[CinemaRatty] tag: white

The TCM Ten 8/30-9/5

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:59:47 +0000

This weekend marks the end of TCM’s annual Summer Under the Stars, finishing up with Katharine Hepburn on Saturday and, fittingly, Spencer Tracy the day after. I like the comfort in a day full of the same actor, but there’s something to be said for variety. As always, all times are EST and program days begin at 6:00 AM.

Sunday August 31

11:30 PM A Man’s Castle (Borzage, 1933) - BW-69 mins. - I’ve heard excellent things about this film, which had been on the July schedule at one point only to be nixed before air. Spencer Tracy stars as a Deperession-era man with no job. After getting girlfriend Loretta Young pregnant (a reminder of the film’s pre-Code origin), he turns to crime. Tracy and Young really were a couple after meeting on the set (despite her being just 20 to his 33). From what I’ve read on the film and about Borzage’s delicate romanticism, it seems like a major outing. An early Columbia picture, A Man’s Castle is not on DVD. (I’m bothered by TCM’s 69 minutes of promised runtime versus the 75 in IMDb’s listing, especially since TCM originally had the latter.)

Monday September 1

8:00 PM Millions Like Us (Gilliat & Launder, 1943) - BW-103 mins. - Courtroom dramas make up the entire daytime of the channel’s schedule, leading into a tribute to the Telluride Film Festival. The Lady Vanishes screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder made their directing debut as a team with this British wartime drama. The pair also finished up their supporting characters Charters and Caldicott, who had debuted in the Hitchcock movie and also popped up in a pair of other films. Patricia Roc stars as a woman working at an airplane factory during the war, looking for love and friendship. Gordon Jackson, Anne Crawford, and Eric Portman highlight the rest of the cast. I’m not sure who has the R1 rights, but it’s not yet released here on DVD. There is at least one version in the UK, but it seems to be out of print.

Tuesday September 2

6:00 AM The Men Who Made the Movies: King Vidor (Schickel, 1973) -55 mins. - I’m really keen on Richard Schickel’s auteur-focused series, originally airing on PBS in the ’70s and updated years later with improved clips, and TCM will be airing five episodes consecutively today. Vidor, who directed films as varied as The Crowd and Duel in the Sun, is interviewed here, as are actors Jennifer Jones and Gary Cooper. Though several of Schickel’s entries are included as supplements to Warner Bros. DVDs, this one is not. Maybe the studio will tack it on if The Crowd ever gets released. The Howard Hawks episode, available on two different DVD releases airs next and is followed by…

8:00 AM The Men Who Made the Movies: Raoul Walsh (Schickel, 1973) -55 mins. - Also not available on DVD, Schickel’s look at oft-neglected studio director Raoul Walsh, known for White Heat and High Sierra among several others, includes interview footage with the eye-patched filmmaker. The future of this special on DVD seems decidedly uncertain since most of Walsh’s major films controlled by Warner Bros. are already out. It might possibly show up on the unavailable James Cagney-Rita Hayworth film The Strawberry Blonde, assuming Warner Bros. turns its attention back to releasing in-demand catalog titles with any frequency. Episodes for Sam Fuller and William Wellman immediately follow.

3:00 AM Private Screenings: Shirley MacLaine (2003) - C-53 mins. - The nonfictional programming continues with Robert Osborne’s chatting up the one and only Shirley MacLaine. I don’t think I ever made time for this special. It’s not on DVD, is it? Even without seeing it, I’m confident Shirley provided plenty of strange, yet endearing memories of the Rat Pack and Billy Wilder. TCM has built a night of her movies around this program, including her Wilder collaborations Irma La Douce, at 10:15 PM, and The Apartment, at 12:45 AM.

Wednesday September 3

10:15 PM The Candidate (Ritchie, 1972) - C-110 mins. - Because the only DVD in R1 is incorrectly presented in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, viewers of the film old and new may want to check out TCM’s promised letterbox airing. Robert Redford as a long-shot senatorial candidate facing a seemingly sure thing incumbent, with Melvyn Douglas as his former governor father and Peter Boyle his campaign mastermind. This and Advise & Consent are my favorite films about politics, with the ending here among the best I’ve seen. Please Warner Bros., cough up that re-release in the correct AR. The next month or so would have been the perfect timing, too. Several other political-themed films air this evening, all pretty good from what I’ve seen. One I haven’t watched is The Dark Horse, a 1932 comedy starring Guy Kibbee, and set for 4:45 AM.

Thursday September 4

9:15 PM Jewel Robbery (Dieterle, 1932) - BW-68 mins. - Star of the Month for September is Kay Francis, whose work I am just barely familiar with and mostly know from Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise. The good news for classic film fans is that the great majority of these Kay Francis films are not on DVD, giving everyone the chance to watch movies otherwise difficult to see. A couple of William Dieterle-directed pre-Code pictures air tonight. Jewel Robbery, co-starring William Powell as a thief who romances a tycoon’s wife in Vienna, is followed later by the female executive-male secretary romance Man Wanted, airing at 1:00 AM. Both were made for Warner Bros. and remain absent on DVD.

5:00 AM I Loved a Woman (Green, 1933) - BW-91 mins. - Kay Francis gets caught up with Edward G. Robinson, or maybe it’s the other way around. Robinson plays an art student who returns home to his father’s meatpacking plant and marries Francis as he increasingly loses sight of his earlier ideals. She corrupts him, he corrupts himself and he ultimately faces the consequences. Sounds pretty good. Warner Bros. again and not on DVD.

Friday September 5

6:45 AM Living on Velvet (Borzage, 1935) - BW-76 mins. - The ever-popular Frank Borzage makes another appearance this week. He takes Kay Francis along for the ride this time, with George Brent and Warren William somewhere in the background. Word doesn’t seem as encouraging for this film as with the other Borzage or the two other Francis pictures, but it’s at least worth a mention anyway. Brent is a pilot who walked away unhurt from a crash that killed his family. He falls for Francis, who just happens to be engaged to Brent’s buddy Warren William. Another Warner Bros. title not available on DVD.

