Film Review--All Night Long (1962)

In the context of the rest of the collection, I was surprised by the final installment in Basil Dearden's London Underground, 1962's All Night Long. After the polemics of Sapphire and Victim and the political tomfoolery of The League of Gentlemen, I didn't expect a jazzy confection to round us out. It's not a great film, but it's a little more substantial than I initially gave it credit for. As an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, this is Basil Dearden's philosophy in practice and, because it stays fairly close to the original material, it has a stronger structure than the other films in the set.

I won't recap Othello for you, but here's how it works in the confines of Richard Attenborough's jazz club. Bandleader Aurelious Rex (Paul Harris) has recently married Delia Lane (Marti Stevens) and everybody's thrilled. Everybody, that is, except Johnny Cousins (Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner). He wants to start his own band and even has a gig, but it won't go on unless he can recruit Delia to sing. Unfortunately, Delia retired after the wedding and won't return while she's married, so Johnny hatches a plan to convince Rex that Delia is having an affair with best friend and trumpeter Cass Michaels (Keith Mitchell). But, you know, best laid plans and all of that.

Without Shakespeare's plot, All Night Long likely wouldn't be anything that great. McGoohan and Attenborough do pretty well, but the rest of the performances are not up to the level of what we've previously seen in the collection. Because there's already baggage from thousands of performances of the main characters, it doesn't come off as completely hollow, but the lack of any real standout performace and some questionable casting choices give the film an unfortunate amateur feel. The real culprit, though, is the stunt casting of the house band. Johnny Dankworth and Tubby Hayes may never have held the biggest sway in the jazz world, but putting Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck in the band is agregious. They may have been exceptional instrumentalists and one may have trained his cat to use the toilet, but actors they are not. While closeups of their hands are cool, their main function is to say things like "That's some hot playin', Charlie!" and "Thanks Dave" in tight cutaways. It reminds me of something that might have hapened in Gold Diggers of 1932. That is not a compliment. That said, the three or four minutes of music we get to hear are pretty good, so it's not a total loss, I guess.

There isn't a lot of outward connection between this film and the others here, but there are similarities in tone and attitude. Most importantly, the world of All Night Long is integrated, and the non-chalance of it is interesting. Obviously, the Moorish lead character in the play makes that interracial couple natural (though Paul Harris is black, whites in makeup would play the part for years after this came out), Dearden inserts other mixed-race relationships into the scene. Importantly, he never mentions it. This is not a political film; it's Othello, but that the director sees fit to quietly place them in the film is proof in practice of the heavy-handed ideals he presents in the earlier films.

Taken on its own, All Night Long would probably fare better, but within the confines of this collection, it feels somewhat trifling. It isn't just the lack of an overt political message, although that's part of it; outside of the Othello trappings, there's simply nothing going on. At least in a movie like Tim Blake Nelson's O, which I like but is of mixed quality, had some stylistic flourish. Even if it's a little pretentious, at least he's trying. Here, it seems that Dearden was content to film the play with little style outside the musical interludes. The film isn't boring and, because of the source, plays out well, but it doesn't come anywhere near the other films here and isn't the kind of sendoff I would have hoped for for such an eye-opening collection.

Film Review--Victim (1961)

Our next film in Basil Dearden’s London Underground is Victim, starring the great Dirk Bogarde, one of my favorite character actors. Dearden returns here to what succeeded with Sapphire: a screed against a strongly felt social problem. This time, he tackles bigotry against the gay community, specifically the laws on the books that made homosexuality illegal. Like Sapphire, Victim handles the issue by wrapping it in a mystery, but much more loosely here in favor of a more direct approach.

Bogarde plays Melville Farr, a London barrister with a loving family and a successful practice. He’s also in the closet, forced to deny his true self for fear of arrest and losing everything he holds dear. That changes, though, when members of the gay community from across the city begin receiving blackmail letters along with evidence of their “crimes.” When it hits close to home, Farr realizes that he must risk everything by using his clout to discover who’s responsible. The trouble is that most of the victims would rather pay the money than have their secret revealed, so it becomes his sole responsibility to make the sacrifice.

The impact of Victim comes less from the plot than from the overall attitude of the film. This is 1961; openly gay characters were virtually unheard of in film and, the rare time they do appear, they are sniveling, perverted villains. Dearden, who had denounced the laws publicly, not only recognizes homosexuality as an existing, viable way to be, he completely condones it. We so rarely see this attitude in film even today, let alone fifty years ago, that it is much more than refreshing to see Dearden take such a position, it’s downright shocking.

Though it takes a bolder stance than Sapphire, Victim is much less preachy, simply because the story is more artfully told. It doesn’t look as pretty as the earlier films and has a much stagier feel, but between a stronger script and Bogarde’s incredible lead performance, Victim is a great piece of work. Bogarde squeezes every ounce of emotion and conflict out of his character. As a barrister, he needs to stay on the right side of the law and, as a husband, he wants to satisfy his wife’s needs, but at a certain point he can no longer deny who he really is. This sentiment is repeated over and over, hammering home the normalcy of homosexuality. Over the course of the film, Farr’s coming to terms with himself runs in concert with his pursuit of the blackmailers; he summons the same courage to deal with both. When we finally discover the culprits, it suggests that the mainstream public is as much at fault for the practical enforcement of the laws as the bureaucracy that wrote them. Dearden rarely shows subtlety, but it is an intelligent and emotional film with its heart firmly in the right place.

While Victim was successful in England, its content could not escape an X rating. That was far less detrimental to a film’s audience as it is now, but still damaging. Over here, though, the film board would not allow it until all use of the word “homosexual” and all its variants had been stricken from the film. Really, that’s a lot to cut, and I can’t imagine how it was replaced to make sense. In their effort to pull the teeth out of the film, the effectively banned it and it became a forgotten relic in this country. The only mention I’ve ever previously seen for it is in The Celluloid Closet, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary on the history of gay filmmaking. It’s a sad fate for such a great film, one from which we could still stand take lessons. Rarely will you see such an open attitude in film outside of LGBT cinema; the mainstream still has a long way to go.

Next, our final film in the collection, a jazzy little diversion called All Night Long.

Film Review--The League of Gentlemen (1960)

Our next installment in Criterion's Eclipse Series, Basil Dearden's London Underground, is the film I assumed I would like best, based solely on my affinity for the genre. The League of Gentlemen is a good film, and more pure fun than, Sapphire, the previous film in the collection, but it's a far less artful film with a less striking message than Dearden's breakthrough.

The League of Gentlemen is a much more straightforward film than the previous entry and, while it still carries a message, this message is neither as harsh nor as blatantly set forth. It doesn't make it less important, but this film would surely be easier to stomach for audiences than the racial indictment of Sapphire. Here, we have a Colonel Hyde (Jack Hawkins), an aging career military man who has been deemed redundant and, thus, forced into retirement. This is galling to a man who has given his entire life in service for his country, and he won't be satisfied until he has severance. To take what he is owed, he hatches a two-tiered scheme that will humiliate the military and make him rich, all at the same time.

Hyde can't do it alone, however, so he puts together a list of top shelf former military men, each selected for a particular talent. Luckily, these men are played with zeal by some fantastic talent, including Richard Attenborough as a weird mechanic, Nigel Patrick (in a much different role than the previous film) as an aristocratic boor, and Roger Livesey as a conman disguised as a priest. To them, Hyde details his plan. First, they'll infiltrate the nearby military base, steal a cache of weapons, and make sure the IRA gets blamed. With that done, they'll rob a bank. Split equally amongst each conspirator, it'll amount to around a hundred thousand pounds, enough to set them up for life and repay each for a life destroyed by the military bureaucracy they gave their souls for.

The League of Gentlemen is very simple. We're introduced to the characters, on a very skeletal level and presented with the heist. Once everything's in place, we get our dual capers and a finish. As standard heist films go, it's a fine piece of work, but nothing groundbreaking. My expectations may have been higher for this than Sapphire, but there are many reasons why it doesn't work as well. This picture is greatly helped by the performances, all of which are quite good. It's humorous, taking more lighthearted stabs at the military than I anticipated it would, but it's a little too chummy for its own good and loses much of the impact of its message.

Whenever asked about the political motivations behind his films, Dearden would always demure, saying that he wasn't trying to make any waves, yet at the same time decrying the issue at hand. This kind of wishy-washy behavior is most evident on screen in this film. Certainly, Dearden makes a statement about displaced veterans and what their role in the world is after the skills they've been trained for no longer have relevance. It's so thickly masked in the comic heist hijinx, though, that the message has little help in being brought to the audience. Maybe that was his intention or maybe he just didn't feel as strongly about this as he did about other things that we have already seen and will see later, but The League of Gentlemen is too light to be taken seriously.

