High and Low

L'enfant d'en haut (aka: Sister, 2012, directed by Ursula Meier) is the first film that the great cinematographer, Agnes Godard, has shot with a digital camera. I wonder if this is a film that could have been shot digitally before this year or last, because the main drawback of digital has been the dynamic range of the image. This is a film that goes from a physical (and metaphorical) darkness to the blinding white of snowy ski slopes and back with regularity. I can imagine Godard pulling her hair out trying to get her camera to do what she wants. Part of her solution was a careful focus on the film's characters, shot mostly in intimate close-up whenever the landscape threatens to intrude. This is a film set in a spectacular landscape that resolutely ignores that landscape. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Godard tells how she wanted to avoid shooting postcards (and how difficult that is in this film's setting). They don't serve the story, she says. She's wrong about that, but she's such an intuitive artist that her approach manages to integrate the landscape with the story in a way a cinematographer more cowed by the visuals of her surroundings might not. In any event, this is an intimate film.

Read more below the fold >>

The Ashtray of Time

The Weinsteins have a long and ignominious history of cutting the foreign films they acquire--particularly the ones from Asia--and it's sometimes difficult to divorce the film as presented to an American audience from the film that the filmmakers actually made. The ending--and some might say, the point--of Jackie Chan's Drunken Master II was excised wholesale back in the bad old days of Miram-ax, but even highbrow arthouse auteurs are not immune. Zhang Yimou's Hero is subtly different in its American incarnation than it is in its original Chinese version. Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster (2013) has the misfortune of falling victims to the Weinsteins, and given the film's very real problems with its continuity and its habit of eliding huge gulps of exposition with title cards, one has to wonder to what extent the film on the screen is what Wong intended or what he has negotiated with Harvey Weinstein. This question is compounded by the film's international history, in which Wong himself has submitted variant cuts from territory to territory. One of those versions is rumored to be four hours long. The film's provenance makes the task of assigning blame very difficult, because what was on the screen when I finally saw it was a mess.

Read more below the fold >>

Vocal Opposition

Some years ago, I saw a performance art piece by genderqueer theorist Kate Bornstein in which she recounted her experience with vocal therapy for transsexuals. The therapist she had gone to kept urging her to raise her voice: "Like this?" "Higher!" "Like THIS?" "Higher!" "Well, I don't want to talk like that." The "like that" was what you might call the squeaky toy voice. Bornstein eventually developed a voice based on listening to Laurie Anderson albums, and that seems a more laudable and realistic a goal. Thinking of all the great female voices, I gravitate to people like Lauren Bacall, Joan Greenwood, Sally Kellerman, and Kathleen Turner. No squeaky toys. This and more was all rattling around my brain as I walked to my car after seeing In A World... (2013, directed by Lake Bell). Writer/director/star Lake Bell doesn't like the squeaky toy voice either, and her movie underlines--gently--the disturbing assumptions behind its currency in our culture. In A World...is a comedy--a good one, I think--but it's also an excursion into feminist sociology.

Read more below the fold >>

From A to B

I've owned a copy of Stage Door (1937, directed by Gregory La Cava) for years. I have it as part of the old Warner Brothers Classic Comedy box, which I originally bought for cheap and for the other movies. I was also laboring under the misapprehension that I've seen Stage Door before, which turns out to be not the case (I was mistaking it for another movie entirely). It's the sort of movie that I might have watched with my mom when I was younger. She loved this kind of stuff, and she loved Katharine Hepburn. I've been reordering my DVD shelves this weekend and I decided to watch it when I was reshuffling my box sets. It was a genuine surprise.

Read more below the fold >>

A Love Poem for No-one in Particular

Back when The Sessions (2012, directed by Ben Lewin) was in theaters, I ran into a friend of mine coming out of our local art house where it was showing. His praise of the film was effusive, particularly after he had ground his teeth at several other films that had been making the art house rounds at the same time. “So well written,” he said, “Really terrific.” I don’t remember why I missed it in the theaters, but I’m glad I finally caught up with it on video. My friend was right. It’s very well written. But that’s only the half of it.

