狂った!

wikipedia - imdb

At the Castro Theatre, with Lucía, Adela, and Meghan, on 12 March, 2007, at 21:25.

This was my last film at the Castro Theatre before we move. I can’t really imagine a better sound film to see at the Castro, though it’s a shame the sound quality was so poor.

When I was in high school, my father mentioned a few times how much of an impression this film had made on him when he had first seen it (he was at UCLA at the time). The fact that it had made such an impression on him itself made an impression on me, and so I determined that I would watch the film. At that point, pretentious as I was, I determined that it was the best film I’d ever seen, though before long it shared that space with The Children of Paradise.

In college, I saw the film as part of the Intro to Film class that I was taking. In the lecture following the film, my professor began reading a passage from a book, detailing the significance of the class relations, the recurring references to the “rules of the game,” and constant reminder of the ways in which the lives of the upper class are really just ongoing performances (I don’t remember the details). At some point I raised my hand and asked something about how, given that Renoir had prefaced the film with some text indicating that it wasn’t intended as social commentary, wasn’t there some danger of over-interpreting the film? The professor then revealed that he had been reading from Renoir’s memoirs.

It is interesting to see how Renoir works in the themes of performance into the film. Everything is a performance. Octave prepares to conduct an imaginary orchestra, the house guests put on a series of amateur stage productions, people give dignified speeches, and people put up masks and façades at every encounter. Even the hunting is its own kind of performance, as they stand around shooting at pheasants and rabbits that are brought to them by the groundskeepers and their noise sticks. As the two main story threads reach the height of insanity—the servants running around with Schumacher brandishing a gun, and André wrestling with St. Aubin—Chesnaye tells one of his servants that the farce must be stopped, and the servant asks him: “which one?”

I’ve seen La règle du jeu a few times now and it’s a great film whatever way I think about it. While I have come to value this sort of film less over the years and films like Tokyo Story and A Woman Under the Influence more, I still find La règle du jeu infinitely rewatchable and it still gives me a great deal to think about. It is the absolute height of that kind of theatrical filmmaking.

(***)

The Lives of Others

wikipedia - imdb

On 35mm at the CineArts Empire, with Lucía and Ben, on 3 March, 2007, at 21:25.

This was basically a well-crafted Hollywood thriller, only it was a German production, and it was set in East Germany five years before the wall came down. It was assembled expertly enough that I was never bored, even if the film was basically a large package of predictable plot twists and clichés (you could pretty much tell the nature of each of the characters at a glance—the characters were, for the most part, like thin paper cutouts, each with a readily identifiable set of traits, excepting the three main characters, whose deviations from those traits were the basis for the film).

The film did cause me to wonder about life in East Germany, but I don’t feel like I necessary know anything more about that after watching the film. I do wonder how differently the subject matter might have been handled by a director that grew up in East Berlin.

(*)

Army of Shadows

wikipedia - imdb

on 35mm at the Roxie Cinema, with Lucía, Ben and Sunny on 14 January, 2007, at 21:00

Melville seems obsessed with details. He’s not much for plot-moving scenes, explicit violence, or dialogue; he’d much rather draw our attention to one thing happening on-screen, whether it’s Alain Delon fiddling with car keys in Le Samouraï or the careful execution of a robbery in Le Cercle rouge. Also, Melville likes us to imagine things off-screen, and I can’t think of a time I’ve seen this to such good effect as in L’Armée des ombres.

The real tone-setting moment for the film comes when Philippe Gerbier tells a fellow prisoner to escape while he distracts the guard. He goes over to bum a cigarette off the guard and the other prisoner runs, at which point Gerbier takes advantage of the guard’s distraction to stab him in the neck and escape through a side passage. As he exits the building, we hear some commotion of screen, presumably near the entrance, and it culminates in gunfire. Suddenly we become aware of two things: Gerbier is cruelly willing to sacrifice his anonymous fellow prisoner, and he is no ordinary prisoner (something that was hinted at but not made entirely clear before).

