skimpole

I saw four movies last week, and one the week before. Ghosts was perhaps the best, a German film about two female juvenile delinquents. It was a subtle, reasonably simple film. The Army was also worth watching, about old men inflicting their disappointments on the next generation, engaging in fatuous militaristic talk. Humoresque is not the kind of movie I thought I might like, and you do have to have a tolerance for melodrama, as well as for Odets' screenplays. But if you can get past these, you can find something to enjoy. Through a Glass Darkly is the first of Bergman's "God's Silence" trilogy. One can understand why it won an oscar. It discusses a serious topic, the acting is extremely good, and it discusses it with more taste and restraint than half a dozen movies based on Tennessee Williams plays. But the later two plays are more challenging, both intellectually and aesthetically, and Bjornstrand's final comments are arguably a cop out. Crossing a Bridge is an interesting documentary about Istanbul's music scene: among other things Istanbul has a vibrant rap scene.

Really? That is a pity, since "Silver Bells" may be the song I hate the most in the entire world.

Still nothing.

No, that wouldn't be encouraging, but having seen the first 16 minutes of The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir, I would say there is a place for tv movies. Peter Ibbetson and The Small Back Room are the obvious thirties and forties premieres. It also occurs to me that Pierrot le Fou and Weekend would have been obvious choices for this month's road movie festival.

Perhaps they could do a month honoring oscar winners who didn't make enough movies to be a star of the month. I'd suggest Emil Jannings, Luise Rainer, Grace Kelly and Paul Scofield.

Miller continued: (4) The corruption of violence: "In contrast, screen violence now is used primarily to invite the viewer to enjoy the feel of killing, beating, mutilating. This is most obvious in the slasher films, in which the camera takes the stalking murderer's point of view, but the same empathic project goes on throughout the genres. There is no point to Rambo's long climactic rage, or Cobra's, or Chuck Norris's, other than its open invitation to become him at that moment - to ape that sneer of hate, to feel the way it feels to stand there tensed up with the Uzi. The hero's inner kinship with the villain used to seem uncanny, as in Hitchcock's and Fritz Lang's movies, and in Clint Eastwood's excellent Tightrope - whereas Stallone's Cobra gets a charge out of being exactly like the psychopaths he chases, just as we are meant to feel exactly like him." (5) The cartoonification of movies: "The primacy of stimulation has, in short, made the movies increasingly cartoonlike. In the cartoon world nothing stands between the wish to look at violence and the enactment of that violence: no demands of plot or character, no physical limitations (space, gravity), no mortality. Ingeniously, and with cruel wit, the cartoon presents a universe wherein the predatory are punished again and again for their appetite by the very hills and trees, the doors and crockery. Full of rage and purpose, those victim-predators get nowhere, and yet never die, pushing on forever, despite the anvils falling on their heads, the steamrollers flattening their bodies out like giant pancakes, the cannonballs caroming down their throats - torments at once severe and harmless, and which occur exclusively because we want to see them happen." (6) The gratuity of victory: "Often, however, today's cinematic wish fulfillment comes not in a sudden and gratuitous final moment, as if the writers didn't know what else to do, but as an obviously calculated piling-up of surplus triumphs - triumph upon triumph upon triumph - not as a quick way to end the film but as its very purpose. Many movies now purvey such surplus wish fulfillment, film after film repeatedly screaming, 'You can have it all!'" (7) Celebrity over character: "Reinforcing the surplus wish fulfillment, this foregrounding of celebrity has helped erode film narrative, for all that's needed now (aside from grabbers) is a series of setups that convey the feeling of being watched by an admiring audience. Thus Hoosiers is filled in with extended slo-mo sequences of deft, victorious athletics, as in an ad for Sports Illustrated, just like the Rocky films, like each Karate Kid - or like Fame, Flashdance, Footloose, White Nights, Tap, and other storyless montages of stars dancin'." (8) Purging the Darkness: "It would be wrong, however, to imply that once upon a time all Hollywood pictures ended in the same warm glow of factitious "bliss." Many big-budget products of the old studio system did not end as movies do today - a fact that we would recognize at once if any of those earlier films were remade now. Today Rhett and Scarlett would patch things up and have a baby, Shane would come back, Charles Foster Kane would find his sled, Tom Joad would get to be a CEO, and Mildred Pierce would send her daughter out for counselling (and the two of them would end up in a freeze-frame, hugging)." But now: "Thus Eisenstein's nightmare vision, in Potemkin (1925), of the czarist massacre on the Odessa steps becomes a crude, adrenalizing bit in Brian de Palma's The Untouchables (1987), its gruesome climax negated by a happy ending that makes heroes of the Feds. And thus Jean Renoir's wry and complex vision of the bourgeoisie in Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) is inverted in Paul Mazursky's remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), which ends not with the tramp impulsively deserting his adoptive family but with Nick Nolte trying, and failing, to escape the affluent and cuddly Whitemans. And thus Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), a rich, bleak story of how the young are inexorably broken by their fearful parents, comes back as Footloose (1984), in which young Kevin Bacon finally gets the whole town dancin'! - a pseudo-celebration of such bad faith that it inspired a number of TV commercials for McDonald's. And thus Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), a devastating allegory of corporate power and American dominion, recurs as the jolly tale of **** in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) - a simple, goofy fantasy, despite its frequent wit, and therefore just the thing for pushing Diet Coke." (9) Happy ever after at all costs: "Over and over 'opposites' converge as everyone applauds - in The Color Purple, Heartbreak Ridge, Married to the Mob, Everybody's All-American, Young Einstein, Over the Top, the first three Rocky movies, True Believer, each Karate Kid, Stripes, My Favorite Year, Overboard, Cocktail, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Running Man, Without a Clue, Desperately Seeking Susan, and Outrageous Fortune, among others. In all of these, two 'different' types end up hugging or dancing close or strolling off together, as a knot or mob of watchers claps and/or yells 'Yeah!' and/or 'Hurray!'" (10) The authoritarianism of pseudo-populism: "Despite the movie heroes' frequent grumblings about 'red tape' and 'the bureaucrats,' the movies actually extol the system that produces them, for the usual pairing demonstrates the breadth and tolerance of bureaucracy, which always turns out to have everything in common with its "wildest" employee: the most explosive cops and soldiers - Rambo, Cobra, "Maverick" (in Top Gun) - are always crazy not against bureaucracy but in its service. At the end some crusty, decent papa comes down from high atop the company or service or department, grins knowingly upon the pseudo-dissident, and often gives him or her a break."

