn’t make sense. Like the other battle sequences, this one simply occurs. There is no reason aside from the fact that the new Lord is a little trigger-happy. The generals of the once invincible Takeda Clan all resign themselves to defeat even before the battle starts, simply because the new Lord has disobeyed the late Lord’s wishes to not attack outside of their own lands. The opposing warlords give the order to “shoot the horses first” as if this were a novel idea. Sure enough, as the Takeda generals send one army after another at the enemy lines, they are mowed down by a wall of gunfire. Throughout all of this, all I could think of was why didn’t the Takeda Clan just send all their guys out at once, instead of waiting for each separate army to be destroyed and then sending in another? Or better question, if this is the way they fought, how did they become Japan’s most powerful clan in the first place? Why didn’t their enemies just shoot them down like they did here? None of this matters, though, as long as all those extras with all those flags on their backs get to create the color choreography that’s really on Kurosawa’s mind. Action here is empty spectacle, far prettier but also far more boring and ill conceived than your average Braveheart knock-off. There is no lyricism to the succession of images, which is what makes Ran worth watching, but rather a forced poetry that comes off exactly as such.

Lest you think I’m some sort of action-whore who believes The Last Samurai is the best movie ever, let me be clear that I don’t necessarily want or need Hollywood-ized gratuitous combat viscera to get my jollies. I do expect to be excited and engaged, though, either by the sheer physicality or by the ideas presented in an epic such as this, and that’s where Kagemusha truly fails. The film thinks of itself as grand tragedy, but it left me feeling nothing. I never felt that the narrative provided any meaningful stakes, that there was a reason for me to feel either way about any of the characters or about the Takeda Clan. As I said before, Nakadai’s portrayal of the Double is sympathetic, and the relationship he has with the true Lord’s grandson is touching, but it is not enough in a nearly three-hour pageant of anonymous horses and men. There are no real characters in the film, aside from the Double, in that none of the other figures on screen register as people. A muddled theme of suppressing ones true identity to the greater good is lazily thrown into the film, registering zero resonance. It looked pretty easy/fun to impersonate a rich and respected warlord.

Look, there’s good stuff in this film as there is in all of Kurosawa’s films, but for the life of me I cannot understand why these are so well-regarded. I’ll keep watching Kurosawa, but from now on consider my expectations officially lowered.

by Timothy Sun | Source: 35mm
07 Jul 2008 4:26 PM | Comments (6)

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King Corn / USA / 2007

Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis leave Boston for the small farming community of Greene, Iowa and spend a year cultivating an acre of corn in this engaging documentary directed by Aaron Woolf. Cheney and Ellis’ purpose is to examine how and why corn became such a predominant feature of the American diet and the American economy, largely via the inedible Iowa crops that are processed into corn syrup or used to feed livestock. Here we see how not only urban and suburban consumers have become alienated from the processes that bring food to their tables, but how rarely farmers themselves have anything to do with their mature crops other than parceling them off for sale.

Cheney and Ellis are curious and concerned but not self-righteous, and the film benefits from the even-tempered nature of their probing. There are also a few nice visual flourishes, such as a stop motion toy farm used to illustrate some of the information. Ultimately, this intelligent investigation of the transformation of American agriculture (with all of its economic, social, and nutritional ramifications) may lead viewers not only to be more mindful of what they put in their bodies, but also lead them to wonder why the issue is so rarely a part of the national conversation.

by Victoria Large | Source: Docurama Films DVD
06 Jul 2008 5:26 PM | Submit Comment

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Hancock / USA / 2008

Recommended if you like: (a) Will Smith’s God complex or (b) extreme close-ups of Charlize Theron’s pores. If only more homeless alcoholics would use their powers for good…

by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
06 Jul 2008 1:24 PM | Submit Comment

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Pirates of The Caribbean: At World’s End / USA / 2007

The third Pirates of the Caribbean is basically a series of truly marvelous set pieces, stellar makeup jobs, and gorgeous CGI strung together in a mosaic with no discernible narrative. Even Johnny Depp’s performance as has lost much of its freshness, especially since Jack Sparrow is given nothing comprehensible to do. Then Keith Richards shows up. Why? Because. Boo, suspension of disbelief; hooray, because! The art and design of the movie are so beautifully done that the nonexistence of the plot hardly matters. (Though I feel like Orlando Bloom has some obligation to the gods of genetics to be a more useful human being with those frustratingly perfect looks of his. But as it is, watching him act is like watching a superhero who can only use his powers to deliver the mail or help a friend move. Nice, I guess, but is that really it?)

The film actually works great if you think of it less as the third installment of an established Disney franchise and more as a Matthew Barney film without any sex.

by Katherine Follett | Source: Disney DVD
06 Jul 2008 11:30 AM | Submit Comment

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The Happening / USA / 2008

A few days ago, Pitchfork ran a review of mash-up artist Girl Talk’s new album. It began:

As I was finishing an interview with Gregg Gillis in July 2006, he casually mentioned his desire to see M. Night Shyamalan’s just-released fantasy movie Lady in the Water. Given the film’s wretched reviews – a pitiful 24% on Rotten Tomatoes – and the train-wreck hype surrounding it, I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t; Gillis liked some of Shyamalan’s other flicks, so he wanted to check this one out. Simple. And it’s this omnivorous, pleasure-seeking attitude toward pop culture that defines his work as Girl Talk. (Luckily, his taste in music is superior to his taste in film.)