That leaves with the heist. It's no Rififi, but it's a tense and fun pair of crimes that fit well into the genre. In black and white instead of Sapphire's color tones, Dearden shoots the London streets with a noir feel, accentuating the monolithic structures and making them feel like repressive tools of government. The heists are well-filmed, again a little too jokey for my tastes, but nicely put together. It's a missed opportunity, but the only really strong complaint I have is in the ending, which is very poorly drawn and a clear "crime doesn't pay" tack-on. It leaves a bad taste in one's mouth, but it doesn't kill what Dearden has built: a strongly written and well performed crime film with some cool imagery, whose only crime is stopping short on a message that may not have been all that important to the director in the first place. The League of Gentlemen is a good film, better than I've made it sound. The performances are great and the story is pretty strong; I'm not a big fan of the tone, but it's still worth watching.

Next, we find ourselves back on message street in Victim, the best film in this collection.

Film Review--Sapphire (1959)

This week for DVD Verdict, I am reviewing the latest collection in Criterion's excellent Eclipse Series, Basil Dearden's London Underground. These four films, virtually unknown today but award winners at the time, are on DVD for the first time. Basil Dearden is a director I have no experience with, but it's an intriguing collection. I'll review the entire set as one on DVD Verdict and won't have the opportunity to give proper reviews for each film, so I do this here. First on the slate, Best Film at 1959's BAFTA Awards, Sapphire.

"We plan to show this prejudice as the stupid and illogical thing it is," so says Dearden in an interview during the production of Sapphire. That statement is telling of both the good and the bad of the film. On the whole Sapphire succeeds as an unpredictable mystery and a well-intentioned drama, but there are some of the same ham-handed moments here that afflicted similar but later American productions. Regardless, Basil Dearden makes a solid first impression.

Sapphire is a social problem film wrapped in a murder mystery and Dearden balances both sides fairly well. It's a very basic crime story, centering around the body of a young woman turned up in a park one morning. The death of this pretty, young, and white college student named Sapphire will scandalize the town, but not so much as the truth. When Sapphire's brother arranges to come from London to view the body, the police can't believe their eyes. Dr. Robbins (Earl Cameron) has skin every bit as dark as Sapphire's was light. Much as the police stand in disbelief, it is true; Sapphire figured out that she was able to pass for white and got engaged to David Harris (Paul Massie), the son of a respectable family. Naturally, when the autopsy reveals pregnancy, the police look to David. He, along with his entire family, claims that he knew that she was black, didn't care, and loved her anyway. He's not being entirely honest, however, and it's in finding out the missing details that will lead to Sapphire's true killer.

I know little to nothing about the history of racial tensions in England, and I'm certainly not used to such direct and expressive displays in British films, so Sapphire took me as something of a surprise. The moment Dr. Robbins arrives, it becomes clear that this is pointed racial commentary but, like its American counterparts, focuses on the white side of racism, while the black population exists more as a set of symbols than as real characters. To solve the murder, the investigators have to cross into both worlds, each with its own share of animosity and revelation. The lead investigator (the great Nigel Patrick) is the progressive one, understanding from the beginning that the idea of justice has little to do with race. His second, though, is considerably more ignorant. Once her race is revealed, he becomes less concerned with justice and more bemused that he can't just know something about a race by looking at them.

It's white people having their eyes opened to their prejudices and, while that's a very tired trope today and feels ham-handed even for the time, it's still 1959 and just having had the conversation is important. It was a daring early picture for Dearden's production company, Artna Productions, and the film made its impact at the time. It's more effective at dealing with social problems than, say, the similarly-themed but nearly a decade older Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (spoiler alert: it's a black guy!), and a more artful film, overall. The melodrama is thick and the mystery genre conventions are in full effect, but it's a shot with a lovely understated style, full of muted color and heavy with Caribbean and African music. Had Douglas Sirk directed Stanley Kramer's overrated film, it might look something like this. The performances tend toward scene-chewing, but Dearden played the mystery to hilt so he could mask controversial viewpoints. That's an important point that Stanley Kramer never understood. If filmmakers have a political point, they cannot slap us across the face with their message. The only people who won't recoil from this are those who already agree. It's much better to ease audiences into uncomfortable positions, get them enjoying the story, and then implant the message in the brain. Sapphire isn't the best at this sort of subterfuge, but it does manage to entertain while delivering a surprisingly pointed message.

At first glance, there's little understanding why Basil Dearden has been so forgotten, but this is a nice first impression and I'm excited to see what comes after. Next up, The League of Gentlemen, a heist film, one of my favorite genres.

Film Review--True Grit (2010)

The press for the Coen Brothers' adaptation of True Grit, of the 1968 novel by Charles Portis and not of the 1969 Henry Hathaway film, not surprisingly, has focused on Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, the role that John Wayne played in the first film and the character with the titular grit. Fairly, Bridges is fantastic in the part, losing himself entirely in the surly alcoholic grime of the US Marshall, but this story isn't his and neither is the film. Those honors go to Mattie Ross, the steely young woman that hires Cogburn, and Hailee Steinfield, the brilliant young talent at the heart of True Grit.

There's good reason why John Wayne is the one remembered from Hathaway's picture, even though the essential structure of that film remains unchanged here. He's an icon for a reason, but he was always a dominating figure wherever he appeared. He needed costars of a certain strength to make up for his top heavy swagger, but Kim Darby was no Vera Miles and, the Rhinestone Cowboy himself, Glen Campbell (of all people), cast in the role of Ranger La Boeuf , is certainly no James Stewart, so it's Wayne's one-eyed marshall that we are left with forty years later. The film is good, not great, and not worth its reputation. It's certainly not necessary viewing to enjoy the Coens' effort, a much stronger and more complete film, most unlike what they've done in the past. Instead of a movie that has that “Coen Brothers feel,” a concept they so expertly parodied in Barton Fink, True Grit is just a damn fine Western.

That this is such a straightforward revenge tale, it's a little surprising that the Coens decided to tackle Portis' novel. Plenty of genre stories have more moral ambiguity and less conventional plotting, but they saw something in the characters and the simplicity of the story, or maybe they just love the book. Either way, the result is a fantastic revisionist-style genre film that represents the the themes of the book in much darker fashion than its predecessor approaches. It's hard to tell if this is more or less violent than No Country for Old Men, but it's certainly less expected here than in their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel and much more gratuitous. Don't get me wrong; as a lifelong horror fan, I have high appreciation for smashed heads and blown chests, so I'm not exactly complaining. Seeing skulls crushed against stone here, however, does little to serve the story, but adds at least a certain measure of shock value, as evidenced by a number of disgusted noises in the dark. People can quibble with the necessity of it, but it punctuates the harshness of the world these characters inhabit without resorting to outright explanation.

True Grit is an unflinching and sometimes quite brutal film, which makes it all the more surprising that then 13-year-old Hailee Steinfield fits so naturally into the scene. Very few, if any, scenes in the film don't involve Mattie Ross and Steinfield stands up ridiculously well next to some heavyweight actors, often outshining some of their work. Mattie is a hard young woman, steeled by the ranch and smart from her effort. With her father dead and an obvious lack of regard for the effectiveness of either her family or the law, she has prepared herself to deal with issues well beyond her years. She built herself into as good a negotiator as a conman and at least as good a bounty hunter as the Texas Ranger she travels with. Steinfield inhabits the part completely; the utter joy that washes over her face when she gets the chance to shoot the man who killed her father offsets her sadness from his death which sits under the surface. She'll barely admit her sorrow, but she's out in the wilderness for mean and dark purposes and, despite any physical and experiential limitations she might have, she's out for blood. For somebody at the proper age to represent this is really an amazing thing. This wasn't the case when Kim Darby, at least seven years her senior at the time, played the part. Mattie Ross is the kind of role that an actress like Barbara Stanwyck would have excelled with, though I don't know that even her greatness would be better than what Steinfield shows here; her total conviction trumps most all child acting that I've ever seen.

Jeff Bridges is as good as you expect him to be and, while his grungy appearance contrasts starkly with his hairpiece sporting, corset wearing counterpart in John Wayne. Unlike Wayne, Bridges actually looks like he spends his days on the range and, when his nights can be spent indoors, they're muddled by a bath of whiskey. The thought of Bridges playing Rooster Cogburn was delicious, and he does not disappoint in the execution. I'm not as thrilled with the rest of the major casting, though I can't have too much trouble with it; they're up against some pretty tough lead competition. Matt Damon's playing Ranger La Boeuf and, while his performance is adequate and, at time, pretty funny, he never escapes being Matt Damon the way that Bridges and Steinfield get away from themselves. Josh Brolin makes a slightly better mark as Tom Chaney, the man who killed Mattie's father, but I can't help but feel like this role, as well as Damon's, may have been better suited in the hands of lesser-known actors. Part of it feels like the gang's all here—plus one girl—and the parts may have been better served by people outside their circle. There were clear parts for John Goodman and Michael Lerner, why not them? I shouldn't really quibble over such things, since I did like their performances, but I wish that the main supporting roles were filled by people without big name Hollywood baggage.