From Mark Crispin Miller's inquest, published in the April 1990 Atlantic and reprinted in Seeing Through Movies: (1) The ubiquity of product placement: "The rise of product placement has, however, damaged movie narrative not only through the shattering effect of individual plugs but also - more profoundly - through the partial transfer of creative authority out of the hands of filmmaking professionals and into the purely quantitative universe of the CEOs. All the scenes, shots, and lines mentioned above represent the usurption by advertising of those authorial prerogatives once held by directors and screenwriters, art directors and set designers - and by studio heads, who generally cared about how their films were made, whereas the managers now in charge are thinking only of their annual reports." (2) The insidious aesthetic of advertising: "Like ads, movies now tend to have a perfectly coordinated total look, as if they'd been designed rather than directed - a tendency so marked, in some cases, that the movie and some well-known ad can hardly be distinguished. Thus The Color Purple, with its lush score, hazy golden images, and long climactic round of teary hugs, leaves you thinking not that you should read the novel but that you really ought to call your mother ("Reach out - "), while the parodic Raising Arizona uses precisely the same wide-angle distortion and hyped-up, deadpan acting that Joe Sedelmaier used in his famous ads for Federal Express ("When it absolutely, positively - "), while Top Gun, the blockbuster salute to navy fliers, is in its action sequences identical to those spectacular commercials that allured the young with "It's Not Just a Job: It's an Adventure!" or (yes!) "Be All You Can Be!" - expert recruitment propaganda that was probably well known to the film's director, Tony Scott, who came to the movie business as a famed director of TV ads, most notably for Diet Pepsi. (These three movies leave you feeling good.)" (3) The degeneration of the cinema aesthetic: "Today there are few scenes shot in deep focus (as in Renoir and Welles, Vertigo and The Godfather Part II, or, for that matter, The Night of the Living Dead). Likewise, we rarely see the kind of panoramic composition that once allowed a generous impression of quasi-global simultaneity, as (most elaborately) in the movies of Robert Altman and Jacques Tati, and that also, more subtly, enriches the frame in most great movies, whose makers have offered pictures, composed of pleasurable "touches" and legible detail. These moving tableaux often, as Andre Bazin argued, gave their viewers some choice, and required some (often minimal) interpretive attention. Only now and then, and in films that don't come out of Hollywood - Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket - do we perceive such exhilarating fullness. In contrast, today's American movies work without, or against, the potential depth and latitude of cinema, in favor of that systematic overemphasis deployed in advertising and all other propaganda. Each shot presents a content closed and unified, like a fist, and makes the point right in your face: big gun, big car, nice ****, full moon, a chase (great shoes!), big crash (blood, glass), a lobby (doorman), sarcasm, drinks, a tonguey, pugilistic kiss (nice sheets!), and so on."

I wouldn't say 8 1/2, L'Atalante or Metropolis are bad films, but they do little for me. Amarcord, however, is clearly a movie I don't care for.

