La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

The stripping of Joan

Finally saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc on projected video (thanks to Alliance Francais), with music but without subtitles (no thanks Alliance, though to be fair they tried their level best to get one), so I watched without having understood a word. Nevertheless: an incredible film, one of the greatest-- silent French or otherwise-- ever.

The Merry Widow (Erich von Stroheim, 1925)

The last waltz

Funny, if you compare the original operetta of The Merry Widow to Lubitsch' version with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier you'll find a sophisticated romantic comedy involving a rich widow and the officer from a small country ordered to woo her.

I remember that Lubitsch version and loved it for the effervescent humor, the witticisms flipped at you like little crepes; at the same time it was a lavish production-- the ballroom scene alone had hundreds of extras and a thousand gaslights, and MacDonald wore a dozen gowns. Lubitsch, apparently, could direct a big production and still keep his signature airy tone.

Erich Von Stroheim's The Merry Widow you'd hardly recognize as the same creature except for the famous waltz that plays a prominent role in the plot. He delves into the widow's backstory, building up a failed romance between the widow (Mae Murray)-- who starts out as Sally O'Hara, dancer for the traveling show The Manhattan Follies-- and Prince Danilo (John Gilbert); against them he pits Crown Prince Mirko (Roy D'Arcy), a repulsive example of royal inbreeding, all smirks and leers and hypocritical fastidiousness (he loathes flies, but laughs in agreement when Danilo calls him a swine).

The Winner of the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture

Bird man

In time for Oscar Weekend, my own little piece about the Academy Award winner for Outstanding Picture--

William Wellman's 1927 epic Wings won in 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's very first awarding ceremony, and you can see the thinking behind the choice: it's a boxoffice hit that capitalized on the aviator craze (Lindbergh had just crossed the Atlantic); it's big in terms of scope (furious aerial dogfights and sprawling ground battles) and emotional scale (Patriotic sacrifice! Love triangles! Brotherly love!).

Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve), Carrie (Kimberly Peirce); Machete Kills (Robert Rodriguez, 2013); Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass, 2013); The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjostrom, 1926)

(Needless to say, ALL the films mentioned are discussed in detail, including story, plot twists, and ending)

Pray for the best

Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners is a nice example of the airless, minimalist art thriller, set in the rather limited and overfamiliar genre of the child abduction/serial killer flick.

Mind you, there's plenty to like: the generally excellent cast (Paul Dano as mentally challenged Alex Jones and Melissa Leo as his heroically stoic Aunt Holly stand out; Maria Bello is sadly wasted as a cliche of a distressed housewife, confined to bed in a drugged-out stupor); Roger Deakin's bleak cinematography (with Georgia's constant downpour doubling for the wet autumns and sleety winters of Pennsylvania); Villeneuve's understated way of  generating suspense quietly, with a minimum of fuss. 

I'm less crazy about the script. For all its grimness Prisoners is an ultimately comforting film despite (or perhaps because of) its talk of mazes and mysteries; even someone's statement--that the maze found in a medallion didn't have a solution ("I know, I've tried")--is the kind of declaration of hopelessness you hear just before the dawn. Too many smart guesses solving too many puzzles downgrades one's regard for the film from an eloquent statement on the human condition to an entertainment, nicely made, a couple of steps above NCIS or Law and Order.

Even the moral ambiguity seems neatly parceled out: Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a small business entrepreneur, devout Christian (is he Catholic? It's not made clear), and well-organized survivalist; when his daughter is taken the law requires that he sit still and wait while the police do their job but his can-do, by-the-bootstraps ethos ("Pray for the best, prepare for the worst") demands that he do something--so he does. The resulting scenario is the kind of cobbled-together 'what-if' situation favored by pro-torture advocates (what if your child was in danger?). The next-door neighbors (Terence Howard and Viola Davis as, respectively, Franklin and Nancy Birch) whose child was also abducted come up with a more practical approach: don't get involved, but don't stop Keller--he might actually come up with something (he doesn't get the results he expected, but he does accidentally advance the investigation). By film's end the (more or less) righteous are amply rewarded, the transgressors punished, and even those that have temporarily strayed suffer poetic--and not a little funny--comeuppance.