8:15 AM If You Could Only Cook (Seiter, 1935) - BW-72 mins. - Three mid-thirties Jean Arthur films this Friday morning. Leading off, Herbert Marshall stars as a well-off executive who’s lured into working as a butler. Happens all the time. The lurer in this situation is Jean Arthur, trying to get a job as a cook and in need of a service partner. Could it be love? Does co-star Lionel Stander have a raspy voice? The film was made for Columbia, but isn’t on DVD. Arthur co-stars with Joel McCrea in Adventure in Manhattan, airing right afterwards at 9:30 AM, and then listens to Stander again in More Than a Secretary at 10:45 AM.

8/29: The Player

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:58:00 +0000

A lot has been said about the metafictional genius of Robert Altman's The Player, in which the Hollywood producer Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is unwittingly involved in a very Hollywood-style story of murder, sexual intrigue, and duplicity as his career disintegrates around him and he receives threatening postcards from a writer whose script he rejected. The film announces its intent with its opening, a virtuoso tracking shot that lasts several minutes, beginning within an office and slowly panning out and around the entire grounds of a studio lot. This is a stunning maneuver, introducing the large cast in walking cameos as they stroll by the camera's path, conversations drifting in and out of range at various points. Moreover, Altman has these characters discussing the use of just this kind of device in other films, from the opening of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope with its unbroken ten-minute takes. As these characters themselves say, such devices introduce the entire movie in microcosm before the credits have even finished rolling, and Altman sets out to do just that, establishing not only the setting and characters but the way in which the constant flow of inane chatter and deal-making patter constitute the reality of behind-the-scenes Hollywood.

If this intro — and the non-stop flow of Hollywood stars flooding the film with cameos — telegraphs the metafictional, satirical intent of The Player, the soul of the film is contained in a single richly layered scene at a fundraising party where Mill gives a speech. Speaking to a room of stars and producers (including Cher, the only one dressed in red at a black and white affair), Mill praises the studio system for keeping alive the idea that movies are art by donating prints of a few dozen old classics to a film center. He lambastes the moviegoing public and the press alike for failing to understand art, for wanting only crass entertainment, while maintaining that it is up to Hollywood itself, and especially the producers, to deliver great art to the people. He ends on a passionate note, emphatically declaring: "Movies are art!" Altman cuts in for a closeup at this point, capturing the genuine sincerity of Mill (and the earnest glint in Robbins' pale, expressive blue eyes): he radiates an intense belief in what he's saying. It's a powerful, even moving speech for those who love movies and take it for granted that they are art, and one senses that for a moment, Mill is speaking Altman's mind; the director has momentarily taken over his character like a puppet and is ventriloquizing through him. It is also an extraordinarily complex and ironic scene, though, mainly because despite Mill's apparent sincerity and Altman's obvious underlining of his words, there is little evidence that Mill pays any more than lip service to what he's saying. If he truly believes what he says, he does so in the abstract, as a concept divorced from his actual practices in the movie business — in practice he does everything he can to smother the art in movies, to produce the generic entertainment he rails against, though in fairness he is not quite as mercenary as the young upstart Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), who thinks that producers can replace writers altogether in the Hollywood assembly line.

This speech is also undercut by the fact that hardly anyone is listening to Mill. Altman cuts around the room from one table of celebs to another, showing the various actors and actresses chatting with one another, hobnobbing and ignoring the producer's words. One wonders if, when they agreed to these cameo appearances, the stars realized that they'd be depicted as ignoring a speech about the importance of cinematic artistry — or if they'd even understand if they did. The constant interplay between star personae and screen characters encourages these kinds of metafictional musings. One of the funniest things about Altman's decision to include so many cameos is that one is never sure, when a new star appears, if they're playing themselves or if they're meant to be an actual character in the film. OK, so Sydney Pollack and Whoopie Goldberg are characters (Mill's attorney and the detective investigating him, respectively), but Jeff Goldblum, Anjelica Huston and John Cusack are all going by their own names as Hollywood stars. The film's metafictional slippage creates and revels in this uncertainty, crafting a world in which some of these stars are playing parts, while others ostensibly represent who they really are. Altman encourages this star-spotting, peppering his crowd scenes with recognizable faces who he occasionally points out, enhancing the impression that this satire is sharply pointed at the real Hollywood apparatus these people are a part of.

Mill's speech also highlights one of the film's key themes, the gulf that exists between modern Hollywood and its vision of itself, a vision largely crafted in an era when its artistry and its commercialism were inextricably intertwined rather than in competition with one another. There are constant references to the past, both verbally and in the continuous use of images from Hollywood's past: posters for noirs like Laura hang on Mill's office walls, and the mysterious figure who threatens him sends him a postcard promotional still of Bogart pointing a gun. Mill has more of a connection to the past, and to the non-American cinema, than most of the film's characters; he admires Umberto De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Tod Browning's Freaks, whereas other characters are oblivious to films outside of their immediate cultural sphere. In that long tracking shot opening, one producer keeps citing Touch of Evil as if it's the only film he ever saw, while he repeatedly says he has no idea about anything made outside of the US. Even Mill, though, is limited in his knowledge — he fails to recognize the name of Joe Gillis, the murdered writer played by William Holden in Sunset Boulevard — and his idealistic image of Hollywood's past is in direct contrast to the debased system he's a part of in the present. In mercilessly delving into the business of making movies, The Player makes it difficult for Hollywood types like Mill to rest on the laurels of the Hollywood Golden Age; Mill's contention that (Hollywood) movies are art holds some water for noirs and Bogie adventure flicks, but it's a lot harder to keep a straight face when he seems to be referring to his studio's endless stream of mass-marketed pablum, their plots massaged and reworked on the evidence of test screenings.