What was the result of this poll anyway?

I saw four movies last week. The Last Command has its virtues. Emil Jannings gives a good performance, and William Powell in his comparatively small role shows signs of future greatness. On the other hand, the portrait of the Russian Revolution is somewhat muddled. (At one point, Jannings' character complains about revolutionaries cutting off military supplies, as if they were like the resistance in the second world war. And it's not clear why Powell's character is sympathetic to Jannings.) Scarecrow is a more interesting movie, and it's nice to see Pacino before he became typecast. A time for Dying is a Boetticher western, and its terse, abrupt ending helps make up for a weak middle third of apparent western cliches. Kikirou and the Wild Beasts is an adequate, but hardly brilliant animated movie apparently based on African folk tales.

The journalist Ron Rosenbaum has complained that The Great Dictator isn't anti-Hitler enough. I'm not going to go into full details of this argument, which ignores the fact that the film was completed before Hitler had conquered most of Western Europe. (The movie was released in October 1940, at a time when supporters of the Allies were downplaying the need for American entry into the war). But one argument he makes was that the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) gave the movie an award because they saw it as anti-interventionist, like themselves. Can anyone provide any information about this?

What are the last two movies pre-empting? I've never heard any Nicholas and May sketches, or if I did they were more than a quarter century ago. Quite frankly, after seeing Nichols adapt Joseph Heller and Jules Feiffer in the early seventies I seriously wondered if he had any sense of humour at all. As for Working Girl, 1988 was a particular poor year for best picture nominees. Clearly it was a year where December releases swamped critical judgement. I can understand, if not accept, why the Academy didn't nominate Dead Ringers, but nominating this over A Fish Called Wanda is absurd.

There's a 1995 inquest from the April 10, 1995 issue of The New Republic by John Richardson which still has a lot of validity. Richardson points out a number of problems: (1) The deal is more important than the actual movie. (2) The rise of micromanaging executives. (3) The rise of everyone except writers and directors. (4) The rise of moronic screenwriting programs. "The 1980s also saw a tremendous increase in screenwriting programs. On an assignment for a magazine, I took one of these courses, and learned that a movie should introduce two buddies, build their relationship to a crisis, separate the buddies so that they can learn some lessons on their own and then bring them back together. This is the model of movies as different as Rain Man and E.T. The reason I didn't emerge from the course with a million-dollar screenplay is because taking the course doesn't teach you how to create characters like the rain man or E.T. All it does is give you a glib way to talk about your plot and an artificial way to look at structure. The damage would be limited to a few thousand hapless screenplays except for one thing: executives take these classes." (5) Jeffrey Abrams: "Abrams did not come up with Vegas-lounge-lizard-becomes-king-of-England, but I am holding him spiritually responsible. The real problem is that executives love this kind of story, partly because they're easy to sell on a poster and partly because they're easy to defend--it's not like we were doing complex family drama, boss--we were doing yuppie-shot-in-the-head. We were doing crook-finds-filofax. Once in a while these movies do work--a mermaid in Manhattan? Talk about yer fish out of water!--but most of the time they turn out to be as thin as the ideas they are based on. Remember cop-gives-waitress-two-million-dollar-tip? How about hooker-with-heart-of-gold-pretends-to-be-guy's-girlfriend? Or guy-offers-one-million-dollars-to-sleep-with-your-wife?" (6) The Hit-driven film economy. (7) General corporate cowardice. (8) Too much money and insularity: (9) Body-snatching foreign directors. (10) General corporate cowardice II-movie stars: "Stars are paid huge salaries on the theory that they can open movies. Most of the time they don't, though. The list of movies that hit without stars goes on almost forever: E.T., Star Wars, Dirty Dancing, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 48 Hrs., Blazing Saddles, Easy Rider ... and so on. Again we have to ask if people in Hollywood are just total morons or if there is some systemic cause. Again, the answer is the less satisfying one. Movie stars are insurance. Maybe they'll open the picture, maybe not, but at least they will give you some bragging rights about working with a big star."

I saw six movies last week. Man is not a Bird and Love Affair have their interesting aspects, but they didn't really grab my attention. I suppose the second movie deserves more of a look. The Conquest of the Air is an interesting documentary. The Winning of Barbara Worth has some problems, such as an annoying organ score and large portions filmed in unpleasant orange. I know black and white is no more real than any other non-colour scheme, but it feels more real, while the way that many Hollywood silent movies don't use black and white but something else is off putting. Having said that Winning does become more interesting if you look at it more closely. Admittedly the love story is nothing special and the conflicts are simply black and white on unlovely orange. But the scenes are interesting. Maps to the Stars is clearly the movie of the week, an intriguing portrait of perversity in contemporary Hollywood. U-Carmen is a movie which updates Carmen to contemporary South Africa, with the characters singing Bizet for much of the movie and speaking Xhosa for the rest. It's not bad, but also nothing special.