The film as a whole is very episodic. Relationships bounce around over presumed time gaps with little explanation, and the film really seems like a series of action vignettes out of a larger story that Melville doesn’t want to bog down the film in telling, or would simply prefer to tell through the vignettes. The film moves around in fits and jerks as though it were someone relating memorable incidents rather than a smooth narrative. What is the effect of this style of filmmaking? Well, it makes the film a lot more thought-provoking (we are often left figuring out why characters are doing what they are doing, and what happened before a scene to cause them to behave in such a way), and while I’m normally not over-fond of films-as-puzzles (such as Babel), I do make exceptions when I find the puzzles intriguing, or when I feel it contributes to my understanding of the characters (such as in Mulholland Drive, which I didn’t love, but I liked much more than Babel), rather than detracting from it. I prefer character-driven puzzles to plot-driven puzzles? Perhaps that’s it, but it sounds over-simplified and I’m sure I’ll find plenty of exceptions.

From these three films of his that I’ve now seen, I feel like Melville has a very consistent style. He must have been heavily influenced by Rififi (which Le Cercle rouge seems like an intentional nod to), which seems something like a point of origin for this kind of filmmaking where execution is the goal or focal point of the film and plot is given secondary standing—just prominent enough to give us some kind of reason to want to know the outcome of the events as they unfold. This was certainly the best Melville that I’ve seen, and I’m now all the more eager to see some of his other works.

(***)

wikipedia - imdb

On 35mm with Lucía, Ben, Ana, and Ryan, at the Clay Theater, on 30 December, 2006, at 19:00.

This was a very attractive film and I’d like to see it again. Almodóvar’s ability to direct strong female characters (or an entire cast of them) puts anything out of Hollywood to shame, though his referencing of Bellissima and Mildred Pierce reminds me that it wasn’t always this way. In fact, in comparison to Anna Magnani, Penélope Cruz seems like she could be blown over by a light gust.

This is only the first time I’ve really seen Penélope Cruz act. Certainly there was nothing memorable about her performance in Abre los ojos or Blow, and wild horses couldn’t drag me to see Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

(**)

wikipedia - imdb

On 35mm with Lucía, Ben, Miho, and Mariko, at the Century 20 Daly City, on 25 December, 2006, at 22:30.

The film is about as good as I’d expected, and not as good as I’d hoped. It is remarkable that Beyoncé would play a character about whom it is repeatedly pointed out that her voice is less than great and that her selling point is her looks. The film felt too modern in many ways (though the costumes were fabulous), the music was a disappointment (it seems very monotonous for most of the film, with a few exceptional moments), and the film had an uneven texture (in particular, it wasn’t clear to me that the film was a musical until about 20 minutes into it, which came as a slightly jarring realization).

I wish I knew more of the backstory—certainly the history of Motown Records must be fascinating—but I’m not sure I got too much out of this version.

One aspect of the film that I found interesting was the way in which all of the characters were cast in varyingly positive and negative lights as they developed through the film—none of the characters were outstandingly noble, and none of them were unrelentingly bad. Certainly the most despicable character, Curtis Taylor, Jr., had the distinct characteristic of being the only one who really had the vision to bring the whole musical genre to the national stage, and the determination to make it happen, even if he was determined to sell everyone out in the process.

()

Harakiri or Seppuku (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)

wikipedia - imdb

On 35mm at the Pacific Film Archive, with Lucía, Dick, Ben, Sunny, Barbara, and Oscar, on 3 December, 2006, at 18:40.

In Seppuku, Kobayashi does a good job of having his cake and eating it too. The film is a withering critique of samurai ideals, of ideas of nobility predicated on position and circumstance rather than character, of making life-or-death decisions based on snap judgements and character generalizations rather than the situation at hand, and even of accepting the truth of history as it is handed down to us. Yet at the same time, we are given top-notch swordplay and bloodshed and a good and noble character to root for. What more could we ask for a film? In this case, I feel that Kobayashi managed to take the premise and work through it to utmost effect. The layers are unpeeled slowly over the course of the film, giving great weight to the kernel inside. In many ways I was reminded of Hero, only I felt that the way that the story slowly worked its way out like a Rubix cube was much more engaging (Hero I found pretty tedious), and the kernel itself was something I felt much more valuable (in Hero we learn that it’s worth sacrificing lives for… the one true China?).

If there’s a better samurai film out there, I don’t think I’ve seen it.

(***)

wikipedia - imdb

On 35mm at the Jack London Square cinemas, with Lucía, on 28 November, 2006, at 19:30.

In The Last Laugh, the main character dies so pathetically that the director steps in with an intertitle and explains that he can’t simply leave us on such a note, even though it is the natural close to the story, and so he must provide for us an alternative ending, however poorly it fits the story. Then we see the main character win the lottery and get to eat all the cake he wants, and we find out that he lives the last years of his life in happiness, or something like that. While it is indeed a terrible ending for the story, it becomes brilliant, because it is now detached from the story and is now the source of hilarity. Above all else, it achieves its goal: the director has produced a pathetically tragic film that leaves you in high spirits.