Read more below the fold >>

Pub Crawl

I had a pretty good time at The World’s End (2013), the third film in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s loosely connected “Cornetto” trilogy. My long-suffering partner laughed her ass off at the film, and this soothes my conscience, given that I’ve dragged her to movies that have traumatized her in the past and given that she sat through Edgar Wright’s last film, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, in a resentful, stony silence. (Her remarks afterward: “Well, that was stupid.”). I can’t ignore this part of the filmgoing experience because having a companion who is having a visibly bad time can poison the well and having the opposite can likewise sweeten the pot. The movie itself isn’t bad, but it has its problems and even though the experience of watching it was good, that doesn’t necessarily I’m ignoring those problems. At another time, at another showing, I might have had an equally bad time. This is why you should take all film writing with a grain of salt—especially mine—because it all exists in the liminal spaces of value judgments and emotional responses. It’s all unreliable. For myself, I don’t even trust myself over time. But I digress.

Read more below the fold >>

So Long, Dutch

I had planned to write about something else today, but the death of Elmore Leonard has put me in a funk. Leonard has been a fixture on my bookshelf for decades now and I was beginning to think he'd outlive me. Leonard is the last of the great mid-century pulp writers to shuffle off this mortal coil. He follows other populist writers like John D. McDonald, Ed McBain, Ross MacDonald, and Donald Westlake in to the great hereafter. His legacy is arguably broader and more durable. The movies have assured that. Unlike his contemporaries, Leonard was as much a cinematic artist as he was a literary one. Dozens of movies are based on Leonard, some of which he wrote directly for the screen himself. Lately, I've been watching Justified, a series based on one of Leonard's short stories, and it's almost a perfect amalgam of his career: equal parts western and wry hardboiled crime story. A friend of mine thinks that Leonard's westerns are where his real legacy lies, and I don't know that he's wrong. The western movies based on Leonard are pretty hefty, including 3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, Joe Kidd, Valdez is Coming, and The Tall T. I don't know that my friend is right, either, because nobody makes westerns anymore. But crime stories? Those seem evergreen.

My favorite movie based on one of Leonard's novels is probably Stephen Soderbergh's Out of Sight, but it's hard to choose, given that there's also Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, Mr. Majestyk, and the aformentioned westerns. My favorite of Leonard's novels is probably Maximum Bob, because it's the funniest of them, not because it's the best (I liked the ill-fated TV series, too, probably in spite of my better judgement). But this is all splitting hairs.

So this morning, I grabbed The Law at Randado from my shelf and I'll start rereading it on my lunch hour. And if I drank, I'd raise a glass to Leonard after work, and I'll probably watch an episode of Justified. So long, Dutch.

In My Glass Coffin, I Am Waiting...

Allow me cut right to the chase with my thoughts on Blancanieves (2012, directed by Pablo Berger). Such was my delight in this movie that I saw it in the theater twice in the span of four days. I don't remember the last time I did that. This is a film that ran a needle-fine wire into the pleasure center of my brain and jolted it unmercifully for a hundred and four minutes. It's a film that plays like a lost Tod Browning film, rediscovered and restored by Pedro Almodovar. It's a film that's so intoxicating to my filmgoing sensibilities and appetites that I hardly know how to convey how much I loved it.

Nota bene: here be spoylers beyond the cut.

Read more below the fold >>

Delusions in the Witch House

There’s a depressing sameness to the middlebrow horror that’s being released into the multiplexes these days. Without gainsaying their various qualities, there’s not a lot of difference between the basic elements of, say, The Possession and The Devil Inside and Mama and Sinister and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Woman in Black. All of them represent a kind of zeitgeist, in which the signature horror of the times is the family unit under threat. This is the horror movie at its most conservative, if not at its most formulaic. This is doubly true of 2013’s The Conjuring (directed by James Wan), which gathers up familiar elements from the genre toybox and assembles yet another portrait of the nuclear family under siege. If you’re looking for something new, or even a fresh wrinkle on something old, you will look for it in vain in this movie.