I don't know. I like how Villeneuve's put together the picture; there are confrontations between Keller and Alex that are ferociously good (though they're careful not to be too explicit), and an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Keller and investigating officer Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) that's even better. Villeneuve even pulls off the kind of trick Hitchcock used to do so well, where the audience knows more than the characters onscreen (you want to yell: "HE'S IN THERE! IN THERE, DAMMIT!").

Compare this to David Fincher's Zodiac, however (unfair, but both deal with serial killers, both feature Gyllenhaal in crucial roles) and it's no contest: Fincher offers a puzzle with no definitive solution, no dramatic bringing to justice, no comfortable resolution to the terrible things that happened.

Compare this too to Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, where the torture of captives is actually part of the film's point, actually evokes a specific time in South Korea's political history when enhanced interrogation was standard police procedure, and just as fruitful in producing information (in effect: not very). Difference is Bong Joon-ho's film isn't as morally schematic, and the interrogators display an unsettlingly blase sense of humor about the whole thing; difference is neither Zodiac nor Memories offer consoling fictions to ease us in our contemplation of the unknowable. "Some secrets," they seem to say, "you will never uncover"--Prisoners posit a light at the end of a long and very dark tunnel; Fincher and Bong see no light, no guarantee of an end to the tunnel. 
  

 Where everybody knows your name

Two questions come to mind when hearing of Kimberly Peirce's remake of Carrie: obvious and instantaneous ("why bother?"), less obvious and rather wistful ("maybe she can pull it off..."). Now the movie's out we see that the inevitable's happened: the remake has only a fraction of the original's diabolic energy, of its blood-drenched color scheme. 

Worse I suppose is that the noble intention--that we look at Stephen King's debut fairy-tale horror novel through a woman's (as opposed to a misogynist's) gaze--doesn't really pan out; this Carrie borrows too much, from the dreamlike slow-motion shower room sequence (discreetly draped with towels this time) to Mrs. White's spectacularly excruciating end (in the novel her heart was stopped). One might mistake this as the original's anemic runt sister, too timid to strike out on its own.

Possibly Peirce's efforts were doomed from the start: Stephen King's novel--his first and as he is the first to admit, rather "lumpy and burned at the bottom"--isn't promising material for a feminist filmmaker. Look at Jack Torrance in The Shining, Andy McGee in Firestarter, Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone, and you can see that King is far more comfortable writing from the male point of view (he had to be prodded to write from Carrie's). Poor Carrie White is abused not just by her classmates, but by her author-creator: the shower scene where the girls toss tampons in the panicked girl's face feels more like a boy's locker room gag than a genuine case of female bullying; the monstrous Mrs. White has the outsized dimensions of a cartoon villain, her Christian denomination left suspiciously vague. De Palma's sensibility--his brand of cruelty--sails in waters and directions not too radically different from King's where Peirce (whose Boys Don't Cry dealt primarily with the confusion found in adolescent women) seems to struggle with a stiff headwind.  

All that said, some of Peirce's voice does come through--in that lulu of an opening scene, for starters, where Mrs. White (Julianne Moore, despite her sketchily delineated character managing to deliver the film's most frighteningly effective performance) screams and rolls on bed then pulls her skirt back to discover a bloody lump of a face between her legs. In Carrie and her mother's more fully fleshed-out relationship--Mrs. White dragging her daughter into a tiny closet is bad enough (though I miss the tiny statue of St. Sebastian with its freakish glow-in-the-dark eyes) but more startling is the later scene of reconciliation between mother and daughter, lending the taint of truth to their relationship (even the most abusive bond has its moments of love and tenderness, which is arguably the cruelest hook of all).

Possibly sacrilegious to say this, but beyond the preparatory images (the lights turning red, Sissy Spacek's otherwordly eyes) I never found De Palma's prom-night massacre sequence effective--the split-screens were especially clunky. Peirce adds one interesting idea: her Carrie gestures and waves, shaping the movement of the telekinetically manipulated objects around her with a conductor's flair--literally a symphony of death and destruction. 

Sad and not a little disappointing that Peirce wasn't able to break completely free--but this Carrie isn't a bad picture, exactly, just a half-formed one. Like Carrie White herself, it struggles under the shadow of its wilder, more malevolent older relation--but it does have its own virtues, and does bare its own set of fangs. 