The important technical pieces are intact. Roger Deakins shoots the film and Carter Burwell scores it. Both aspects of the film are brilliant, though much discussion of their respective parts require too much explanation, so should just be experienced. True Grit is a fine film, a departure for the Coen Brothers for sure, but a welcome one. This is genre fiction played on a very high level that is worthy of whatever awards come its way. Mostly, I hope to see more from Hailee Steinfield and, even if she never does another film, her portrayal of Mattie Ross should go down as something all young actors should aspire to.

Film Review--CAS'L' (2010)

Is Bruce Bickford even human? I’ve seen pictures of the guy and he appears to be of my species, but what Earth-bound mind could possibly conceive of the monstrosities born of his work? Between his hands and a ton of clay lies a magical, undulating world of Bickford’s unique vision that is, at once, violent and sexual, disturbing and beautiful, and always complete genius.

Bickford’s public body of work is unfortunately slim, but by no means does this indicate a stagnant artist. Instead, the detail needed to create these figures and landscapes demands extreme labor and patience. Eighteen years of that patience resulted in the astounding CAS’L’, forty-five minutes of contained insanity and animated wonder. While Bickford’s style hasn’t changed much since his word first appeared to a relatively mainstream public in the Frank Zappa film, Baby Snakes, the scope of CAS’L’ is far more broad and fully realized than anything he has ever created.

Trying to glean a plot from CAS’L’ is a fool’s game, one that I won’t pretend to play. Bickford works off of themes and blunt-force imagery, not story. CAS’L’ moves like a river as clay overtakes clay in waves on mayhem, rising up to consume what came before and waiting to die by the grostesquery that follows. The style lends an impression of stream-of-consciousness while being anything but spontaneous. Bickford’s clay animation is as deliberate as you’ll find; it had better be because once a figure is gone, it’s destroyed forever.

Bickford’s morphing, bleeding style isn’t some gimmick he uses to overshadow second-rate work; he has it down to a science. It’s often said that, in art, it’s important to have a broad enough perspective to kill your babies. On that level, Bickford is a serial murderer. Committing gleeful infanticide with every meticulously constructed frame, his figures are born and eat, then killed and eaten to make way for a rebirth in a different, equally hungry form. Giant nude women wielding swords yield to tiny versions of themselves, who are then smashed into hamburger (or, more accurately, a hamburger) to be eaten by a living human and have their insides poured onto the landscape to recollect as a group of gun-toting Sandinistas built to wreak even worse havoc on the next generation.

We get four loose slices of this world that have only a tenuous connection to one another. The interpretation of each scenario is certainly up for debate, but themes of war and consumption are ever-present. Whether you’re watching a rendition of the Globe Theater or perusing the outskirts of the “Crum’L’ Brand Criminal Cigarette” factory, you can be guaranteed of three things: swords, blood, and clay devouring clay. Everything moves in and out of each other; it’s an awe-striking thing to behold. Colorful and creative on one hand a virtuosic level of detail on the other, CAS’L’ is a nearly perfect balance between the aesthetic and the technical.

Great as Bickford’s images are, CAS’L’ is silent on its own and would be slow to watch, let alone to market, without a top-notch soundtrack. In 1979, that was provided by Zappa. Today, that duty falls to Greg McClellan, who edited the film in addition to writing the music, playing bass and keyboards, performing the sound effects, and appearing in the film as “Giant with Swords.” Fairly, McClellan is no Zappa (who ever has been?), but that doesn’t change his impact on the film. Along with Bill Barkley on guitars and Daren Pullen on drums and percussion, McClellan provides a Carl Stalling-esque mash-up of styles, from flamenco to jazz to metal and just about anything in between. The seconds-long snippets of music remind me of Mike Patton’s Fantomas or John Zorn’s Naked City projects (comparisons that couldn’t be more complimentary), and add levels of humor and irony that do nothing but enhance the often nasty, always hilarious effect of the film.

I loved CAS’L’ from top to bottom and start to finish. I can’t say I understand every little thing about it, but I don’t want to. CAS’L’ is an aesthetic feast, a film that should be seen by far more than ever will. No matter how many eventually witness Bickford’s greatness, art like this is two decades well spent.

Movie Review: They Killed Sister Dorothy

Taking Lyrad's suggestion, I sat down and watched They Killed Sister Dorothy last night. The documentary traces the murder of American nun Dorothy Stang in the Brazilian Amazon, and is subtly divided into three parts: the first deals with her efforts to create a new type of sustainable land-holding for the poor in the Amazon in the face of local opposition, culminating in her murder; the second part focuses on the trial of the poor gunmen accused in the murder; and the third (and longest) part focuses on the trial of a ranch-owner accused of hiring the gunmen to kill Stang. However, the documentary is far from blocky; the directors and editors do a spectacular job threading the three stories together so that it flows seamlessly, even while the three acts play out.

The background is fairly straightforward: Stang had begun mission work in Brazil in the 1960s, and had developed a plan of sustainable development in which the landless were given land to own. They could farm and clear 20% of this land as they deemed appropriate, but the other 80% (composed of rainforest) was to remain untouched. The program, or "PDS" (Sustainable Development Plan) would thus simultaneously allow landless to gain access to their own plots and prevent the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest. Stang's program received nominal support from the federal government, but also met with widespread opposition in the state of Para, as both ranchers and poor farmers were openly antagonistic to Stang and to her plan, ultimately leading to her murder.

The two gunmen involved in the murder are quickly arrested, as is a middle-man who allegedly set up the murder, and they are quickly found guilty. This is unsurprising, as anybody who studies any part of Brazil knows that the legal system is really two systems in one; a legal system for the poor, who are unable to afford wealthy lawyers, lack political connections, and are quickly condemned; and the wealthy, who are often connected to political elites (especially in states like Para), can afford elite lawyers, and who usually walk. What is curious in the Stang case is that the lawyers for Vitalmiro Bastos Moura ("Bita"), the ranch owner accused of contracting the murder, also offered his services to the poor gunmen who could not begin to pay for his services. Both gunmen refuse the lawyer's services in the 11th hour, though, suspecting they're being set up as fall guys by the lawyer so that Bita can walk free. Both gunmen admit to the killing and are sentenced, but not before implicating Bita in the murder of Stang.

This situation sets up the last half of the documentary, which focuses on Bita's trial. After admitting in their own trials that Bita had contracted the gunmen, they then say in Bita's trial that he never contracted them, and that they had acted on their own, thereby contradicting their own admissions in the earlier trial (apparently, perjury charges either do not exist in Brazil's legal system, or operate differently, I'm not sure). As the trial proceeds, Bita's conviction looks increasingly unlikely, as his lawyers raise numerous issues, including allegations (which seem patently absurd by this point in the narrative) that Dorothy had contracted murders of people in the region herself, the arrival of the FBI in questioning the gunmen, and perhaps most importantly, the defense lawyer appealing to Brazilian nationalism by portraying Stang as part of an American imperialist project that wanted to colonize its own state in the Amazon and deny Brazilians the right to their own land and to use it as they want. This aspect of the argument was particularly brilliant (if offensive), because it very well could have worked; Brazilians of all political stripes are extremely suspicious of foreign groups trying to save the Amazon, be they NGOs, government organizations, or individuals. Even the most politically astute and aware will often fly into blind suspicions and accuse NGOs of just working for the government so that the "First World" can further exploit Brazil. These arguments sometimes are nearly sensible ("why does the rest of the world get to tell us how to use our land when we can't tell the United States, or Russia, or China, how to use theirs?"), but they are often illogical or inconsistent. Nonetheless, it is one of the ways in which national identity affects Brazilians throughout the political spectrum, and by appealing to that nationalism and suspicion of the U.S., the defense lawyers were making a very astute move. I don't want to give too much away, but I'll say this: as the trial continues, I couldn't help but be wrapped up by the suspense the film-makers create, actually feeling my blood rush a bit faster as it reached the climax, even though I knew the outcome. To me, that speaks of the highest ability to weave a story and get viewers invested, and in that regard, the film was a magnificent success.

One of the more interesting aspects to me was seeing just how Brazil's criminal legal system functions in trials. I had my own extensive experience with the Brazilian legal system, but it was much different than the one the movie documents. It was noticably different, ranging from the ways in which witnesses were addressed to the set-up of the court itself (the charged sits isolated in the middle of the floor in front of the tribunal, separated from his defense, though apparently they can still consult him during the trial). It offered a fascinating insight into how different legal systems function, raising as many questions in my mind about how the U.S. system functions as how Brazil's does.

I had a hard time finding any flaws with the film. Certainly, as a specialist (of the dictatorship, no less), I was very curious about what Para was like in the 1960s, and how the military dictatorship might have responded to Stang's (or others like her) arrival (if they were even aware of it). I also would have liked more individual interviews with the poor in the area, both in favor of and against Stang, to get a more diverse understanding of why they viewed her the way they did, but admittedly, that's not the film's focus, and we do get a decent sampling of those voices in the first part of the film; I was just interested in getting to even more of those voices (though perhaps it will just have to wait for my own or somebody else's research).