Yes those five movies would all be better nominees than Nicholas and Alexandra, though my choice for that year would be The Sorrow and the Pity with Death in Venice as runner-up.

Actually George V thought granting asylum to Nicholas would make him unpopular, and he decided not to risk it. (He didn't mind having other people think it was his prime minister's fault.) It's hard to see why accepting the children would be so difficult. On the other hand, it might be for the best, since it may have occured to Winston Churchill that it would be a great idea for the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, to marry one of his emigre cousins. So not only would Britian still be stuck with him in 1940, but the Queen would probably be violently anti-Soviet and even support appeasement than the actual royal family. Anyway, here's Pauline Kael's capsule review: "As obsequiously respectful as if it had been made about living monarchs who might reward the producer with a command performance. Viewers are put in the position of celebrity-lovers eager to partake of the home life of the dullest of the Czars. Nicholas and Alexandra (Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman) appear to be two dunces sitting on a volcano, and the solemnly square movie is more interested in the dunces than in the volcano. When one is asked to watch them for over 3 hours with no object but to feel sorry for them one's sympathies dry up. The faith healer and "holy man" Rasputin was a very funky monk, but you'd never know it from this movie, which skips the triumph of that crude peasant libertine over the court. It avoids drama, and the death of Rasputin (Tom Baker) is so badly staged that it doesn't seem as if he's hard to kill because he has so much rotten life in him--it just seems as if his murderers are incompetent. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, without the sweeping mastery of large-scale visual imagery he has shown in the past. With Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Jack Hawkins, Harry Andrews, and Alexander Knox. Adapted from Robert K. Massie's book, by James Goldman; cinematography by Freddie Young. Columbia. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Deeper into Movies."

I saw four movies last week. The Wildcat was clearly the best, with striking art direction and mise-en-scene, along with strikingly good cinematography for 1921 and a clever sense of action. Sadie Thompson certainly benefits from Gloria Swanson's charisma. The Silence of the Sea was also a good debut and a thoughtful movie, even if it involves mentioning Treblinka a year before it was founded. Less successful was Lower City, a Brazillian movie with more nudity than insight about its petty criminal characters. Mr. Freedom is a somewhat crude satire of American chauvinism, notwithstanding the presence of Delphine Seyrig, while Donald Pleasance has a cameo.

Congratulations SansFin.

I don't think It Happened One Night is overplayed. I've only seen it twice on TCM, once in 2006 and then a few months ago. I know it's been on more than that, but never at a time I'd be able to see it. Foreign Correspondent and To Be or Not to Be are certainly not overplayed in Canada.

I think The Way of All Flesh is a lost film, like Lubitsch's The Patriot, so TCM couldn't show it if it wanted to.

I saw three movies last week. If The Southerner isn't as good as Renoir's greatest movies, and if it is not the most perceptive and honest look at smallholder/sharecropper life, it is manifestly better than most American movies on the subject. House of Wax has some interesting touches. One does wonder what would have happened if a really good director had found some way of making Vincent Price giving a good performance, instead of having him start as reasonably sane and civil and ending the movie as a complete lunatic. Where the Truth Lies starts interestingly and then becomes a complete mess. (Seriously what kind of journalist sleeps with both her subjects? And the denouement instead of being clever just seems contrived.

So TCM is going to be showing Chicago, No Country for Old Men, The King's Speech and The Artist. How long do you think it will take for them to show The Pianist, There will be Blood, The Social Network or The Tree of Life? What academy award nominees from the Oscars' first three decades has TCM not shown?

Barry Lyndon--at last!

Margaret Dumont, Duck Soup Agnes Moorhead, The Magnificent Ambersons Margaret O'Brien, Meet me in St. Louis Martha Raye, Monsieur Verdoux Setsuko Hara, Tokyo Story Nanette Fabray, The Band Wagon Isuzu Yamada, Throne of Blood Bibi Andersson, The Seventh Seal Barbara Bel Geddes, Vertigo Shelly Winters, Lolita Claudia Cardinale, The Leopard Anne Wiazemsky, Au Hasard Baltazar Francoise Dorleac, The Young Girls of Rochefort Lauren Bacall, Murder on the Orient Express Grun Wallgren, Fanny and Alexander Lena Olin, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Christina Ricci, The Addams Family Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Secrets and Lies Melora Walters, Magnolia Charlotte Gainsborough, Melancholia

Interesting schedule Fedya. I particularly like scheduling Passport to Pimlico and Kes. (As for The Rose Tattoo, you're not missing much.)