As these themes percolate and develop, Altman patiently weaves a thriller plot into the satire, as well as an increasingly steamy romance between Mill and the girlfriend (Greta Scacchi) of a writer (Vincent D'Onofrio) who had an antagonistic relationship with Mill. The whole thing is brilliantly concocted so that it's barely obvious, until the very end, just how neatly Mill's story reads like a Hollywood genre piece, with all the necessary sex, violence, and emotional mood swings required to punch it up. Even Mill himself doesn't realize it until he has the whole sordid story, in barely veiled form, read to him over the phone as a pitch, complete with the obligatory happy ending. The final act of the film, presented as a flash-forward set one year after the main events of the story, complete Mill's arc by tying up all loose ends and providing him with his promised — and utterly improbable — happy ending, an ending that rhymes off the similar last-minute turn-around in a movie Mill was producing, a death penalty drama that was meant to have a grim, "realistic" denouement, but is turned into a high-octane thrill ride in the final minutes due to the whims of test audiences. One wonders what those same audiences would have made of Altman's finale, which on the surface makes use of the conventions of the happy ending only to draw attention to them and satirize them, and which externalizes the script itself by putting its too-tidy resolution and literary ironies right out there for anyone to see (and to second-guess). The most clever aspect of Altman's film is its auto-critique of its own cleverness.

Life In Black & White

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:59:00 +0000

Following his triumphant examination of 1980s sink-estate Britain in This Is England, director Shane Meadow’s re-recruits his teenage star Thomas Turgoose for the contemporary follow-up, Somers Town, a minutely-observed portrait of youthful friendship set in an underdeveloped part of 1990s London.

Turgoose plays Tommo, a bright but troubled sixteen year-old who, for reasons we never quite discover, runs away from Nottingham to pitch up in Somers Town. On his first night on the streets, he is robbed by a gang of thugs who take his clothes and his money. Loitering in a café, Tommo meets Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish immigrant teenager who lives in a nearby tower block with his father, a builder on the Channel Tunnel railway line.

The two lads are well met; Tommo is a talkative, cheeky troublemaker while photographer Marek is more sensitive and less certain of himself. With nowhere else to go, Tommo convinces Marek to allow him to hide in his room while his father is at work, or out drinking, and the pair form a bond through their shared isolation, boredom, lack of money and a growing obsession with French waitress Maria (Elisa Lasowski).

It doesn’t sound like much in synopsis, but over the course of his just-too-short 70 minutes, Meadows and his regular screenwriter Paul Fraser spin an affecting, unassuming story of outsiders making the best of difficult circumstances. Despite the bleak landscape, Meadows balances his theme of urban poverty and the immigrant struggle with customary earthy humour, relying on the natural, unaffected grace of his two inexperienced leads for semi-improvised banter. There could have been more of it, though.

Turgoose and Jagiello’s essentially optimistic performances are central to the film’s success, sharing a freewheeling chemistry that lights up the screen, particularly in their interactions with local wide-boy Graham (Perry Benson) and a long scene where they wreck the flat after swilling down their first bottle of wine. Meadows and cinematographer Natasha Braier present the story in glowing monochrome high-definition video with a simple, gritty lyricism that finds unexpected flecks of beauty in the corners of a city in transition.

Famous Firsts: THX 1138 (1971)

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:54:21 +0000

Famous Firsts Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

THX 1138 (1971) Debut film of: George Lucas, writer-director By Roderick Heath It’s a little sad returning to George Lucas’ groundbreaking, energizing, dystopian fantasy debut as yet another cash-cow milking Star Wars installment lands in theatres—now fully animated for 90 percent less entertainment. It’s impossible to talk about Lucas’ career without doing it in terms of Star Wars. Perhaps it’s fair enough, considering that four of the six films he has directed have been in that series. Even at his worst—that would be Star Wars - Episode One: The Phantom Menace (1999)—with his limitations on display, Lucas is a natural-born filmmaker, skilled at filling the silver screen with detail, composing and editing his shots with fluidic skill and pictorial intelligence. If somewhere along the line his grip on actors wasted away and his avoidance of working with screenwriters of the caliber of Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett sent his reputation into fan-boy limbo, Lucas achieved the feat of surviving, when the vagaries of cinematic fate crushed his producer, collaborator, and friend Francis Coppola’s hopes to define a new independence in Hollywood. Coppola’s then-new Zoetrope Studios produced THX 1138, adapted from Lucas’ film school short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138-4EB. Peeking under the film’s stringent, conceptual façade, Lucas’ preoccupations come into focus, preoccupations that also fed the nostalgic comedy of American Graffiti and the high-flying fantasy of the Star Wars films. THX 1138 is a tale of attempting to escape a world of strangling conformity and seemingly arbitrary rules (and rule) with verve and humanity. THX, the kids of Graffiti, Anakin, and Luke Skywalker—all attempt to blast apart the numbing trial of their lives in Nowheresville armed with fast machines and romantic notions that soon melt in the light of day. How well they survive then depends on their essential characters.

THX 1138 (Robert Duvall, suitably, intensively dead pan) is a member of a future civilization that has retreated underground. Children are laboratory-grown, and people have been reduced as much as possible to abstract entities. They’re drugged to suppress emotion, allowed to cohabit but prohibited from sexual activity. Hordes of technicians supervise everyone and each other. They’re kept still more numb with media, reduced to the barest of provocations. TV provides either terrible sitcoms (“That was very funny,” THX states at the punchline of a nonexistent joke), or social lectures, or forms of pornography, both violent (one show consists of one of the city’s robotic policemen beating up a man) and sexual (a dancer who flickers whilst THX is worked on by a masturbation machine). Religion provides confessional sessions in a phone booth, with an image of a generic holy man and a recorded voice; priests don’t let anyone into their tabernacles. The workplace regularly sees accidents that wipe out hundreds of disposable employees.