Ugh. I mention this because I think it reflects the popular thinking that has determined how Shyamalan’s films have been received since Signs. Yes, The Village was terrible, and yes, I skipped Lady in the Water, but The Happening, despite its ridiculous title and premise, is – like last year’s Cloverfield – a short, effective apocalyptic thriller. Of course, it has run up its very own embarrassing 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the only reason I can see for that is that Shyamalan is just not “in” anymore. He’s been rejected by those who see themselves as taking film seriously. We can all just assume that if someone we trust expresses an interest in one of his movies, they are probably kidding. Right?

It’s not great. It’s even laughable at points. But The Happening is a step forward, the first step out of a rough patch for Shyamalan, who retains his gift for audience manipulation and quiet, sustained suspense.

Rumsey’s Thoughts. Adam’s

by Teddy Blanks | Source: 20th Century Fox 35mm print
06 Jul 2008 3:14 AM | Comments (1)

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Air Force One / USA / 1997

Before heading to the cookouts, my girlfriend and I laid in bed this morning and watched Air Force One on a laptop. The acting and dialogue are terrible, for the most part. (Watch Gary Oldman, as the head hijacker, try to keep a straight face while mourning “Mother Russia.”) But the scenario itself is irresistible: Harrison Ford as the President, belonging to no specific political party, but still single-handedly saving a plane full of hostages, and the free world? Say what you will about Crystal Skull, but a decade ago the man was definitely not too old for this shit.

Audrey, who just got off a ten month stint in the press room at the Hillary Clinton campaign, was quite taken with Glenn Close as the tough, steadfast VP. Sometimes the people we cast to play our elected officials in the movies can be enough to make us proud to be Americans.

by Teddy Blanks | Source: iTunes Download
05 Jul 2008 12:27 AM | Comments (1)

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WALL-E / USA / 2008

I used to assume Pixar films would always centre their narratives around some sort of basic childhood fear or parental paranoia (usually involving abandonment issues), but in recent years Pixar has attempted to distance themselves from these mildly manipulative scenarios and instead concentrated their considerable talents upon envisioning various distressing and disheartening dystopias. By doing so the company has achieved some extraordinary results that simultaneously fuse together charming entertainment with modest social critique.

Their latest film, WALL-E, continues this recent trend by taking our consumer-driven culture to some incredibly unsettling extremes, though a great deal of their social critique is camouflaged within a robot love-story, which somehow manages to integrate an appreciation for mushy musicals. The film is also one of Pixar’s more audacious creative efforts considering it evades issues involving family dynamics and commences without a great deal of dialogue. Actually, even when the first few words are spoken, they’re kind of inaudible. The difficulty in discerning the dialogue actually may not be the film’s greatest obstacle, as the filmmakers have included a few darker touches (the robot psych-ward was kind of disturbing) and I’ve already heard complaints about the tweaking of the accepted Pixar-formula by blending a few schmaltzy techniques that appear lifted from the maudlin romantic-comedy playbook (the complaints I heard so far are a bit blunter than the words I’m using).

While I do agree that some of the song cues sound a bit too calculated and I might have chosen a different musical for Wall-E to be obsessed with, I have to say Pixar has long relied upon sappy songs to achieve their signature emotional resonance and I’ll admit that I believe them to be one of the few contemporary filmmaking crews capable of wielding such sentiment within specific scenes without ultimately weakening their final product. In fact I must say that I was mesmerized with a few sequences within the film, which rarely happens anymore.

Instead, what I found weird was the integration of live-action footage with the usual computer animation. Perhaps it was a necessary decision considering the filmmakers already needed to include live-action footage of Hello Dolly!, but even after the filmmakers provided an explanation for the creepy alteration to the human form that occurs over the centuries within the film, I still found that the inclusion of footage involving Fred Willard severely hindered, rather than enhanced, my ability to perceive this imaginary world as some extension of our own reality. Instead, the inclusion of live-action footage only highlighted the artificial nature of film, which seems to run contrary to the filmmakers’ intentions, since the film’s primary observations seem squarely aimed at our current culture. Still, this lapse seems trivial in comparison to film’s other substantial achievements.

As an aside, in terms of the demographic breakdown of the audience, I was definitely the outlier at the matinee screening I attended. It felt like every grandparent in my city decided to take their grandkids to see this movie. Oddly there was little reaction from either demographic during the screening and I’m not exactly sure which age group was more likely to have been sleeping through the movie.

by Chiranjit Goswami | Source: Walt Disney Studios 35mm print
02 Jul 2008 5:14 PM | Submit Comment

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Stranger on the Third Floor / USA / 1940

Nearly a decade after his haunting turn as a deranged murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, Peter Lorre lent his incomparable aura of insanity to another tense thriller, once again playing a mentally disturbed man who is convinced that the world has it in for him, and is irresistibly compelled to carry out heinous and violent acts.

Unlike his starring role in M, however, Lorre’s work here is limited to a few short scenes, the bulk of the tale dominated by the tribulations of a reporter named Mike Ward. After witnessing a murder, Mike helps land the accused man in jail. However, once a second murder occurs, again with Ward as the only witness, the police turn their suspicions on Mike, and force him to find a way to prove his innocence.

Though the wrongfully accused man thriller has been infused with greater suspense (Hitchcock’s terrific The 39 Steps, for one, was released five years earlier), Stranger incorporates some unique narrative touches, including a terrific nightmare montage of the American legal system gone belly up (replete with sleeping jurors, an impatient-to-convict judge, and an apathetic defense attorney), and an extended interior monologue detailing just how paranoid Mike has become.

Above all, though, even though his screen time is limited, it is Peter Lorre’s presence that recommends this film—his disarmingly calm voice laced with madness; his lolling and asymmetrical eyes peering warily at new acquaintances—injecting a sinister, unnerving element to the proceedings.

by Thomas Scalzo | Source: TCM Broadcast
02 Jul 2008 8:43 AM | Submit Comment

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