In Stranger Than Fiction, there is a similar effect. A similarly terrible ending is attached to the film, and we are given an excuse: because the character is, within the context of the film, a real person, the author is compelled to give him a pleasant ending as the starting point for the rest of his life, instead of the pathetic and supposedly brilliant ending she had in mind. This does relieve the pressure off of the terrible ending, as with The Last Laugh, because we now have a humorous context for it, but one of the key differences is that we are given only a quick, superficial pathetic ending to chew on as the “real” ending of the film. This ending is a let down, because within the context of the film, we are made to believe that it is brilliant, and it turns the story of Harold Crick’s life into a masterpiece (so brilliant that it’s worth sacrificing his life for), and yet we are forced to actually see the ending, which is not in any way brilliant (nor could the narration in the film plausibly be a part of such a masterpiece).

In most films where we have a work that is, within the context of the film, life-changingly brilliant, we are kept from the work itself, essentially making it a MacGuffin. In this film, however, that’s impossible, because the film is itself intricately tied into the work. This forces the filmmakers into the same position that the other filmmakers are trying to avoid: the fact that it is impossible to dish out for the audience the work that is agreed upon as a world-changing masterpiece. Kieslowski (and some other directors) tackles the problem head on (in Blue and in The Double Life of Veronique), and in my view encounter the same disappointment (I hated the music in those films), but that hasn’t prevented his films from being masterpieces themselves in the eyes of many (some even accept the music as masterful in its own right).

Another approach is to be ironic: to make the work obviously lame to make a comment about the state of modern art. Daniel Clowes hit this one on the nail, though he’s certainly not the only person to take that approach. In Stranger Than Fiction I almost feel that Forster is going for that effect, I have some sense that the brilliance of the work is as much a caricature of the people holding that opinion as Kay Eiffel is a caricature of a writer (and Will Ferrell is a caricature of… an antisocial IRS agent?). But I’m not sure that that’s really the effect that the director is going for, because among other things it seems like a point made in an impossibly subtle way in an otherwise totally unsubtle film.

I really enjoyed the pop-up numbers in the beginning of the film (and sprinkled a little bit throughout), and I really wished that the director had had the guts to keep it up through the rest of the film. Unfortunately, it seems like one of the rules of such items from the Hollywood book of tricks. The rule being followed seems to be that such gimmicks are invaluable in engaging the audience in the film, but once the film has hit its dramatic stride, it becomes an unworkable distraction that will prevent the person from being sucked fully into the story. I had the same feeling about the comic-booky, frames-within-frames effect in the editing of the earlier scenes of The Hulk.

()

wikipedia - imdb

On 35mm at the Century City Centre, with Lucía and Ben, on 20 November, at 19:20.

Much like Syriana, Babel was an incredibly ambitious film, seeking to create a set of very realistic-looking narratives in various parts of the world and edit them together into a semi-cohesive mass. Unlike Syriana, however, Babel didn’t seem as involved in trying to create some over-arching view into the mechanics of any particular aspect of world politics. Instead, it was a series of hyper-dramatic narratives—all relating to culture clash and miscommunication—connected together like a chain, and intercut into a false chronology. Specifically, each narrative has some amount of overlapping chronology, and each narrative is presented with its own internal chronological order intact, but the cutting between the narratives disrupts the chronology of the film as a whole, leaving the viewer to stitch it together in his mind like a puzzle.

Iñárritu can stitch a scene together like few other Hollywood directors. Individually, I found most of the scenes very gripping, and a few stood out in particular—the club scene, the wedding scene, the scene where Santiago is driving back across the border. I also found it enjoyable to try to piece stitch together the narratives to see the larger narrative that Iñárritu was building.

Where the film fell flat for me, however, was in overwrought drama towards the end of the film, the more unnecessary elements of the film that seemed to detract from it and anyways made it longer (such as the scene where Amelia makes out with the creepy older widower away from the wedding party), and the unplausible nature (or what felt like it, anyhow) of a lot of the film that kept nagging at me (the couple’s children are taken on this crazy adventure at the same time as they are caught up in these life-threatening events at the center of international attention? These same events are caused by a kid that takes pot shots at a bus?).