Read more below the fold >>

Snake in the Grass

It's been well over a decade since I last saw Onibaba (1964, directed by Kaneto Shindô). Once upon a time, I would have named it my favorite Japanese film. Time and (I hope) wisdom has put the kibosh on that. I mean, the very notion of having a favorite anything seems ridiculous to me anymore, particularly a favorite from a national cinema as broad and as deep as Japan's. Even so, Onibaba continues to haunt me. The details of its plot may have receded in my memory a bit, but the images? The tall grass swaying menacingly in the wind? The old woman in the demon mask? The hole into which the bodies of dead samurai were cast? Those are burned into my brain. Looking at Onibaba from the point of view of a Western horror geek, I couldn't help but notice mythic resonances with the Sawney Bean myth, in which rural travelers are waylaid by the locals. Indeed, the first time I saw Onibaba, I was convinced that it was some kind of missing link between the walk through the cane field in Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's a film that encompasses a range of horror traditions, though in retrospect, it is uniquely its own thing deriving from traditions of which I was ignorant at the time. The intervening decade has changed my perception of Onibaba a little. Not much. It's still one of the great horror movie and it's still a movie that I love unreservedly. It's more a matter of placing it in the context of the Japanese New Wave, of the pinku eiga, and of the generation of filmmakers to whom director Kaneto Shindô belongs.

Read more below the fold >>

And the Colored Girls Sing...

 The Sapphires (2012, directed by Wayne Blair) is a surprisingly serious film given that it's ostensibly a musical comedy biopic. Given that most of the film is set in Vietnam in 1968, it's also a surprise that the film's seriousness doesn't necessarily derive from the Vietnam war. But that's what you get when you look at the various cultural contexts surrounding soul music in the 1960s. It was an artform that was inextricably tied to the civil rights movements of the time. And, apparently, not just in America.

Read more below the fold >>

Sound and Vision

When I was describing Berberian Sound Studio (2012, directed by Peter Strickland) to a friend of mine shortly after I left the theater, his response was "Oh, so it's Blow Out?" I laughed, because that's kind of what I thought from the synopsis I had read of the film prior to heading out to see it. But, no. It's not Blow Out, though it does share with that film a narrative built overtly on the craft of filmmaking--of sound, in particular--as text rather than as form and it does crib Blow Out's best joke. Like Blow Out, it's almost impossible to divorce Berberian Sound System from the patterns of influence exerted from other movies. This is true of most movies, I think, but Berberian Sound System is different. Its touchstones are deliberately invoked as talismans or dire warnings throughout rather than as homages or casual swipes. It's also a boldly experimental plunge into cinema as complete abstraction. It builds a formidable sense of menace mainly through sound divorced from image. An audience for horror movies might be forgiven for chafing at the way this film plunges off the narrative deep end in its last act, but I found it thrilling.

Read more below the fold >>

It's That Time of the Year Again...

...when a girl's fancy turns toward horror movies. The 2013 edition of the October Horror Movie Challenge is a mere month and a half away, and it's time to start planning.

Read more below the fold >>

Darkness and Doubt

Sinister (2012, directed by Scott Derrickson) is a stock, mid-list horror film. It's a kind of film that I like to describe as a "One from column A" film, in which the elements that make up the plot are chosen from two stock lists of horror tropes. In this case, the elements derive from The Shining and The Ring (natch) and The Woman in Black and even certain episodes of Doctor Who. This isn't a film that reinvents the wheel. For all that, it's pretty good.

Read more below the fold >>

Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

I have mixed feelings about anti-westerns. Do you know the type of film I'm talking about? The ones that debunk the myths of classical Western movies? The heyday of the anti-western was the early 1970s, when movies like Soldier Blue, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Wild Bunch blew the conventions of the Western into bloodstained gobbets. Some of the anti-Westerns are legitimately great movies, and I'm not even going to argue that point because it's self-evident. But anti-Westerns aren't usually much fun, either. The Wild Bunch is a lot of things, but "fun" ain't one of them. Even satirical anti-Westerns like Little Big Man tend to become bleak in the end. Plus, some of them tend to preach. I dunno, maybe it's not appropriate to make a "fun" western on themes like genocide, capitalist exploitation, and violence as the instrument of Manifest Destiny. But damned if the new version of The Lone Ranger (2013, directed by Gore Verbinski) doesn't try. The Lone Ranger as a character is the very embodiment of Hollywood myths about Western heroes, part Zorro, part Wyatt Earp, all corn, so the fact that the makers of this new film have used him to completely debunk not only Western movies, but American myths about ourselves, is downright subversive. That they've done it as a summer blockbuster is an act of smuggling so brazen that I can't believe they got away with it, especially given that this was made for Disney, of all people.