Hack

Loved Machete; thought it one of the best movies that year, an abominably entertaining fusion of Robert Rodriguez's chaotic talents as filmmaker (he can direct an action sequence well but when shaping a feature-length narrative--well, he can direct an action sequence well) to the white-hot anger felt by Latin-Americans towards immigration hardliners.

To say that Machete Kills strays from that basic formula (Machete; immigration; breasts and bullets) is to understate matters--the sequel is Hell's own Christmas Pageant on fast forward, both confusing and exhausting in equal measure: Machete doesn't only fight on behalf of Latin Americans but for America and the World, and by film's end he's ready to bring the battle to outer space. His anger is largely banked, though; instead we have smoldering embers shooting the occasional spark at specific targets--the proposed US-Mexico border wall, realized as a monumental rampart complete with secret access tunnel for enterprising wetbacks; megawealthy entrepreneurs (Mel Gibson, for once likeably psychotic) who see illegals as a source of cheap feudal labor.

There's a cartoonish exaggeration to this movie that defuses much (but not all) of the sexism, the same time it renders much of the political satire toothless. No, the original wasn't a model of plausibility but for once Rodriguez found a cause truly worth fighting for, and his zeal drove the ungainly mess forward, helped sell it as a committed whatever-it-is. In this sequel the only cause that seems to move Rodriguez forward is the desire to top the first movie; the drive peters out about three-fourths of the way through, about the time when Machete punches his way through the border wall--after that he's like Sean Connery's James Bond at his most parodic, going through the motions for the sake of an overinflated paycheck, or (stranger still) the notion of a feature length (it's a brief one hundred seven minutes and feels like a hundred and fifty). The original Machete was a joke turned into a parody trailer turned into a surprisingly nimble film--part of the pleasure of the picture is watching Rodriguez talk out his ass then actually follow through; too bad Rodriguez fails to pull the stunt a second (and, judging from the dismal boxoffice, a third) time.

And yet--it's still a ballsy move. Trejo is still a chipotle badass. And the movie is still three-fourths a shambolic wonder (can't even say for certain which three, though the intestine-through-the-copter-blades and rust-iron armored car come to mind). Rodriguez is an undisciplined, unpredictable filmmaker, which is his curse and glory. I can't recommend this, but neither can I condemn it; I can only sit there with a goofy guilty grin on my face.

Dead men tell no tales

Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips I like best for its masterstroke casting: to play Somali pirates, the filmmakers have decided to cast, well, Somalis. Brilliant! Better by far than having, say, Gong Li play a Japanese geisha (who can tell from Asian faces?) or Jennifer Connelly play a Latina housewife (why bother with the character's ethnicity?).

As is, Barkhad Abdi as the pirates' ringleader Muse easily walks away with the picture. Looking half-starved and frighteningly alien (at least he must have looked frighteningly alien to most American audiences), Muse reveals himself to be resourceful, courageous, even rather witty, and Abdi despite the presumed lack of experience (it's his first film role) pulls off each revelation of Muse's character with skill and deceptive simplicity. Probably helps that Greengrass allows Abdi to improve on his role (Abdi came up with a memorable line--"I'm captain here"--during one improvisation). 

Hanks--who plays the eponymous captain--faced with such energetically fresh talent had to step up his game; his Captain Phillips is something of a bastard, a hard taskmaster who demands security drills and locked gates at all times; when confronted with pirates, he turns the encounter into a gigantic chess game, always a move ahead of the Somalis, who have to step up their game (the boarding of the ship, done with hooked ladders on rocking skiffs, is a hazardous undertaking comparable to the epic boarding sequence in Richard Lester's classic Juggernaut). I imagine Hanks would make for a wonderful villain, except of course he's the hero here; sadly when he's kidnapped he turns into a rather tiresome hostage victim, throwing hysterical fits in an attempt to maintain the tension (by his third or so fit I wanted to yell at the snipers "shoot him instead!"). 

Greengrass was told before he undertook this project never to do a film involving water and boats; actually I'd go the opposite way, and recommend that he sticks to boats. When allowed to do hand-to-hand combat, or a chase sequence involving cars or feet his signature shaky-cam (put together chop-suey style with ADHD editing) is well nigh incomprehensible; when stranded out in sea, where you can see the enemy miles off and no one looks very fast going thirty or so knots the suspense slows to an unbearable creep (not necessarily a bad thing, mind), and it's thinking about the situation and anticipating what might happen next (Will they board? Will we hide?) that generates most of the suspense. A coherent Greengrass film? Oh joy!