Like most dystopias, it’s actually a particularly scurrilous version of the era it was made in, whilst owing something to Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. The prologue presents clips from an old Buck Rogers serial, an ironic counterpoint to this vision, but also an affirmation of its themes. Like Buck, THX is an ordinary man who beats his enemies by utilizing his fundamental, ordinary human gifts of bravery, verve, and wit. There is no cabal of ruling elite, à la Orwell, with knowledge and interests at odds with the suppressed populace. It’s not a theocracy, fascist, or socialist state. It’s all those things, with catchphrases of such diverse authorities, like “the masses,” and “religious matters,” jumbled into a mélange of substance-free significance. THX is a technician who works with dangerous nuclear materials, and it’s impossible for him to perform without nerve-deadening drugs. But his assigned wife, LUH (Maggie McOmie), tampers with their pills, prodded by suppressed, illegal maternal urges. She and THX are awakened to a terrifying, daunting new life. THX is beset by violent withdrawal symptoms, but is soon suddenly alive to LUH’s body, sex, and feeling. Not just love, but the ambiguity of love, as LUH wonders whether they were properly mated by the computers. It’s amazing, but, as THX snaps, “It can’t go on!”

They are observed by computer programmer SEN (Donald Pleasance), who attempts to intervene in their lives, promising to shield them if he can convince THX to cohabit with him. SEN is searching for a kindred soul who, like him, bends the rules. Whilst at his job, an arrest warrant goes out for THX, and he is “mind-locked” at his work station; this almost causes a nuclear disaster, which is only averted once he’s released and can save the day. He is swiftly tried for violating morals and drug-use laws, and sent, along with LUH and SEN, to a vast white void of a prison. When THX and LUH react to this strange, oddly free environment by having sex, officers hurriedly race in to separate them. LUH is later executed. THX is only spared from execution because of his technical skills, and is left with SEN and other long-term, intelligent prisoners. In a note that satirizes the divide between younger, lifestyle-oriented, counterculture folk and older, goal-oriented radicals, SEN wants to be effective in his resistance, and rejects the notion of intellectual immigration. “When posterity judges our actions here it will perhaps see us not as unwilling prisoners, but as men who, for whatever reason, prefer to remain as noncontributing individuals on the edge of society,” SEN formulates to the other prisoners, and warns, “This must not happen!”

THX doesn’t give a damn. He stalks off into the great white to find a way out, SEN trailing him pathetically. They come across the wandering SRT (Don Pedro Colley), who claims to be a hologram who got bored with his program and escaped into the real world, and he shows them the way out of the prison. Escaping into a throng of pedestrians, SEN is separated from THX and SRT, and panics at the thought of freedom. “I can’t start again. I can’t change,” he confesses, and allows himself to be arrested. THX and SRT brave their way into a transport hub and steal police cars. SRT crashes, but THX hits the road. Lucas is fascinated by the notion of the ghost in the machine—in a literal fashion, the degree to which fundamental human, sentient characteristics can interact with the technological, and the way they clash. “He’s more machine now than man,” Obi-Wan Kenobi once murmurs in considering Darth Vader, and the crux of the series, as in THX, is the notion that a spark of human spirit will finally overthrow such technocratic usurpation. The crucial moment of this film comes when THX escapes. He stops his car on the threshold of the city. Duvall’s face subtly registers both his fear of the unknown he’s diving into, and his sad realization that his rebel companions SEN, LUH, and SRT won’t be following. He is vitally alone in his confrontation with existence. This is, at last, being human, and he feels it.

Despite the scifi trappings, THX 1138 has an interior, alienated texture pitched to echo a counterculture atmosphere; it feels like an illustration of a Bob Dylan lyric, like “Visions of Johanna,” or a Borgesian labyrinth tale, with its haiku-spare vignettes and images, and echoes of vast cultural arguments going around in circles. This balances some overt satire and whimsy. As Peter Watkins did in his masterful Punishment Park (1970)—an entirely different spin on a similar parable—Lucas exploits the suspiciously fascistic look of contemporaneous Los Angeles motorcycle cops, styling his robot guardians of the city after them. Yet the policebots are the film’s fount of humor, as they engage in idiotic banter and find themselves easily outpaced by a man without the behavioral restraints they’re used to. In the end, they’re reduced to pleading with THX to come back because they’ve exceeded their allotted pursuit budget. The Star Wars films are pictorial, illustrative, narrative-driven, whereas THX 1138 is often near-abstract, but both are built from an enveloping mise-en-scène. Lucas cowrote the screenplay with buddy and all-around film wizard Walter Murch, who aided Lucas in creating the film’s suffocating sound textures, an eternal cacophony of blips, beeps, sirens, advertisements, recording voices, droning air conditioning, and a thousand other contributors to subterranean atmosphere. Lucas’ visuals are often fractured, shot through layers of media like video surveillance equipment. The film condenses gradually into a dense blanket of sensory input. This is THX’s world, where private feeling and experience have been reduced to the point where even those who rebel have barely any idea of how they should act or what they should do.

THX 1138 also owes a debt to Kubrick for its thematic glaze of estrangement through technology and the struggle to overcome it. Visually, however, it owes little to anybody, and images from it haunt the imagination afterwards: Maggie McOmie’s shaven head and haunted face; the vast hordes of likewise bald drones; naked THX circled by the policebots with cattle prods, trying to defend himself and his mate; the dribbling philosophical argument in an endless sea of white; the sudden thrill of movement as THX drives to freedom. Lucas is a savant at home purveying the image rather than the spoken word. His most expressive moments are found in image. The very last image of THX 1138, where newly reborn Man rises to the surface underneath a gigantic setting sun, is bound with the other, most nakedly emotional shot in his oeuvre, where Luke Skywalker stares in yearning at the twin suns of Tatooine. Yet it also echoes the finale of American Graffiti, with the car crash in the early morning light suggesting an end to illusions and the brief window of the thrill of the run—from here on is only survival. It’s easy to call THX 1138 an adult film, and the Star Wars films juvenile, but they’re built from the same nuts and bolts of parable. Star Wars was bent on being accessible and thrilling, where THX 1138 is allusive and mysterious. If THX 1138 is ragged in places, it’s also one of the best science fiction films of its time. Its influence is undeniable. Scifi dystopias arrived by the bushel in its wake, but the likes of Soylent Green (1971), Logan’s Run (1974), and Rollerball (1975) lacked its rigor of style and mise-en-scène, and I doubt Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1981), or The Matrix (1999) would have happened without its example. Lucas occasionally talks about returning to experimental projects like this. I doubt he will. And it’s a shame. l Grade Tectonic