But these are hardly serious "complaints" that undermine the quality of the film. It speaks highly of the depth and lucidity of the documentary that there are many aspects of the film I haven't even begun to go into: the legal roadblocks that Stang's friends and family encounter in their search for justice; the living conditions, hopes, and fears of those poor families who are a part of the PDS; the sheer sliminess of Bita's lawyers, who clearly overwhelm the poorly-paid prosecutors as representative of how the wealthy benefit in Brazil's justice system; and many other aspects. The movie manages to cram a lot of detail and information into the narrative while never overloading the senses or overwhelming the viewer with information, making it an excellent documentary for specialists on Brazil even while being completely accessible to everyday viewers. I cannot recommend this film strongly enough, whether you're interested in the environment, social justice, Latin America, legal suspense (the story outdoes anything most authors of crime/legal suspense novels could ever offer, even when you know the outcome), or just the documentary format.

Film Review--World's Greatest Dad (2009)

I ordinarily go out of my way to avoid films that star Robin Williams, but when there’s a second directorial effort by Bob Goldwait, I don’t care if it stars Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus (actually, that might be brutally funny). The last time I saw a film he directed was 1991’s Shakes the Clown, which certainly has its detractors, but is one of my very favorite comedies. His brand of humor (if we forget his turn in the miserable Police Academy movies) veers sharply into the dark and me; he never for a second pretends like it’s going to be nice. Those were certainly my expectations going into World’s Greatest Dad, but it’s shocking to find those expectations not only met, but resoundingly exceeded. Is that a good thing? Is it funny? Depends on whom you ask.

Williams plays Lance Clayton, a failing writer and failing father. He has written four novels with no takers, and has resolved to quit writing if he can’t get his fifth published. His son, Kyle (Daryl Sabara), is about the biggest scumbag kid you’ll ever have the displeasure to meet. Because he’s such a little dickhead, everybody at school treats him badly, which causes him to act worse, and it becomes a never-ending escalation of shitty behavior. Lance is the poetry teacher at Kyle’s’ high school, but all of it goes over his head. His self-absorbedness makes him blind to everything except the fact that none of the kids give a damn about his poetry class and his belief that his girlfriend is cheating on him with the physics teacher, which he thinks he sees all too clearly, though he shudders to admit it to himself.

Just as he starts to think that things have started to turn around, he comes home from a date to find Kyle dead--autoerotic asphyxiation (naturally). In spite of his grief, a light comes on in his head. He cleans Kyle up, dresses him, hangs him in the closet, and types out an overly eloquent suicide note. After the initial shock of his death, the school publishes the note and, all of a sudden, everybody was his best friend. He becomes a martyr in the minds of the students and, now, Lance can rewrite Kyle’s life…literally.

Especially when they die young, people have a tendency to lionize the dead (see Kurt Cobain or Pat Tillman). The real story never matters as much as the narrative, and Goldwait skewers this attitude brilliantly. People begin to clamor for more details of Kyle’s life, so Lance starts to release pieces of “Kyle’s” journal and, eventually, publishes it as a book. He’s able to turn Kyle not only into a misunderstood genius, but also into everything Lance. Among other things, he makes Kyle’s favorite musician is Lance’s: Bruce Hornsby, a beautiful running gag that culminates in an appearance from the artist and a live solo performance of “Mandolin Rain.” As confusing as some of the details are to the students, they accept them without question. Lance makes himself relevant through his son and his life feels like it has meaning, even though it’s all shallow and based on lies.

Over the years, Goldwait has been something of a Comedy Central darling, directing episodes of Crank Yankers, The Man Show, Chappelle’s Show, and currently Important Things with Demetri Martin. Though this experience, the comedian has clearly developed his chops. Improvement is readily apparent in every aspect of the filmmaking, from the performances to the pacing to the camerawork. Where Shakes was this weird anomaly and technically deficient despite its charms, World’s Greatest Dad moves well and makes sense from start to finish. The screenplay, which he also wrote, is full of great quotes and surprisingly realistic dialog. The film flows really well, providing some very dry laughs up until the suicide (a gut-wrenching scene of emotional cruelty), and then moving into some truly brutal territory. At this point, the comic foils change from Lance, Kyle, and their poor relationship to the world at large. As a two-act story, the switch makes a lot of sense. All the conflict lies within Lance, and the people at large follow along because, as against logic as all of it is, they choose to believe what he tells them about Kyle; they decide not to question his stories. Robin Williams does really well in his role, better than I could have expected, which may have more to do with the fact that I can more easily swallow an actor I don’t like playing a hateable character more than anything special he did.

In the end, World’s Greatest Dad is a good comedy, if not a great one. On the strength of the writing, there is plenty of repeat value, but Goldwait is not Fritz Lang, and for as much improvement as he displays, there are some limitations in the film. Mainly, we have the issue of a complete lack of likeable characters. In Heathers, the king of modern black comedy, at least we know that Veronica Sawyer is an inherently good person and, for all that goes on, easily redeemable. There are no secrets for us about Lance Clayton. When he says, “You guys didn’t like Kyle. That’s okay. I didn’t either. I loved him. He was my son, but he was also a douchebag.” we know that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree, and that’s a problem. It would have been fine if we thought he was decent and Goldwait pulled the rug out from under us, but Lance goes from totally pathetic to an utter asshole, so we still have the question of why we’d want to watch these characters torture each other. To my taste, the film is extremely smart and funny, if not nice, and that’s enough for me. Your mileage may vary; it will solely depend on your tolerance for assholes being assholes to other assholes. It’s well worth watching, though; Bob Goldwait is a unique voice in comedy and his films are almost singular in their dark hilarity.

"I think this might be my masterpiece"

possible spoilers

These are the last words in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, and they're so gloriously cocky spilling from the lips of Brad Pitt as Tarantino's doppelganger, Lt. Aldo Raine: brash, foul-mouthed, scarred and uglied up and from an unsexy part of the USA and constantly smirking, unruffled by anything that happens to or around him, that I think he might be right. Tarantino, that is, speaking through Aldo Raine.

Despite the early trailers that made much of cartoonish violence and Pitt's cartoonish accent, it's certainly Tarantino's most mature movie--despite those easy gags, it's a mile away from the diatribes that revelled in tossing around taboos and dropping n-bombs in his earlier movies.

Pitt, though he gets the last word, isn't even the star of the movie--that would be Melanie Laurent as Shoshana, a Jewish cinema owner who saw her family killed at the orders of Oscar-nominated Christoph Waltz's Col. Hans Landa, after betrayal by the man who hid them. The garish revenge of Raine and the Basterds is nothing compared to her steely resolve, and she gives the movie emotional heft that sneaks up on you and only hits you when you realize how far she's willing to go.

Really at its heart this isn't a movie about revenge--Tarantino already did that, glorifying and personifying revenge in The Bride in Kill Bill--but about movies, about the power and the joy of movies, but mostly the power. The way cinema can destroy, can inspire, can write and rewrite history. It's not enough to kill Nazis--Shoshana must make a movie and splice it into one of Goebbels' propaganda pieces, asserting her self, her freedom through cinema.

Tarantino's greatest strength as a filmmaker has always been that he's a film junkie: he can reference layer upon layer of high and low art. But the strongest references here are to his own movies--a closeup on Shoshana's lips nearly identical to one from Pulp Fiction but with stakes much higher, and a drop-in grindhouse title on top of a German Basterd (who despite his cartoonish intro also lends weight--Til Schweiger is dangerously, broodingly dominant onscreen, emanating as palpable hatred as Shoshana's every time he's onscreen with the Nazis).

Even the Basterds, who start off as Jewish revenge porn (a crew of Jewish soldiers from the USA dropped in behind enemy lines to destroy as many Nazis as possible?), remind you where the film is really going. Eli Roth, nicknamed "The Bear Jew" and lovingly shot (never thought I'd find the man responsible for Hostel sexy) evokes a remark from Raine that watching him beat Nazis to death "is the closest we get to going to the movies."

They strike back through spectacle, if not explicitly through cinema. They don't just kill Nazis; they scalp them (how American-cinematic!) and leave mutilated bodies to be found, and carve swastikas onto the foreheads of those they let live--in a way, a nod toward what he owes to real victims of the Holocaust--a reminder that all this happened and no one should forget, and a picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words gesture both of mercy (and the word "merci" is never translated in the subtitles, a move that I can't help but think was intentional, particularly in the intro scene between Landa and LaPadite) and of continuing revenge. The story of the Basterds is their real strength, making them outsize cinema-villains. Storytelling is power.

The film cartoonizes Hitler, defanging him not just through violence but by making you laugh at him. It humanizes other Nazis, though, while not forgiving them--Daniel Bruhl as the young soldier who crosses over into cinema and stars in his own life story is almost likable in his flirtation with Shoshana and his need to flee the larger-than-life sight of himself on the movie screen, the dramatized version of his real-life exploits.

Bruhl's character isn't the only one that crosses the borders there--Diane Kruger also does as an actress turned double agent: film into politics into film again. The lines of reality and cinema, for Tarantino, are suddenly more porous, while the rest of his work has always been hyperconscious that it is film. Basterds rockets from the improbable--Mike Myers in heavy makeup recruiting a plummy-accented film critic to go behind enemy lines to meet the Basterds--to the poignantly real, but here it's not just celebrating the fun that movies are, it's making a stronger point about them.