Read more below the fold >>

Wolverine in Japan

I mentioned to some of my friends a couple of days ago that I hoped that there would be the requisite naked Hugh Jackman in the new Wolverine movie. Longtime readers may remember that I once theorized that Hugh Jackman's naked ass was probably good for about $70 million at the global box office. I think that's probably still true. Fortunately, the new movie, titled The Wolverine (2012, directed by James Mangold), fulfills this entirely reasonable demand. That it's probably the best superhero movie of the summer is gravy.

Read more below the fold >>

Rising as the Sun Sets

This was written for the Muriel Awards Hall of Fame vote this month. This was among my nominees for inclusion, so I got the job of writing about it.

I always think of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans with a fair degree of melancholy. It’s one of the glories of the cinema, sure. But it’s also a kind elegy for silent films as they were about to be swept into the dustbin of history. Silent film had developed to a high degree of visual sophistication by the time Sunrise appeared and that sophistication is imprinted on every single frame of the film. Unfortunately, Sunrise appeared a month after The Jazz Singer. It was obsolete on arrival, arguably the last fireworks display of the era. The camera that Murnau had liberated from its moorings on the floor of the studio was remounted there as film had to learn everything over again to accommodate sound.

Read more below the fold >>

Stomp

See if you can follow me on this: some years ago, I was presented with the prospect of a movie in which both Chow Yun-Fat and Keith Richards were to appear together. More than that, they would be playing pirates. I thought at the time: “How can that possibly be bad?” I still think back on that thought in idle moments when I consider the films that resulted, but more as an exasperated expression of disbelief. If someone had told me beforehand that those movies would suck—and suck they most assuredly did—I wouldn’t have believed it. My mistake was in underestimating the power of corporate Hollywood to turn everything it touches into a big steaming pile of shit. This is a cautionary tale.

When I first read about Guillermo Del Toro’s latest film, Pacific Rim (2013), my first thought was that fatal, “how can that possibly be bad?” Once burned twice shy, I guess, because I tamped down on that as hard as I could and tried to keep my expectations low. Then the trailer promised giant robots fighting giant monsters like the biggest Toho monster rally you ever did see, and given that I once ran a video store whose sign had Godzilla looming on the Tokyo skyline, this was a pitch that was in the sweet spot for me. I could feel the glee rising in my chest. But also, there was a nameless dread. I’d like to say that Del Toro’s name was reassuring, but that would be a lie. Auteurism only goes so far and Del Toro has always been less interesting at bigger budgets than he is on his small, personal projects. This is a movie that must do a half a billion dollars at the global box office to make money, so it’s the sort of movie in which “input” from the suits in charge of the money was a given. So as the movie began, I was a more than a little bit apprehensive.

Read more below the fold >>

Down to the River

Jeff Nichols's last film, Take Shelter, tripped itself up over genre. It seemed like a film that wanted to embrace genre, all the while distancing itself from it. His new film, Mud (2013), is more inclined to give itself over to genre, but its genre--kinda sorta film noir--is much more friendly to filmmakers with artier impulses. It's a better film in spite of being more in tune with its pulp fiction literary forebearers. It's also a portrait of the collapsing American civilization and a gentle coming of age story. It mostly integrates all of this into a pretty good movie.

Read more below the fold >>

The File on Barbara Stanwyck

This is part of the Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon being run my friend, Aubyn, over at The Girl with the White Parasol. There are a LOT of writers blogging about Stanwyck this week, covering almost all of her major films and most of her minor ones, so check it out.