8/28: Bruce Conner shorts: A Movie; Report

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:13:00 +0000

The singular title of Bruce Conner's A Movie positions this avant-garde short as though it were a prototypical example for the entire medium. In fact, Conner's film is the self-conscious inheritor of a particular tradition within the movies, a particular use to which moving pictures have been put: the filmic spectacle. Where Conner's film, constructed entirely from a wide variety of found footage, diverges from this tradition is in its recognition that in spectacle, the content hardly matters so much as the sensations conveyed through the film. Conner claims the cinema as essentially an art of montage, of combination, cutting together disparate materials from Hollywood epics, car and motorcycle races, plane and boat crashes, war footage, the atomic bomb, and sexy girls. It's like a catalog of the cinema's sensationalist devices, all of them blended together with little regard for their origins. A rapid-fire montage towards the beginning of the film switches almost seamlessly between horses in a cavalry charge, a trotting elephant, a train, and cars speeding around a track. The viewer has to strain to even notice the transitions, which happen almost subliminally because the scene's dominant feel is maintained across each fluid cut: it's speed, pure and simple, and the racing, speeding object hardly matters in comparison to the overall impression communicated by the montage. Conner is exposing the most basic workings of cinema here, intuitively grasping that he can cut together very different material and still achieve something that "feels" right because its editing has the proper rhythms.

Conner's movie also acts as a great leveler between various kinds of images: documentary versus staged, violent versus prosaic, frivolous versus serious. The film's general arc is towards more and more devastating images, even as the soundtrack becomes bombastic and stirring, its epic grandeur clashing against the images of starving children, dead soldiers, and the distinctive mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb. Conner can be playful too, especially in his use of familiar cinematic devices in ways that confound expectations: he keeps flashing up the words "the end" at various points, and initiates a countdown towards the start of the film that's interrupted by a striptease, as though he just couldn't wait until the count was over to get into the film itself. But his best visual gag leads directly into his most horrifying image, as a shot of a pinup girl posing in a tiny bikini cuts to a submarine crew firing a phallic torpedo which, in turn, improbably sets off a nuclear explosion. The Freudian playfulness of the imagery is basically cut short, reminding viewers that despite psychological speculation to the contrary, a weapon is less a sexual symbol than a tool of grand destruction. The puffy, blossoming explosion of a mushroom cloud may make a clever metaphor for an orgasm, but it's a metaphor with its own horrible realities attached.

Conner is constantly playing with these kinds of multiple layers, and he packs a great deal of potential meaning into barely 12 minutes. During the final minutes of the film, the editing grows more and more frantic as the music reaches its crescendo, signaling a typical movie climax that Conner will not deliver. His imagery, which had hitherto blended traditional spectacles and samples of Hollywood footage into the war movies and explosions, now delves wholeheartedly into the darker side of spectacle: firing squad executions, a field of dead bodies, a blimp imploding into a fiery ball that looks like the heart of a volcano. The music and the frantic editing condition the audience to expect excitement, but Conner challenges them to be excited by these abject images instead — he mocks the conventions of cinematic narrative by delivering a montage of horror in the guise of an action movie climax. The effect is bracing, as the aesthetic tensions between music, editing, and imagery reach a breaking point and then give way to an enigmatic, poetic coda of a diver descending into a mysterious porthole, disappearing with one last flip of the fin.

The film forces viewers to engage actively with its content, to question its effects and the cinematic tools it uses to achieve them. There is no other film this side of Godard in which the evidence of the filmmaking is displayed so nakedly, in which the role of montage and music in creating emotional responses are made so apparent. The continual pauses built into the editing, the stretches of black leader that divide one section from another, provide the necessary blank spots that shatter the illusions that Conner is simultaneously creating and deconstructing. The black spaces give the film a rhythm like breathing, or thinking, each chain of fluidly edited images eventually giving way to a black screen on which the individual viewer can trace his or her own thoughts.

One of the film's most enduring legacies may be the forceful way in which it lays claim to cinema as a medium defined by editing. Conner keeps asserting his authorship in titles that recur at odd points throughout the film: "A Movie by Bruce Conner," as though there were any doubt that the film belongs to him, despite the fact that he didn't shoot any of the footage he uses. It's a clever way to develop the idea that the artistry of movies lies, first and foremost, in the arrangement of images. The basic technique of A Movie is to expose and explore these kinds of fundamentals, to draw attention to the normally invisible artifice of movies by recreating that artifice with illogical combinations of elements.

Report is a fragmentary, harrowing attempt to come to terms with the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination, and especially, in light of the infamous Zapruder tape that captured the event, to understand what it means to document or report on an event like this. Bruce Conner's attempt at a "report" on Kennedy's death uses footage from Zapruder and from various other news outlets, along with radio voiceovers, but he does not combine these elements in a traditional, objective way. Conner's conception of a "report" is not the dry recitation of facts or the following of a strict chronology, but an analysis of the emotional impact and political ideas that circle around the central event. To this end, Conner methodically takes the day apart and dissects it, first documenting the assassination itself before both doubling back into the past and shifting forward into the future. This chronology privileges the intensity and epoch-changing nature of the actual event while acknowledging its place within a complex political and social spectrum that both led up to it and was forever altered by it.