I felt that the film had nothing to say, however. So much painstaking effort was spent in creating this worldly epic just for a couple hours of entertainment? I guess I don’t mind painstaking efforts for entertainment made in a studio or by a digital effects team, but when such a painstaking effort is made to create a sense of realism that feels cheaply undermined by the driving need to create a simple, very Hollywood dramatic arc, I get annoyed, because it feels like a waste; Iñárritu could have made a much better film if he had spent as much effort on creating a worthwhile story as he did on filming each scene.

(*)

wikipedia - imdb

On 35mm at the Piedmont Theatre with Lucía, on 15 November, 2006, at 21:30.

This film chronicles the clash between the tasteless, modern, media-frenzied British public and the stubborn, traditionalist, stoic, irrelevant British royalty as it came to a head following the death of princess Diana in 1997.

Not being British, it’s a bit hard to understand the significance of the queen, and of the controversy surrounding princess Diana. Also, for someone as cynical as I am, it’s equally hard to imagine feeling much emotion at the passing of a public figure of any stature short of Martin Luther King or Che Guevara. Yet at the same time, the crisis at the center of the film makes sense in this day and age where the public in first-world democracies have an amplified sense of their own importance, and the media exerts tremendous control over everything by informing the public of political events and informing the politicians of the public mood. There are parallels between the queen’s reaction to the public outrage and Bush’s response to the protests over the impending war in Iraq or his dwindling approval rating when he said that he didn’t take his lead from “opinion polls” or “popularity contests” (never mind what I think about the relative importance of the British royal family’s public reaction to the death of Princess Diana versus Bush’s determination to lead this country to commit a grave crime of aggression).

Helen Mirren gave a remarkable performance in The Queen, and her much-touted ability to play the role with unrivaled gravity leads me to imagine that she must have slept at Buckingham Palace, worn her costume to bed, and continued playing the role in her mind after the film had been wrapped. Her performance was very clearly the frame around which the rest of the film was hung, and in contrast Michael Sheen’s performance gives us the impression that Tony Blair has nothing else to do but exist in awe of the queen.

(*)

wikipedia - imdb

On 35mm at the Century San Francisco Centre, with Lucía, on 28 October, at 19:20.

Forest Whitaker was pretty amazing as Idi Amin Dada, even if he doesn’t look much like him. But that is, of course, the selling point of the film.

The film was interesting to me for two reasons in particular. Firstly we see blame attributed to Nicholas Garrigan primarily for things he doesn’t do. In a normal context, none of his actions would be considered evil, or at least, they would not be much more than run-of-the-mill. In this context, however, he is cast as A Terrible Person, because of his inaction, his weakness, his complicity, is naïveté, and his willful blindness. What is interesting is that the reason for casting him in this light is never really spelled out, leaving the audience to sort it out themselves. Is he really a bad person? He didn’t actually do anything bad, and the one thing he did do (which he did out of loyalty: mentioning the he saw the minister of health conversing secretively with a white man) he felt terribly guilty for after he came to know the consequences.

Secondly, the film makes Amin out to be a fairly personable person, which I understand he was. Because of his portrayal, we can see how Garrigan might, in his utter naïveté, be pulled in by his charisma. I really feel this strikes an important contrast to the normal American perception of bloody dictators, in which we tend to see them as overflowing with dark and sinister evil in every way. The problem with this is that by perceiving Saddam and other dictators as evil incarnate (or, alternatively, as silly, ineffective caricatures), we fail to learn anything about how they came to power. Better that we think of these people as charismatic, articulate, appealing leaders with undemocratic but multi-faceted agendas with very serious problems. In this regard the film is somewhat successful—we don’t see the complexities of governing a country shown in the film, and Amin seems to rule by whim rather than with any sort of organization, but we do see a complex character with many good traits, but a tremendous amount of blood on his hands.

Back to Nicholas Garrigan. All of this guilt-slinging, and the obvious metaphoric connection to us, the audience, gives the film a bit of a religious tone (what is the film if not a parable?), which is milked towards the end of the film when Garrigan is hung by his skin (his sudden transformation into a stoic sufferer feels heavy-handed), and again when the doctor saves him and speaks to him of redemption. Garrigan has died for his and our sins and has been given a new life outside of Uganda to atone for them. I am curious as to whether the novel feels much the same way, but I don’t want to read it for fear that it does.

(*)