Footnote: had to happen, and it did. The ship's crew have come out with the claim that some of the events in the film are egregious fiction--that Philips instead of being security conscious was actually reckless, and that instead of offering himself as hostage he was simply taken. Greengrass has responded to the accusations, suggesting this is part of a smear campaign staged by some other Oscar contender (Those useless golden doorstops!). Not sure who to believe (to be honest, I'm tending towards the crew members)--stay tuned for further developments on this tempestuous teacup.

A for Adultery

Understand the admiration for Victor Sjostrom's The Wind: it's a harrowing drama that depicts the character's inner thoughts and perceptions in various imaginative ways, from direct sensation (the howl of the unceasing wind) to sneaking suspicion (a man's greedy eyes stare right through his primly pressed hands) to outright fantasy (endless gusts reveal buried corpse), all the while suggesting the unstoppable nature of a woman's sexuality (the wind doesn't just torment Letty (Lillian Gish in the performance of her career), it is Letty--surrender means  giving in to her own sensuality). As an example of the director's art, The Wind is just about unequaled--popularly counted the best of Sjostrom's American films. In comparison Sjostrom's earlier The Scarlet Letter is often considered a lesser work, a tamping down and simplification of Nathaniel Hawthorne's allegorical classic; yet while The Wind fills me with admiration, The Scarlet Letter hits me where I live. 

Sjostrom has scriptwriter Francis Marion focus on the love story. Nearly half the film is devoted to Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale's (Lillian Gish and Swedish actor Lars Hanson) surreptitious foreplay, including a scene where Dimmesdale allows Prynne to drink from a ladle while she's publicly shackled (Bondage and water sports?), another where her underwear hangs out to dry on a shrub for all to see (when Dimmesdale arrives she hides the intimate piece of clothing; when he demands to see what she's hiding she--with the exquisite simplicity of the most artful coquette--surrenders to him the offending apparel). Along with the romance Sjostrom paints an unsparing portrait of the town--the paranoia and hypocrisy, the unsettling fanaticism skewered in a few vignettes (including one where the village gossip is given a taste of her own medicine and mercilessly dunked). Comedy, light and romantic, in a Hawthorne adaptation? But Sjostrom possibly establishes the lighthearted tone to better contrast with the film's darker latter half; the flirtations also play to Gish's strengths as the Eternal Girl-Child, pure of heart yet possessed of a willful, even mischievous, spirit.

This Dimmesdale is a dimmer version of Hawthorne's--gone are the theological and philosophical debates, the psychological nuance of his silent suffering. On paper the man was an introverted intellectual; onscreen Sjostrom has cast a solid Swedish hunk, tall and fair, to match Gish's equally blonde tresses. When he suffers he suffers nobly, giving as good as Gish ever did (and under both Sjostrom and Griffith she gave plenty), helped by Hawthorne's elegantly structured irony: that every word of praise and elevation of status he enjoys is in fact a torment, knowing his true love and her child live in relative squalor. 

Gish's Prynne suffers too, though not as subtly. According to Hawthorne's scheme she must be a public martyr enduring not just humiliation and verbal abuse but mud clods hurled at her innocent child (Hawthorne allows her to earn her fellow pilgrims' grudging respect; Sjostrom doesn't--his pilgrims are too dense to recognize heroism when they see it).

Sjostrom backpedals the symbolism, goes heavy on the melodrama: Hawthorne has Prynne simply walk up to public view with her letter ('A'--in bright scarlet--for 'adulterer') already exposed; Sjostrom has Gish unveil her letter in a masochistic strip tease. Later Prynne goes further, unleashing her long blond hair then tearing off the letter and hurling it to the ground; in a perversely reactionary response her daughter insists on pinning it back on her breast.

The whole thing pays off with the film's climax: Dimmesdale walks up to the public scaffold and expires; Prynne cradles him in a Madonna pose. Sjostrom has loaded his picture with only as much weight and symbolism as the medium of silent film can bear (which while intellectually light can be dramatically significant), has arrived at a reduced but still recognizable--still compelling--version of Hawthorne's ending. 