Conner's account of the assassination is as unforgettable as any more traditional report, despite the complete absence of any exploitative footage actually showing the bullets hitting the president. This moment is emotionally occupied in the film by a now-famous shot of a bullet passing through a lightbulb, shattering its glass and passing through undeterred, a deeply affecting metaphor for the death of a political luminary. In the place of more graphic images, the film repeats a few seconds of grainy footage: the president's limo driving along, Jackie and John smiling and waving in the back, images and faces so iconic that even deprived of most of their detail they are instantly recognizable. In between brief flashes of these images, the film consists entirely of pure black frames, which separate the images with increasingly long times until the presidential limo disappears entirely, replaced by a pulsating flicker of alternating white and black frames, occasionally complicated by basic abstract designs within the black. As the screen pulses and flickers, the soundtrack features a news commentator who is reporting on the assassination live as it happens, his voice breaking into panic and confusion as the shots ring out and the motorcade grinds to a halt. No one is sure who has been hit, and the announcer's increasingly tense tone seems to stem as much from his confusion, his lack of knowledge about what's going on, as from any concrete event. Conner enhances this tension by chopping up the voiceover and looping it, doubling back to hear key phrases again, and towards the end distorting the announcer's voice and bathing it in static until it sounds like he's speaking from inside a blender.

If Conner's treatment of the assassination is uniquely moving and powerful, his way of handling the aftermath and lead-up to this epochal event is even more ingenious. The second half of this brief film blends together past and present by having the voiceover loop back to before the assassination, as the radio announcer describes in much calmer tones the route of the presidential motorcade, the role of the Secret Service in protecting him, and the president's possibly unsafe habit of stopping to shake hands with admirers. All this would seem like foreshadowing had Conner not already shown what happens next. Instead, the voiceover seems like a bulletin from a more innocent time, in which these words would not have had the same horrible prophetic ring they now do. The announcer's words acknowledge the possibility of danger, but almost in a quaint, dismissive way: the voiceover is mostly just impressed by Kennedy's friendliness and spontaneity, not genuinely fearful for what might result. Conner underscores this lost innocence by accompanying the voiceover with a complex montage of images, encompassing footage from Kennedy's funeral, various images from Kennedy's tenure as president, and even a wide variety of seemingly unrelated images ranging from bullfights to war films to refrigerator ads. This material positions Kennedy and his death within a broader social, political, and media context, perhaps suggesting that without a focus on the event itself and its repercussions, Kennedy risks becoming a mythic component in a media-saturated environment, his image juxtaposed without consideration with crass commercialism and unrelated political maneuverings — a prophetic message, as it turns out.

Noir et Blanc

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:44:00 +0000

Married Life – dir. Ira Sachs – 2007 – USA/Canada

I don’t remember Married Life coming out in March. I know it did, as I remember it starred one of my old faithfuls, Patricia Clarkson, and that actress who looks like a number of other actresses donning hideous white blonde hair (Rachel McAdams). But I don’t even remembered whether Sony Pictures Classics released it wide or limited, and whatever they did, they sure didn’t get my attention sparked. Fortunately, on a whim, I watched it and was pleasantly surprised. Unlike the all-too-familiar relationship foursome melodrama (Closer, We Don’t Live Here Any More, Carnal Knowledge, you know them well), it turned out to be a quiet little film noir.

What separates Married Life from your neo-noirs and noir throwbacks like Bound or L.A. Confidential, respectively, is that it isn’t concerned with the stylistic notions of the genre. Certainly, it takes place during the 1940s, the heyday of the noir, but it’s shot in blistering, shadowless color. In fact, it takes about twenty or so minutes into the film for you to forgive Pierce Brosnan’s narration and realize, “oh, that’s why he’s doing a voice over.” Once bored businessman Harry Allen (Chris Cooper) decides that he’s going to kill his loving wife Pat (Clarkson) to spare her the grief of leaving her for a younger woman (McAdams), Married Life really picks up.

Ira Sachs, whose previous Forty Shades of Blue was a snooze, really keeps things interesting in making Cooper, Brosnan and Clarkson just a little bit naughty. They’re not cunning or particularly clever in their murder attempts or affairs; only McAdams is salvaged of the gray morals as the angelical naïve girl thrown into the mix. In fact, Cooper is probably one of the lousiest attempted murderers I’ve ever seen onscreen. However, the three seem to all be decent individuals in extraordinary circumstances, a major component of the film noir genre.

Married Life is probably more akin to Sachs’ first film, The Delta, a slowburn menace of a film about a teenage boy of questionable sexuality and his run-in with a Vietnamese boy on the Mississippi Delta. The strange thing about Married Life, which works beautifully and which Roger Ebert noticed as well, is that no one shouts at one another; there is nary a moment of explosion, and this is what makes Married Life so lovely. Ultimately, Sachs doesn’t fill all his glasses to the top, but it’s still a rich surprise of a film, separate from both the intimate relationship melodramas and neo-noirs we’re all-too-used to.

If You're Right, Why Lie?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:39:22 +0000

On May 18, in Pendelton, Ore., Obama said that "strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries. That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That's what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny, compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet, we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, 'We're going to wipe you off the planet.'

"And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war, and over time, allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall," Obama continued. "Now, that has to be the kind of approach that we take. You know, Iran, they spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have, to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. That doesn't mean we agree with them on everything. We might not compromise on any issues, but at least we should find out other areas of potential common interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that has caused us so many problems around the world."

And this morning... the elementary school playground stuff continues...

To: Interested Parties
From: Brian Rogers, Deputy Communications Director
Date: August 27, 2008
Re: Proper Attire For The Temple Of Obama ("The Barackopolis")

Today, workers at Invesco Field are putting the final touches on the newest wonder of the modern political world -- The Temple of Obama ("The Barackopolis"). It is upon this pulpit that Barack Obama will tomorrow night address thousands of screaming, adoring fans.

There may be some confusion among the press about the venue and appropriate dress code for Barack Obama's big speech. To help out, we wanted to provide the following tips on appropriate attire. The toga may have gone out of style centuries ago, but after Obama's temple speech tomorrow night, they're sure to be flying off the racks.

The memo - here in pdf - goes on to suggest methods of dress. It ends with a twist that defines McCain's campaign as well as any.

At the Temple of Obama, reporters are expected to observe a level of decency and decorum demanded by the import of the moment and the presence of The One. No "Animal House" behavior permitted. Specifically, no "Toga" chants.