It's almost inevitable that Thelma Jordon, the femme fatale in the eponymous The File on Thelma Jordon (1950, directed by Robert Siodmak) must be compared to Double Indemnity's Phyllis Dietrichson. Both characters seduce a patsy in order to get away with murder. Both are played by the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck. The comparison is even useful to a point, in so far as it demonstrates the depth of Stanwyck's greatness as an actress because although they are both locked into similar narratives, Thelma Jordon and Phyllis Dietrichson are fundamentally different characters.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Read more below the fold >>

Dynamic Duos: Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune

This is part of the Dynamic Duo blogathon, which is being held by Once Upon a Screen and The Classic Movie Hub. Pay em a visit. Lots of good film writing to be had.

When I finally settled on doing a piece about the long collaboration between Akira Kurosawa and Toshirô Mifune, I wasn't really thinking about the sheer hubris of such a thing. I mean, I've read Stuart Galbraith's book on the two, The Emperor and the Wolf, and at 850 pages, that sucker is a brick. And I want to distill Kurosawa and Mifune into the three to four thousand words of a blog post? Madness. This is complicated, too, by the fact that neither man was the other's favorite interpreter. Kurosawa made 16 films with Mifune (25 if you count films that Kurosawa wrote but did not direct). Compare that to the two dozen films Mifune made with Hiroshi Inagaki or the two dozen films that Kurosawa made with Takashi Shimura and you have a seriously compromised premise. Indeed, Shimura is arguably the director's on-screen avatar of himself in Ikiru and Seven Samurai and Drunken Angel, so I probably ought to think hard about the underlying premise that holds the Kurosawa/Mifune collaboration as being definitive for both men, because it's possible that it's wrong. Be that as it may, when you think of Kurosawa, you will inevitably also think of Toshirô Mifune eventually. That's a meme in action for you. And, really, their collaboration is like chocolate and peanut butter. Regardless of whether it's definitive or not, it most surely is tasty.

Read more below the fold >>

East is East

There's a scene early in The East (2013, directed by Zal Batmanglij) in which our heroine, Jane, puts a gold cross around her neck. She later says a prayer that she might be strong in the face of the task in front of her. Her job is corporate security and she's going undercover to infiltrate an ecological/anarchist collective. The thing that jumps out at me about this scene is that the film is indulging in dogwhistles. This is a signifier that has no purpose in the film but to subtly demonize the "side" Jane is on: corporate, conservative, Christian. The film's sympathies are with resistance to all three of these ideologies, though the film makes no further use of Jane's Christianity, even as moral dilemma. This is a missed opportunity. The movie as a whole is like that.

Read more below the fold >>

The Old College Try

The short subject before Monsters University (2013, directed by Dan Scanlon), Pixar/Disney's new prequel to Monsters, Inc. wasn't more than five seconds old before I whispered to one of my companions, "They're showing off again." That film's name was "The Blue Umbrella" and it's fairly slight as far as stories go, telling as it does of the romance between a blue umbrella and a red umbrella on a rainy night in a big city. The city is a wonderment. This is computer animation as photorealism. It's a palpably real environment that is completely untouched by the Thomas Kinkeadean light that suffuses so many animated films these days. This is gritty and gray and darkened and wet. When we begin to see faces in the city, made OF the city, it's almost creepy. It's an announcement that whatever you may think of Pixar's current slate of sequels, they're still the top dog in the computer animation business. And it's not even close.

Still, one has to wonder...

Read more below the fold >>

Hothouse

Contrary to its title, Park Chan-Wook’s English-language debut has nothing to do with Bram Stoker or Dracula. Park, after all, has already made his vampire movie, basing it on Therese Raquin, of all things, rather than any canonical horror story. Stoker (2013) defies any easy genre classification. It’s a Gothic, definitely. Is it a horror story? I think it is. Is it a melodrama? I think Douglas Sirk and Tennessee Williams would recognize it as cousins to their own work. Is it transgressive? For this director, that almost goes without saying.

Read more below the fold >>

Border War

With The Last Stand (2013), director Kim Jee-woon makes a conditional success of a kind of film that defeated the Hong Kong directors in the mid-1990s: a big dumb action film with an intractable aging action star at the center. In this case, he's saddled with Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is admittedly a step up from Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose presence almost ruined the careers of John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark when they all made landfall in Hollywood two decades ago. It's also possible that the tightly controlled idiom of New Korean Cinema is less vulnerable to Hollywood derailment than the more freewheeling Hong Kong action films. Maybe.