Tarantino's political statement here is that cinema is political. Indeed, the movie wouldn't have to be about Nazis at all but for the fact that no other regime in history so successfully embraced and used film to create and tell its own story.

I had sworn off Nazi movies before this one hit, but I am also a sworn Tarantino fan. So I may say instead that I hope this is the Nazi movie to end all Nazi movies. After all, it's so conclusively rewritten history--something perhaps only safe to do with history both as well-known and as disputed as that of Hitler's Germany. Just the fact that he can make this movie leaves you wondering what kind of movies we'd have had the Nazis won. You get the feeling that for Tarantino, one of the most poignant scenes in the film is Shoshana's statement that she has no choice but to play German films.

There are a million tiny perfect moments here--a montage set to David Bowie's "Cat People/Putting Out Fire" with Shoshana putting on her makeup-as-war-paint, a cigarette flying in slow motion through the air to set a pile of film on fire, a request by Landa for a house on Nantucket that I can't help but interpret as a dig at the Bush family's own connections to the Reich, Roth's exuberant outburst after bashing in a Nazi skull complete with Ted Williams references.

I did long for a comeback moment, a la Kill Bill or True Romance, a gesture of personal physical violence from one of the film's female characters. But perhaps the lack of it is an odd gesture for some sort of peace, at least for Shoshana.

Peace. It's not really a theme here, but neither is war. Violence certainly is, but for all the vicarious thrills (and heck, I'm Jewish, I enjoy them as much as anyone) the feeling given is less that violence is good and more that those thrills SHOULD be vicarious. Bashing people's heads in with a baseball bat isn't actually a solution to a problem, and if you want to burn down the theater to take your enemies out, you may well go out with it.

Still, I haven't left a movie theater with a wicked grin like I did tonight in a while, and that's the pleasure Tarantino has always given--lines to quote, laughs to remember later, visuals that stick with you, and stories, always stories.

It's just that here, his story actually says something.

Film Review--Contempt (1964)

In general, to make a film satire work, the writer and director have to pull next to all the emotion away; it’s not easy to laugh sardonically at characters you care about. When the film relies on a doomed romance to move its plot, satire seems untenable. Yet, you can throw all generalities out the window when discussing great filmmakers. Contempt proves the viability of such an idea, but I’d never try such a thing myself. Jean-Luc Godard masterfully balances emotional weight with barbed commentary to create the saddest film ever to work as a satire.

Godard pulls out all the stops in the casting department, making it immediately appealing to classic film fans, both today and in 1964. Our leads and players in this fallen love are Brigitte Bardot (by no means a great actress, but always fun to watch, and is at her pouty, self-parodying best here) and Michel Piccoli (a staple actor of the French New Wave with a filmography so large that the Carradines flinch). Piccoli, as a playwright, is getting his first taste of Hollywood screenwriting or, at least, script doctoring. He’s been hired by producer Jack Palance (playing a man out of his league intellectually, artistically, every way but financially) to fix a version of Homer’s Odyssey that director Fritz Lang (playing himself in what would have been a caricature if Lang himself wasn’t such a nut) has turned into an artsy mess. This setup allows Godard to show the filmmaking process onscreen. While this is a world few members of the audience will understand, the director’s intimate knowledge of and acidic venom toward the industry come out in very clear storytelling. The film is instantly relatable for this, especially if you’re familiar with the myriad of horrid American-funded international productions common in the ‘50s and ‘60s (see, not coincidentally, the 1959 version of Ulysses with Kirk Douglas). We get to see the daily progress on Lang’s film, and it gets increasingly ridiculous. He’s creating something that appears closer to an Ed Wood film than to M, but hey, Lang’s just in it for the money at this point. Lang revels in his performance of himself mailing it in, while Palance prostrates, yelling and screaming about the film, but insisting it continue on unimpeded. Lang throws up his hands and follows along, Piccoli looks increasingly bemused as he wonders how he got himself mixed up in this horrible industry, and Palance’s assistant (the incredibly charming Giorgia Moll) spends her time trying to keep peace amongst all parties while serving as Palance’s whipping post for all his frustration.

As satire, all of this works very well, and that’s fine. What the supporting story brings to the table, however, is what makes Contempt a classic. Bardot and Piccoli make an attractive couple and, in the opening moments of the film, they are very clearly in love. The kind of tender bedroom placations Godard uses to show us this are simple but effective. Bathed in a thick red light, the lovers lay together as Bardot asks Piccoli if he loves this or that part of her body, while Piccoli comes up with florid words to tell her he does. There is a sweet post-coital serenity here that I hope they enjoyed, because it doesn’t last. By morning, Piccoli must meet his producer, and there will be no more peace. Bardot comes with him and, moments after the meeting, we can already see the end coming. A single incident starts the chain and, while it’s a simple misunderstanding to Piccoli, it’s a deal-breaker for Bardot. She isn’t in a position yet to express her thoughts, however, so she stews. Every perceived slight compounds the issue until finally, Bardot has had enough. Piccoli isn’t some confused cuckold; he knows something is deeply wrong in their relationship; he simply loves her too much to let her leave without a fight. The final split is heartbreaking, but after all the torment, becomes necessary. That the end of the relationship is no surprise only makes it hurt worse. Like a spurned lover, the audience hopes against hope that, looking down the barrel of dead romance, they will find a way to be happy. The devastation lies in its inevitability. Does Bardot deserve her comeuppance? No, she’s done very little wrong, but Godard leaves us with no doubt that the relationship is over, no chance for redemption, and this is ultimately the point.

I have described two wholly different films, but the stories intersect enough that they never feel like different entities. Picolli finds meaning in his relationship by reading Homer’s Odyssey, and he interprets the epic poem based on his relationship. The stories work in conjunction in many ways, not just this, and they work very well. I found myself at turns delighted by the absurdity and the satire, but angered and frustrated by the romance. That both sides could move me so strongly, never with the sense that either side got the shaft, this is a sign of great art.

Film Review: Avatar (2009)

Avatar is the 3-D, 22nd century version of Dances with Wolves with blue people. Same use of Noble Savage stereotypes, same white man coming to save the day, same indigenous embracing of the white man as their leader, same story of Europeans destroying indigenous civilizations because of greed, same directorial arrogance.

Yes, it looks cool. But the story is not only a joke, it's borderline offensive. Theoretically, viewers could take this movie and realize we should be more environmentally friendly and treat indigenous people better. But in reality, they are going to watch this movie and then wish we had these weapons to kill brown people in the Middle East.

Technically interesting, but a bad movie.

Film Review: 500 Days of Summer

I had pretty high hopes for 500 Days of Summer. And no, I'm not putting the "500" in parentheses, which is stupid and pretentious. But the pretension of the parentheses actually resembles the film itself.

I have a complex relationship with romantic films. Although people are often surprised when they hear this, I actually love a good romance. If done correctly, it can be wonderful. I look for films that delve into real human emotions, witty conversation, humor, telling both sides of the story, or some combination of the above. Sadly, few American romantic films do any of this. The brilliance of Annie Hall and Manhattan aren't their jokes, though of course these are great. It's the beauty of the romantic stories Woody Allen could tell at this point in his career. It's hardly fair to compare other films to these, or to the great films of Eric Rohmer for example, but those are the gold standard. One would like to see romantic films at least try.

And I thought 500 Days of Summer would try. Instead, it relies on cliche after cliche in its effort to tell a hipster love story. The hipster part is central; in fact, this seems to be the point of the film. The use of split screens on multiple occasions, the retro dresses Zooey Deschanel wears, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's skinny ties, the construction of Ikea as the ultimate cool place to shop, the music, the use of non-white people as silent backgrounds for their romance, this is painful stuff. Director Marc Webb even updates the Annie Hall-style monologues to the camera, but to utterly pointless effect. Moreover, the cliches don't stop in the realm of hipsterism. The film also suffers from cliches of the lazy filmmaker, which is even less forgivable. The tired use of a narrative for background is a prime example. Many commentators have complained that Gordon-Levitt's little sister calling him a "pussy" feels false and unnecessarily crude. I totally disagree with this, but what I do find problematic is the old device of relying on a child to be a wise advice-dispensing psychologist. How many times have we seen this?

The film is not a complete failure. Some of the scenes work really well, particularly those heavy in dialogue. The actors are generally fine, even though the episodic nature of the script leaves parts of the romance quite underdeveloped. The script also undermines the power of the romance. It was hard to be anything more than a distant observer of what Gordon-Levitt felt because the script was superficial too often.