Watch Here For Examples Of Inappropriate Conduct

The "here" is this YouTube link... which demans the question be asked... how out of touch and literally old do you have to be to not recall that in Animal House, the Deltas, not Dean (John Mc) Wormer and the uptight idiots at the Omega House we the heroes?

But more importantly, is this the kind of thinking anyone should be allowed to bring into the White House? The Dems are having a big event, so mock it, not on substance, but on style? Try to suck the air out of the closing night by dangling your VP selection in front of the media for 48 hours? Keep making lies up to fill your ads and then become reduced to the fear tactic of showing bombs going off on a loop while repeating electioneering attacks from the defeated candidates?

Of course, John McCain sent his wife to Georgia, so we understand the depth of his diplomacy, right?

Believing Repubican dogma is one thing... being a scallywag and a liar is quite another. John McCain's behavior makes it clearer than ever that he is not fit to be in this office... unless this kind of stuff is what you think America should be all about. "America: Soccer Hooligan To The Wold! Vote McCain!"

VHS Week, Day 3: Demon of Paradise

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:15:00 +0000

As you may have noticed, I review a lot of movies here at Final Girl. Some of these movies are made of awesome, some are made of lame...this is to be expected. You take the good, you take the bad...you take them both and there, my friends, you have the facts of life. It's a rare film that crosses my path, however, that is so bad that I want to go back in time and stop myself from pushing play on the VCR. Even more rare is the film that makes me want to go back in time and stop myself from seeing the movie on the shelf...or further back in time so I can stop the filmmakers from beginning production. Or even further back so I can prevent the filmmakers' parents from having "intimate" "relations" so I can ensure the film will never get made.

This is how I feel about the 1987 Creature from the Black Lagoon wannabe Demon of Paradise.

Blah blah blah legend of prehistoric underwater lizard-man Akua blah blah oh no, he's really real blah blah blah let's follow the standard animal attack movie formula: we can't cancel the annual Parade Festival blah blah blah the scienceologist will save the day blah blah fucking blah.

Trust me, that description is way more exciting than what happens on screen. What happens on screen? NOTHING. So much nothing that when I looked over at one point and my viewing pals were asleep, I thought that maybe I was actually the one who fell asleep and I was having the most boring dream ever dreamed.

Let's take a look at some of the things I wrote whilst taking notes for this review:

Reporter = die, please
nothing happens. nothing happens some more. badly acted nothings happen.
music = horrendous, always inappropriate
more nothing happening = kill myself
testing my resolve as a human being to overcome adversity and boredom
why won't it end?
hell = this
when will it end?
PLEASE END

Finally, it did end and I was left feeling like I'd just completed ten tours of 'Nam. Demon of Paradise was so bad then when the credits finally rolled I nearly went apoplectic, ranting and flipping it off so hard I'm surprised my middle finger didn't explode. There's no doubt that in those few moments, I could have legally been deemed a fire hazard- such was the white-hot intensity of my rage. I'm only shocked that lasers didn't shoot out of my eyeballs.

Oh, how Demon of Paradise angried up my blood! Why did Satan himself have to shit this movie into existence? Why did I have to see it in the 3-for-$5 bin at Video Hut? Why did the filmmakers not realize that a man in a rubber suit popping up out of the water every once in a while to wave at people off camera does not induce terror? Why did it have to be so boring that I couldn't even laugh at the waving monster?

Clearly, Demon of Paradise hates me as much as I hate it.

Originally, I didn't even want to bring the tape home with me: I really, really don't want this movie in my house. Since last night, however, I've reconsidered that stance and I think some good may actually come from this steaming pile of dook.

Some outreach program should take Demon of Paradise to all the Ebola clinics of the world and show one-minute clips to patients. Then they can say "See, Ebola patient? Your internal organs are liquifying and your face is being eaten away, but at least you don't have to endure the other 86 minutes of Demon in Paradise!", to which the Ebola sufferers will say "Hooray! I may have Ebola, but clearly my life could be a lot worse!"

New DVDs: 'Red Belt,' 'August'

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:05:10 +0000

"Redbelt" is a David Mamet movie for people who don't like David Mamet movies, a subset of humanity that most definitely includes me.

Mamet's dialogue often feels artificial and nearly spastic. No one talks that way, except for dumb oily salesmen -- his usual trade -- and punch-drunk fighters from old B-movies. (A clue, perhaps.)

And yet, "Redbelt" feels special, as many film critics have noted. Mamet eventually gets around to trashing his own movie ... but first let's check out all the good stuff:

English actor Chiwetel Ejiofor is sensational as Mike Terry, a jujitsu instructor working out of a modest L.A. facility. Terry is hardcore, samurai-like -- his adult students battle to the point of near-injury and blackouts -- but he also possesses the life-coaching skills sometimes found in advanced martial artists.

For no reason, the world declares war on good-guy Terry, attacking on multiple fronts.

First, a drug-dependent lawyer (Emily Mortimer, another Brit) accidently shoots out the school's front window while backing away from a cop/student. It's a bit of blunt foreshadowing. Then, Terry rescues a TV action star (Tim Allen, terrifically blank) in a bar brawl. The actor's gifts and Tinsel Town-thin attentions bring the black belt nothing but grief.

Terry's beautiful wife (Alice Braga) borrows from a loan shark and then starts working a survival strategy that doesn't appear to include her husband. And evil mixed-martial arts promoters seem to have made off with Terry's signature teaching device of using a blind draw of marbles to assign handicaps to fighters.

This stew of bad mojo turns rancid, leaving the elegant martial artist with no alternative but to fight for survival --- in the form of prize-fight money. To escape the chokehold, as he teaches his students.

Mamet's usual assortment of hustlers and users makes its appearance, the cast including Ricky Jay, David Paymer and Joe Mantegna. As "Redbelt" descends into an old-fashioned fight movie, the Mamet rap sounds at home. Bring on the spit buckets and big cigars.