Read more below the fold >>

Aimless in New York

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's Frances Ha (2013) is a portrait of post-college/pre-rest of your life anomie. Anyone who has drifted through an aimless couple of years after college will recognize themselves in Frances Handley, though I imagine that most people who have gone through this kind of coming of age aren't the same kind of fuck-up. As quirky and occasionally sweet-tempered as this film is, it's a profoundly melancholy film, an effect compounded by its moody black and white cinematography.

Read more below the fold >>

Brittle Steel

A couple of years ago, DC Comics went through a big shake-up of their line of superhero comics. As happens when you have a universe shared among dozens of titles, their internal continuity had become so convoluted that they decided to hit "reset" on the whole thing. This happens from time to time in comics. DC, for their part, did it in the 1980s, too, and now they've done it twice in the movies, as well. Following the success of Christopher Nolan's Batman films (and the relative failure of Superman Returns back in 2006), we have a new Superman with a new origin story. Nolan is involved again, acting as producer and writer. The director is Zack Snyder, whose previous forays into geek territory have been successful and divisive in equal measure. The new Superman is Henry Cavill. The film studiously avoids using the name "Superman" for most of its running time, or even in its title. It's called Man of Steel (2013).

Note: as usual, here there be spoilers.

Read more below the fold >>

Where Eleven Films Have Gone Before

It's entirely possible that there's an interesting movie lurking inside Star Trek Into Darkness (2013, directed by J. J. Abrams). The movie frames a terrific moral dilemma early in its running time that serves as an overt allegory to the current security state of the world's major powers (especially Bush and Obama's USA). To wit, it gives Kirk and company an overtly immoral mission to engage in an extra-judicial killing, one colored by high emotion and a desire for revenge and excused because of the vague exceptionalism of "terrorism." Further, the movie TELLS Kirk that it's an immoral mission, putting objections into the mouths of both Spock and Mr. Scott in scenes that remind me of Robert McNamara's assertion in The Fog of War that "If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning. " But then the entire enterprise, if you'll pardon the pun, completely shits the bed. That moral dilemma would be interesting if this film wasn't so irredeemably stupid.

Nota bene: spoilers abound herein.

Read more below the fold >>

Notes from an Absentee Landlady

I haven't been blogging about film much lately. This is partially from blogging burnout. It's partially due to an extended period of depression and personal anxiety (I won't get into that here). Mostly, though, I just haven't been seeing any movies. This is a crucial element of blogging about movies, don't you think? Soooo.....as I have in the past, I'll be using a couple of blogathons to jumpstart my blogging again. In the absence of a queer film blogathon this year, I'll retreat to classic film. The first one is the Dynamic Duo Blogathon, which is being co-hosted at Once Upon a Screen and The Classic Movie Hub. The other is the Barbra Stanwyck blogathon, being held by our old friend, Aubyn, over at The Girl With the White Parasol. Here are the relevant banners.

Irons in the Fire

Iron Man 3 (2013, directed by Shane Black) is generally a smarter movie than any other superheroic part three I can think of. Other part threes--Superman III, Batman Forever, Spider-Man 3, X-Men: The Last Stand--almost always seems like retreads or one too many trip to the well. Most of these movies tick off the supervillains that haven't previously appeared in their respective series, and here, Iron Man has something of an advantage. Since there isn't really a signature Moriarty to Iron Man's Holmes, the filmmakers are pretty much free to do what they want. True, they make good, somewhat, on the first film's promise of The Mandarin, but they do it in a way that is likely to send some types of hardcore comics fan screaming to the social networks in a frothing rage. Good for the filmmakers. Iron Man 3 also realizes something that is unique to its particular set of characters: we're not as interested in Iron Man as we are in Tony Stark. Compare this with, say, Bruce Wayne, and you'll realize how different that is from most other superheroes. New series director Shane Black seems to share this opinion: he spends the entire movie depriving Stark of his armor, perhaps as a gentle riposte to Captain America's jibes at Stark in The Avengers. What is Stark without his armor? That's what this film wants to find out.

Note: here be spoylerrs, but you've probably seen this film by now anyway. Fair warning.

Read more below the fold >>