Finally, a real weakness of the film is that it is only told from one perspective. Deschanel comes in and out of the story, but you never get much of a sense of her character as a person, except for one really annoying black and white piece with narration, a total failure of a scene for which she is not to blame. Why can't writers and directors tell these stories from a woman's perspective? Or both parties equally? She seemed at least as sympathetic as him, but we don't really know in the end. Instead, it was another story where a woman breaks a man's heart and he struggles to get over it. This is a rich mine of film, but there's great gender imbalance in these stories. Of course, there's an entirely other genre of romantic comedy related to this, but these movies almost try to be terrible; certainly there's little as witty as Annie Hall or Knocked Up or even 500 Days of Summer coming from a woman's perspective. This is no small reason why Juno is so freaking great--women are the heroes in a movie that tells a smart and funny story.

Film Review--The Wrestler (2008)

When I first heard that Darren Aronofsky, one of my favorite young directors, was making a movie about wrestling, one of my great loves, starring Mickey Rourke and Marissa Tomei, two of my favorite actors, I know there was no way I would miss it. Yet, The Wrestler came and went from the theater and I sat at home. Really, I have a hard time justifying an hour drive to see a movie, but this was one I really was looking forward to seeing. For a long time, the only person I knew who actually had seen it was Erik, decidedly not a wrestling fan. He described it as a solid film, yet it took me until very recently to watch it.

I loved it almost entirely. The simplicity of the story allows the characters to breathe and take shape on their own without too much influence from plot contrivances. With only three essential characters, there is time to burn and I think two of these three are over-the-top good with the third standing out as my sole complaint about the film. Rourke is phenomenal, but the surprise at this was ridiculous. Not only had he already "come back" with his role as Marv in Sin City, his performances through the years, at least in those years that he cared, have been consistently solid. I'm not going to sit here and claim that Wild Orchid is great cinema, but he's still good at what he does. Tomei is equally good and possibly better that Rourke. She is given considerably less to work with, but the strength of her performance gives her character much more depth than the script allows. And then there's Evan Rachel Wood, who has even less to do than Tomei, but can't even rise to the level of the character skeleton handed to her, adding absolutely nothing to the role. She doesn't bring the film down too much simply because she doesn't have much screen time, but what time she does spend with Rourke makes for the worst moments of the film.

I don't want to get into a breakdown of the story. There's no point in equating wrestling and sex work; saying that both professionals sell their bodies for an industry that will spit them out as soon as their bodies break is like telling me that water is wet. Unlike Aronofsky's other work, I barely find this story worth discussing. Instead, what makes this film such a great experience is its realism and not its sometimes ham-fisted plotting. After he saw the film, Erik asked me about the really violent stuff, the staple guns and barbed wire, etc., and whether that was the norm in independent wrestling or a marginalized extreme. My response was to describe a match from Sacramento's SPW (Supreme Pro Wrestling) show that I attended in around 2001. The contest was billed as a "death match" and, for wrestling fans, this one's a big seller. At the finale of the match, one of the wrestlers set up a contraption that could only exist in wrestling. A plywood plank covered in barbed wire and attached by small dowels to a sheet of glass was placed on the floor of the theater. The losing wrestler was then laid across this brutal little table while the winning wrestler climbed a ladder inside the ring. He jumped from the ladder to finish the guy off, but his opponent moved, leaving this poor bastard to land face-first through the glass and into the barbed wire. He lost the match, but watching this guy wallow in the wire and glass is one of the truly disturbing things I've seen. The answer to Erik's question, of course, is yes, this kind of hardcore style is extremely common on the independent circuit and thousands of "Randy-the-Rams" are wrestling on cards this week across the country for likely little more than gas money and some dinner.

The real reason, however, that I like The Wrestler so damn much isn't for anything I said above. I laughed during much of the film, a reaction I doubt many non-wrestling fans had. I didn't laugh because it was funny; I laughed because it was correct and I reacted very much as I would to a quality wrestling match. The fact is that The Wrestler is a spectacularly sad film, but not for the performances or the script or the style. It's sadness comes from its truth. I have devoted many hundreds of hours to professional wrestling during my life and you don't have to tell me how the story of Randy the Ram ends. The Wrestler is an elegy for all those dead wrestlers who made the same choices the Ram did. So many of my favorite wrestlers growing up: Brian Pillman, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Rick Rude, Owen Hart, and I could go on forever. I love wrestling as much or more than any form of entertainment and this love is what makes me sad.

Film Review--Philadelphia Story (1940)

It’s hard to believe it’s taken me this much time to get the second of these four reviews up but, what the hell, I’ve been sick and busy….

After deemed poison at the box office, despite the relative success of Bringing up Baby, Katherine Hepburn left the screen for the stage, where she began, to star in The Philadelphia Story. Phillip Barry wrote the play specifically for Hepburn and she took to the role of Tracy Lord like almost nobody had before or has since. Fully embodying the erudite, yet fun loving character, Hepburn was a huge hit on the stage, far from box office poison and, quickly, Hollywood came crawling back. Now, Hepburn held all the cards. Howard Hughes had purchased the film rights to the play and gave them to Hepburn, which she then sold to MGM of a relatively small sum. What she got in return, however, was guarantees that her choice in director and leading men would be etched in stone. George Cukor was her choice for director and, while originally slated as Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, she finally settled on Cary Grant and James Stewart as her leading men. With a wealth of talent on hand, Hepburn settled into the filming of one of her most famous roles and a film that would become part of the model for producing high comedy in Hollywood.

At its heart, The Philadelphia Story is a very simple story about the paparazzi trying to get into a wedding and the family fooling the reporters into thinking they’re welcome. To this end, George Cuckor directed one of the seminal romantic comedies in Hollywood history. Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, old money, who is marrying “Man of the People” George Kittredge (John Howard), new money. She once was married to Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven, also old money, still very popular with his former in-laws. This old money/new money love triangle may have made a fine little movie on its own, but playwright Philip Barry throws a wrench in the spokes by adding no money into the mix, present in the characters of Macaulay Connor and Liz Imbrie (James Stewart and Ruth Hussey). Their lack of capitol makes them the fish out of water, but instead of gaping awestruck at the fine chandeliers and garbage like that, they are scornful of what they see, happy to write their stories and take their pictures and go home to a simple world. At least, it was enough for Connor, but then he got to know Tracy Lord.

Just like Bringing Up Baby, Hepburn’s performance is in a class by itself as she plays two things simultaneously. Tracy’s cold defensiveness at the start remains in shades through her change and into the end when she has shown the capacity for warmth and love. Likewise, though she is rightfully accused by the rest of the characters of looking at herself as an “unattainable goddess,” she always lays a playful touch on her scenes (such as when she delivers a clean back heel trip to Howard to get him dirty after mocking his pristine new riding pants). Hepburn was an acting phenom. This would only become more clear later, but her skills are one of a kind even at this point in her career.

Her supporting cast is also very good, but they don’t really rise to the heights of the film’s star. Grant plays a far more secondary role than I’m used to from him, but as the character that the action revolves around, he is very solid. Though Grant has significantly less screen time than the other stars, his name actually appears first in the credits. He had clauses about name placement in his contract, but the main reason he appears first is the changing attitudes toward film marketing. Hepburn and Grant, essentially, were stars of equal clout, unchanged from two years earlier. In Bringing Up Baby, however, Hepburn’s name appears first. In the ‘30s, actresses were the focal point of the marketing, but this changed quickly and would continue this way, more or less, until today. Stewart had not yet gone to war and made himself an icon; he was still a character performer here, but does a great job as the intellectual everyman. It’s clear why his character falls for Lord, but his change from scorn to affection is quite believable. Special commendation to Ruth Hussey as Stewart’s photographer girlfriend. She had a spotty career, but he is by far the most appealing person in this film. She has an air of intelligent resilience and, though she is treated the worst of anybody in the film, she takes it with a knowing, mocking laugh, letting Connor have his fun until Lord gets on with her life, and she'll be standing there waiting; laughing at his stupidity. The character and the performance are equally good; it's a shame that her biggest role otherwise was as the nanny in Another Thin Man. Between Hussey and Asta, the dog in Bringing Up Baby, I'm starting to think there is a Thin Man pattern. Who'll be in the next movies? Myrna Loy? Tom Neal?

The Philadelphia Story definitely doesn't have the laughs of Bringing Up Baby, but the film is a lot tighter overall. It's simple, but is a perfect template for a high comedy, though it doesn't have any of the fun subtext of the later two films on the set. Brilliant comedy.

Next...hopefully soon...Woman of the Year.

Film Review--Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Last week for DVD Verdict, one of my assignments was a four-film collection presented as part of the TCM Classic Films series, specifically in this case, romantic comedies. I had seen none of the films and, because of word limitations and the general tone of the site, doing full reviews of each film is impossible. Instead, I'll do that here. All four films star Katherine Hepburn, tow star Cary Grant, and two star Spencer Tracy. I'll go in chronological order, so we begin in 1938 with Bringing Up Baby.

Katherine Hepburn + Cary Grant + a leopard = hilarity. This is the equation that makes the king of screwball comedies and I'm most struck by how funny and how sweet the film has remained in the seventy years since its release. In 1938, however, it wasn't so much known this way. Hepburn was part of the group that the studios dubbed "box office poison" and, maybe at the time, they were right, though I have a hard time believing it. The film wasn't the bomb it had been purported to be, but it was not a huge hit, especially given the names in the cast and crew. We are a country, however, that will make films like Shakespeare in Love and Titanic super hits, so what do we know.