The "Redbelt" climax feels like a sellout to all that has come before -- the movie's well-earned emotions squandered on the preposterous. Still, the performances, fight scenes and compelling plot set-up make "Redbelt" a winner by split decision.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released "Redbelt" on Blu-ray and DVD. Robert Elswit's widescreen images roll out at a dramatic 2.40:1. The Blu-ray shows off the sometimes subtle, oftentimes colorful crafts work to best effect. The Blu-ray's Dolby TrueHD 5.1 delivers the blow-by-blow action with accuracy and impact.

Mamet is everywhere is the extras, coming across as a blunt guy who knows how to lighten up. Of working with real fighters, as he did with "Redbelt," Mamet says, "They don't bring a lot of bullshit to the equation. ... They spend their lives suffering. So they have extraordinary character."

Mamet had trained in jujitsu for about five years when he shot the movie. His Brazilian instructors helped choreograph the movie, along with other fighters who are profiled in a cool and snappy extra feature.

On "Redbelt," "We got real, real lucky with actors," Mamet said. Leading man Ejiofor reminds the writer-director of Henry Fonda, with a "spectacular stillness" in common. "(Ejiofor) has such a beautiful face and looks like a fighter." (He's not. I've trained in karate and came away from the film assuming he was a martial artist.)

Anyone wondering what the deal is with the Ultimate Fighting Championship should get their hands on one of these discs. The extras collectively present a decent primer on the league, its stars and MMA in general.

UFC president Dana White does a 16-minute interview, talking about MMA's Brazilian roots, early opposition from politicians such as John McCain (he called it "human cock fighting") and the sport's phenomenal success on cable TV. Its fighting style, he says, is to have numerous styles all at once.

Of the sainted Bruce Lee, White says, "He never believed in one style. He tried to get away from styles. ... He believed you need to train in everything to be a complete fighter." UFC, he says, "Still is pure. It hasn't been corrupted."

Mamet shares the commentary talk with five-time UFC champion Randy Courture. As you'd expect, the track works best during the action scenes, although Mamet always has something to say.

* * * * *

The wounds in "August" are mostly self-inflicted. Josh Hartnett stars as a jerk who runs an Internet startup into the ground in the days just before 9/11 -- and just after the bubble burst all over Silicon Valley.

Even his engineer brother (Adam Scott), can't stand the guy.

The movie feels cold, partly because the main character slithers so successfully for much of the tale. He richly deserves a good ass-beating, but when it comes, you find it hard to cheer. He's too much of a young twit to be a villain, and too much of a dick to classify as a proper antihero.

David Bowie shows up as a Wall Street predator and avenger, a terrifically creepy performance in a bit part. I loved the startup office's pack of slackers, the laziest bunch since Cybill Shepherd's nameless staff on "Moonlighting."

First Look Studios' release of the indie film, by sophomore director Austin Chick, comes without bonus features, unfortunately. The film leaves you wanting to know more about what it was like when the first generation of dot-com millionaires plunged back to earth.

Good rental title for those not put off by the description.

New and notable:
Alfresco (Acorm Media)
August (First Look Studios)
Brotherhood of the Wolf: Director's Cut (Universal)
Chicago 10 (Paramount)
Color Honeymooners Collection 4 (MPI Home Video)
Duchess of Duke Street (Acorn)
Errol Flynn Westerns Collection (Warner)
Everybody Hates Chris, season 3 (Paramount)
How the West Was Won (also Blu-ray, Warner)
Linda Lovelace for President (Dark Sky Films/MPI)
The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning (Disney)
NCIS, season 5 (Paramount)
Pale Rider (Warner)
The President's Collection (Paramount)
Purple Violets (Weinstein Co./Genius Products)
Redbelt (also BR, Sony)
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (The Criterion Collection)
The Shield, season 6 (Sony)
The Three Stooges Collection: 1940-1942, Vol. 3 (Sony)
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (also BR, Disney)
What Happens In Vegas (Fox)
Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (Weinstein/Genius Products)

Complete list of this week's releases on my pal Harley's site, onvideo.org

The Coffin filling up with cash

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:04:00 +0000

Ekachai Uekrongtham's horror film, The Coffin (โลงต่อตาย, Lhong Tor Tai), earned 15 million baht in its first four days since opening in Thai cinemas on August 21, according to an item in today's Daily Xpress. It's the No. 1 film in Thailand.

“It could end up close to 40 million baht, recouping our investment,” producer Pantham Thongsang is quoted as saying by Daily Xpress.

Major Cineplex, Thailand's biggest movie chain, lists The Coffin as its top movie, outpacing the newly released Hollywood actioner, Death Race. The top 5 at Major is rounded out by Wall-E, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and another Thai film, the Phranakorn martial-arts drama, Hanuman: The White Monkey Warrior, which opened on August 12.

The Coffin is a co-production between Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong interests and features a pan-Asian cast led by Hong Kong's Karen Mok and Ananda Everingham from Thailand. The original soundtrack is in English, but for Thai cinemas, it has been cleanly dubbed and English subtitles are added. I'd still like to catch the English version, just to hear Ananda's Aussie accent.

Plans to create an “international version” have been dropped, says Pantham, a producer at Thailand's TIFA Company Ltd. The same cut will instead be seen throughout Asia, and presumably, worldwide.

TIFA also says a song from The Coffin soundtrack, "Yeur" ("Won't Let You Go"), is jumping up the charts on music label GMM Grammy's social networking site, G Member.

Rights to The Coffin have already been sold to Hong Kong and South Korea, and it was supposed to open in South Korea in July, though I can't find any reference that it ever did. It was shopped at Cannes by Arclight Films' Easternlight label.

Also, Twitch unearthed an English-language trailer, and I find it better than the Thai trailer, which gives too much away.

See also:

One foot in the grave (Bangkok Post review) (cache)

Related posts:

Fresh stills from The Coffin

(Via Daily Xpress, Shock Till You Drop, Twitch; hat tips to Movie Cafe and 24 Frames per Second)