We begin with a bespectacled Cary Grant sitting atop the skeleton of a brontosaurus. He comes down to talk to his assistant about what he must do tomorrow. First, he must pick up the just discovered final bone in his four year dinosaur restoration and, second, he must get married to his assistant. The scene is stuffed with innuendo; his assistant/fiance telling him in no uncertain terms that this marriage is simply a culmination of their working relationship and nothing, not even a honeymoon, will get in the way of his research. His look of unsurprised dismay is priceless, but he promptly heads out for a golf game with an attorney who, if he plays his cards right, may be able to secure a million dollar grant for his museum.

The action really begins at the club during his game when he finally meets Katherine Hepburn. Her persona would be solidified a couple of years later as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story and she is playing anything but that character. Here, she is a ditz to end all ditzes, totally self-absorbed and totally fun-loving. She steals his golf ball and steals his car and Grant loses the attorney while chasing after her trying to get his stuff back while she sits there not caring. He agrees to meet the attorney later at a restaurant and, when he arrives, Hepburn is there, too. She is doing some stupid trick, flicking olives into her mouth and drops one on the floor, just in the path of Grant. He slips on it, falling on his top hat, resulting in the following classic exchange:

-I'm so sorry! Oh, hello....you're sitting on your hat.
-I know it
-That's silly. Get up. I'm awfully sorry. I couldn't be more apologetic, really.
-Well, I might have known you were here. I had a feeling just as I hit the floor.
-That was your hat.
-Look at it. Look.
-Yes, well it's too bad, isn't it. Well, Joe here was showing me a trick and the olive got away.
-First you drop and olive and then I sit on my hat. It all fits perfectly.
-Oh yes, but you can't do that trick without dropping some of the olives. It takes practice.
-What, to sit on my hat.
-No, to drop an olive. Now, if your going to be angry with me, what can I do?
-Go away!
-No, I was here first. [he walks away in a huff]

While he hates her right now, she's already fallen in love with him and begins her pursuit, culminating the next morning with a call to his house to help her with "Baby," a leopard her big game hunting brother has sent her. She has mistaken him for a zoologist, so he is the only one who can help her with a wild cat. He's about to hang up when she feigns being attacked by Baby, and he jumps to save her, in spite of his marriage that afternoon. We can clearly see that he's fallen for her as well, even if he can't. All of this in only the first fifteen minutes of the film! From here, she takes him to her aunt's house where the comedy really gets going.

I've gone into enough plot already, but suffice it to say that the resulting mistaken identities, farcical chases and general craziness is some of the funniest stuff I've seen in some time. Hepburn's determination and manipulative sweetness is absolutely charming and, though she'd never play this kind of role again, her performance is appealing and memorable. Grant is far less a heartthrob here than I'm used to and, instead, he plays this sap with relish. At one point, at the aunt's house, Hepburn steals his clothes so he can't leave and he's forced to put on a frilly bathrobe where, of course, he meets the aunt who has just come home. He opens the door for her:

-What do you want?
-Who are you?
-Who are you?!
-Well, who are you?!
-What'd'ya want?
-Who are you?
-I don't know. I'm not quite myself today.
-Well, you look perfectly idiotic in those clothes.
-These aren't my clothes.
-Well, where are your clothes.
-I've lost my clothes.
-But why are you wearing these clothes?
-Because I just went gay all of a sudden!

His little hop while saying that final line is perfectly flamboyant. This would be the first time "gay" was used in this context in Hollywood, though the remark would only serve to make the aunt believe he's completely crazy.

Situationally, the film is utter chaos, often as reminiscent of the Marx Brothers as anything, but this anarchy is held tightly in check by director Howard Hawks. His direction is very straightforward, featuring exceedingly long takes that let the performers pull their lines and pratfalls (which they perform themselves) with a realism that is virtually non-existent in film today. This is testament to the actors' abilities and Hawks' trust in them, which all works to near perfection., While I have a general disdain for animals in film, it is really pretty well-done here. I certainly can't guarantee that no animals were harmed in the making of the picture (there was certainly no ASPCA on the set), the leopard lends a fairly innocuous level of danger and the dog who steals the bone (of course) is a total pro and is the same terrier who plays Asta in the Thin Man films. He's no Rin-Tin-Tin, but he's pretty good.

Honestly, there's a little bit of bloat in the second act; they spend a little too long building for jokes that have minimal payoff. It could be about ten minutes shorter, I suppose, but those ten minutes are a small price to payu for one of the finest screwball comedies ever conceived. If you've never seen Bringing Up Baby, do yourself a favor and watch it; it's a hell of a lot of fun.

[Next: The Philadelphia Story]

Film Review: Milk (2008)

Milk is a solid enough bio-pic/political film. Gus Van Sant does a solid job presenting the story. Sean Penn is great as always, all the supporting actors are quite strong. I don't know if I necessarily buy the closeted Dan White angle, but you have to give him some motivation for his crazy, murderous, hate-filled ways. This was the most unsatisfying part of the film, but not a major problem. It's really not a great film, but it is very good. In fact, I don't know how possible it is for a Hollywood bio-pic to reach real standards of greatness. Van Sant works in the conventions of a genre I don't really like, but in pretty satisfying ways. I could do without the Sean Penn voiceover narration to structure the story. I don't think it's necessary but this is a relatively minor complaint.

My real reason for reviewing the film is not for the review so much (everyone should go see it but it's not going to blow your mind), but to again remind people just how far the gay rights movement has come. The release of Milk is timely because of the passage of Proposition 8. Again though, how far have we come since the time of Harvey Milk! Milk and his supporters were fighting to simply be recognized as people who deserved basic human rights--to not be fired for being gay, to not be killed by thugs or beaten by cops. Today, the gay rights movement is fighting for legally recognized marriage. I doubt Milk would have thought that could be achieved in the next 30 years and the fact that I fully believe it will happen in the next 20 years might amaze him. The gay haters are getting old and dying and their children and grandchildren find that hate antiquated and disgusting.

I again want to emphasize that I am not downplaying the rightful anger over Proposition 8. Rather, I am just taking the long-term perspective to point out that gay rights is on the rise and that gay, lesbian, and bisexual people are moving closer to mainstream acceptance each and every day. Certainly transgender people have greater challenges on this road, but certainly their future is pointing in the right direction as well. In fact, the idea of seeing an openly gay president before I die seems not unlikely.

Film Review: Australia (2008)

I feel really terrible for the Aborigines. First, they had their children stolen from them by racist Australians. Now they have to endure having such an atrocious, laughable, interminable, and borderline offensive movie as Australia dedicated to their plight. Will their horrors ever end?

Movie Review - Kill Your Idols (Now It's Free!!!)

For those with about an hour to kill, PitchforkTV has the no wave documentary "Kill Your Idols" up for viewing in its entirety until this Friday (the 24th). I admit up front that I'm biased, because there have been few musical movements that have hit me quite as personally as no wave. That said, it's an excellent little documentary about the creation and legacy of no wave.

It starts off as most generic music-movement documentaries, going through the (in this case rapid) rise and fall of no wave as a musical expression. It has some really good interviews with some of the "biggest" names from the scene (Arto Lindsay of DNA, Lydia Lunch, Jim Sclavunos, J.G. Thirwell, Glenn Branca) as well as Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Michael Gira of the Swans, both of whom were big fans of the no wave bands and who were clearly influenced by no wave on their early albums (indeed, Moore and Ranaldo both played in some of Branca's early guitar symphonies). The interviews alone are great, not for the insider's information they provide (though that can be fun, too), but for the wildly differing attitudes of people, from the soft-spoken, reflective Lindsay, to Sclavunos's humorous take on things, to Lunch's still-hot anger, to Thirwell's disdain.

After this first portion (roughly a half hour), though, the film really picks up on the originality, immediately juxtaposing recent New York bands the Liars, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, A.R.E. Weapons, Gogol Bordello, Flux Information Sciences, and Black Dice on top of the no wavers. With no narration or interviews guiding you, it's patently clear how much the latter owe to no wave bands. In the wake of the no wave sound, the newer bands' efforts to make a claim to be doing something "new" and "different" isn't necessarily that accurate. They all sincerely admit to being huge fans heavily influenced by at least some of the no wave movement, and everybody cites Sonic Youth as being a major influence (I forget now who, but one of the new bands' members says Sonic Youth really formed the bridge between No Wave and what the new bands are doing). You can really see how much bands like the YYYs and Black Dice admire no wave even while they apparently remain youthfully naive about how "new" their sound is (and in case you didn't get the point, Crary named one section of film "Amnesia").

From that point on in the film, Crary does a great job tracing how the two generations simultaneously respect and condemn the other. Many of the no wavers (especially Lunch and Thirwell) have thinly veiled criticisms for the "New York" movement of music, even while admitting to liking individual bits. Lunch particularly comes off as a bit of a rock curmudgeon, insisting that anybody who dares pick up a bass, guitar, and drums now simply is incapable of offering anything "new," and suggests trying a tuba if you really want to be new, even while what Gogol Bordello's combination of Eastern European music and the Stooges hasn't really been done before. And somewhat incongruously, everybody gets in their digs on the Strokes, who clearly do not have no wave as their influence and who are completely outside of the narrative arc until all the no wavers start digging in on them. It's not all mean (Lee Ranaldo has some insightful comments on how the Strokes' "explosion" is symbolic of a strange and not necessarily good new way of hyping music nobody's heard yet). At the same time, while singing their elders' praises, the younger generation clearly bristles at being labeled inauthentic in any way, and occasionally reveal the youthful mistrust and anger towards what they view as a bit of snobbery.

Crary does a pretty good job of staying out of the way of this. Certainly, there are flashes where he seems to be more sympathetic with the no wavers (who are, after all, the main focus of his film). I'm not sure Crary is "out to get" the new bands, but he doesn't jump to their defense, either. The juxtaposition of the claims of new-ness stacked on top of no wave acts live in the 1970s really points towards the naivete of the newer groups in their earnestness to do something "new," and in case you didn't get the point, he titles that chapter of the film "Amnesia." Later on, in discussing the "success" of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs after their first album, he points to them as "An American Success Story." While the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are fairly well known, I'm not sure calling them an American Success Story is terribly fair or accurate. Sure, they're more famous than the Theoretical Girls ever would be, but it's not like you can say their name or mention Karen O and almost all of America stops and says, "oh, what now?" Still, Crary doesn't really reveal any open antagonism to the new bands, either, leaving it mostly up to the viewer to sympathize with them or the no wavers (or both).

At any rate, it's a really well done documentary. If you're into pretty wild music, the really rare live footage of bands like DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in the 1970s is great, and although not nearly as rare in the Youtube era, live stuff from the Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and others is great too, and the interviews are really interesting. Overall, it's a good film for anybody interested in New York music, the avant-garde, or just music documentaries. And hey, it's free - it doesn't get much more no wave than that.

Film Review: A Song for Argyris

Remembering.

That is the theme of Stefan Haupt's 2006 documentary A Song for Argyris. Argyris Sfountouris is one of millions of people whose lives were destroyed by World War II. A young boy of nearly four in Distomo, Greece, his parents and much of his extended family were killed in Nazi massacre in 1944. The Nazis were ambushed in the road above Distomo and they took it out on the village.

What must this do to a young boy? He was just old enough to remember the horrors of what he saw; events that shaped the rest of his life. His grandparents, who survived the massacre, were unable to take care of him and his youngest sister. They were sent to an orphanage. His sister was affected permanently; she doesn't seem mentally retarded but she has never been able to live by herself and remains in a home until the present. Argyris became a quiet, smart, and intense boy whose impressed his elders. After a few years in the home, he was selected to live in an international orphanage in Switzerland that brought orphans from around Europe to live together as a reconciliation project. He took to the orphanage and stayed in Switzerland to complete his studies as a scientist.

Meanwhile, while he became committed to democracy while in Switzerland, Greece was undergoing deep turmoil. Always a frontier of the Cold War, the immediate postwar years saw the Marshall Plan combine with repression of leftists to keep the Greeks from becoming communist. Argyris was still a child in Switzerland and he had no control over it. But in 1967, a right-wing military coup created a dictatorship lasting until 1974. By this time, Argyris is a grown man, a Greek intellectual, and a human rights advocate. He played a small role in the resistance from his Swiss exile, passing along banned literature and organizing resistance concerts and other public events condemning the military regime. For this, his passport was revoked. The Swiss allowed him to stay but he couldn't leave and became a man without a country.

After he received Swiss citizenship in the early 1970s, Argyris went on to serve in relief and human rights operations in Africa and Asia. However, little time is spent on this portion of his life.

In fact, about halfway through the film, I began to wonder just what the point of this documentary was. Argyris is a pretty interesting guy and has lived an intense life, but I wasn't seeing a compelling reason to make a movie about him.

But then, we get to the point--Argyris is spending his later years fighting for German recognition of the Distomo massacre. Here we understand what Haupt is going after. This is a German film that is really about exposing not only the need for Argyris to remember what happened to his village but the German compulsion to forget all the atrocities they committed in World War II. Argyris could have gone on with his life. He was a young boy after all and has had an incredible array of opportunities in his life. But he chose to make remembrance the central point of his existence. He and his his sisters sued the German government in the 1990s, demanding reparations for what happened to them. After World War II, Germany was supposed to pay reparations, but the importance of West Germany to the United States during the Cold War led these to be forgotten about very quickly.

Should a reunited Germany be forced to pay their debt to the survivors of their actions? I don't know. It's clear from Argyris that money is not going to ease his pain, nor does he really care about it. He wants contrition. And that is exactly what the Germans have trouble expressing. Haupt is clearly disturbed by his nation's forgetting and Argyris serves to remind the Germans of their dark and still fairly recent past. The German ambassador to Greece was invited to a conference held in Distomo for the 50th anniversary of the massacre; not only did he refuse to attend, he didn't even respond and sent note takers to the conference surreptitiously. This was clearly an outrage. For the 60th anniversary in 2004, the German ambassador did come and apologize for his country. But this apology clearly did not satisfy Argyris; he rails against it afterwards. But would anything satisfy him? Can anything make up for the loss of your parents and much of your extended family, the years in an orphanage, and being made an exile? Probably not. But it's not as if the Germans have tried very hard either.

A Song for Argyris is not a great documentary. The narrative structure is a bit confusing, too little is made of much of Argyris' life, and it takes an awfully long time to get to the real point. But it is certainly a thought-provoking film about memory, nationality, and war.

Film Review--Fletch (1985)

This week, I received the upcoming two-disc release of Fletch and Fletch Lives for review on DVD Verdict. Because I have to review the classic original alongside its abysmal sequel, I decided to write a few thoughts here about the movie by itself.

It had been more than a decade sing I’d last seen Fletch and, after an awful experience with re-watching Trading Places recently, I didn’t know how well it would hold up after all this time. No matter how much I loved the movie then, there were no guarantees about how funny it would be, especially given how decidedly not funny he is at this point. It took about three movies for me to tire of Chase’s bit and he’s become just about as bad as a comedian can get. So, as to the question of whether I’ve simply stopped liking his shtick or he’s stopped performing it well, I’m happy to say that it is him and not me who has the problem. Fletch is a damn funny movie that is among the absolute best work of Chase’s career, if it’s not the best film he’s in (which is Caddyshack, hands down, though more because of Bill Murray and Ted Knight than Chase). On a side note, I was very surprised to realize that this was rated PG in 1985 and oh how the rating systems have changed. There’s nothing gratuitously violent or sexual, but the language and sexual humor couldn’t even get a PG-13 rating today.

At this point in his career, Chase was the uncrowned king of the one-liners and, left to his own devices, comes across doing a Groucho Marx-style bit, except with more pratfalls. He’s good at it, spewing out a seemingly endless stream of smart-assed remarks to anyone he sees and then falling on his face. I’m no fan of pratfall comedy in general, but he makes me laugh with it every time, though it’s the lines that make the movie. Everyone’s a straight man to the aloof Fletch, whose self-satisfaction is beyond the pale (one of many reasons that this character is the most like Chase as a person). Abusing the kindness of junkies, sexually harassing women, and generally being a dick is Fletch’s game, but everyone around him acts, if not quite normally, that this is business as usual instead of the more deserving, less funny, response of punching him in the face. The only exasperation comes from the newspaper editor, whose hot story is being held up by our hero’s antics, this has less to do with Fletch and more with his stereotypically Jewish neuroses.

Technically, the characters are based on novels by Gregory McDonald but, in reality, Fletch, who is the only character with any depth, is a creation entirely Chase’s own. Not having read the books, I can only assume that the surrounding story is more closely adapted, but Chase was free to ad-lib all he wanted to the point where he has said that he directed the comedy. It’s hard to argue with that but, though every scene is constructed to allow Chase the most comic freedom, screenwriter Andrew Bergman and director Michael Ritchie have made a generally well-written and well-composed film for an action/comedy, certainly not my favorite genre with all its requisite shootouts and car chases, but the story is more compelling than most of its kind. Ritchie never allows plot coherence to get in the way of a good joke, however, the way it should be in a comedy. The classic lines and delivery, what everyone always stood in line to see from Chevy Chase, in the end, are what make Fletch so memorable and, to finish, these are my three favorite lines from the film, at least of what I can think of right now.

5. “It was something your wife said while we were in bed together. She said we had the same build. From the waist up, I mean.
4. “You know if you shoot me, you’re liable to lose those humanitarian awards.”
3. “I would have been here sooner, but a manure-spreader jackknifed on the Santa Ana. Godawful mess. You should see my shoes.”
2. “May I borrow that towel? My car just hit a water buffalo.”
and...drum roll, please....
1. [to distract a raging Doberman] “Look! Defenseless babies!”