And then Sjostrom delivers his stinger. The dim pilgrims, object of Sjostrom's (and Prynne's) scorn, source of Dimmesdale's unthinking fear and guilt, collectively and wordlessly bow their heads. With a gesture they reveal the hypocrisy of their overscrupulous faith; with a gesture they reveal the love and respect they have for the man, a man who in many ways represent them, from his tireless piety and love down to the dirty little secret he kept on his breast (a scarlet "A," which Hawthorne suggests is a kind of stigmata, which Sjostrom turns into an act of self-mutilation). These dense dunderheads unworthy of Prynne and Dimmsedale turn out to be smarter after all (smarter than the reverend, at least): when the best among them is revealed to be yet another adulterating sinner, what else can they do but forgive and accept?

There's that, and then there's the suggestion--again thanks to the pilgrims' gesture--that if Dimmesdale had come clean earlier he might have been able to live a decent, even comfortable, life; that all the torments of hell--all the fire and brimstone and pitchforked demons dancing about you--are nothing, nothing compared to the self-inflicted torments of a guilty heart. 

10.22.13

World War Z (Marc Foster), White House Down (Roland Emmerich), The Loves of a Pharaoh (Ernst Lubitsch)

"Braaains!!"

If you lobotomized Steven Soderbergh's Contagion and pumped it full of steroids you'd probably get something better than Marc Foster's latest multimilliondollar extravaganza, where the virus stands (or rather sprints) on a pair of athletic legs and flashes a set of gnashing chompers that never quite stop, even when incinerated. 

Based loosely (very loosely, apparently) on the bestseller by Max Brooks (which I haven't for the record read) the filmmakers have decided to jettison the episodic wide-ranging stories that composed the book (with its implicit criticism of government incompetence and American isolationism) to focus on the heroic (and largely fabricated by the scriptwriters) efforts of one man played by Brad Pitt, who also produced the picture (hence his expanded, pro-active role). 

So whadda we have? Fast zombies--I hate sprinting zombies (as some regular readers may be well aware). Brooks reportedly took his cue from the George Romero films and made his zombies (or 'Zekes,' as they're called here) shuffling carnivores, this being the more realistic alternative as it's hard to believe the undead (or virally infected) would be healthy enough to do a hundred-yard dash, or leap vast chasms, or make like an ant bridge (in this case ant tower) and scale impossibly high walls--they're sick, not super-powered. Not to mention the movie loses the undead's most unsettling quality: their preternatural serenity, their utter indifference to whether the prey will escape or not.

Charles Dickens put it best (from Oliver Twist): 

He could trace its shadow in the gloom, supply the smallest item of the outline, and note how stiff and solemn it seemed to stalk along. He could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of wind came laden with that last low cry. If he stopped it did the same. If he ran, it followed--not running too: that would have been a relief: but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and borne on one slow melancholy wind that never rose or fell.

Love that phrase "that would have been a relief." Mere mortals and animal pursuers put effort into their hunt; only the supernatural, beyond science and logic, is confident--no matter where the prey goes, no matter what the prey does, the undead will catch up in the end. A zombie moving fast is merely acting out its insecurities; a storyteller who refuses to deal with a proper zombie's patient pursuit is a lazy storyteller, who prefers cheap quickie shocks over the exquisite shiver of mounting dread.

Foster gets his best effects by emulating Dickens; in the hallways of abandoned apartment buildings, in a nighttime airfield, in the stillness of a Zeke-infested laboratory, the eerie silence evoked prior to the attack is far more effective than the attacks themselves, which collapse into a series of shaky-cam footage, edited ADHD style (it's as if the cameraman had turned Zeke as well, and couldn't help convulsing).

Other puzzlers: the Israelis took years building their defenses, then forget to add watch towers and video cameras to the top of their walls? Pitt rescues a Latino boy, who doesn't seem the least bit traumatized about losing his whole family (he seems more plot function than flesh-and blood, the token ethnic hired to make the cast more diverse)? The World Health Organization people spend millions on their state-of-the-art lab, and can't be bothered to put intercoms inside their vaults?

Otherwise--well, there doesn't seem to be an otherwise, and Pitt, who looked as if he was making modest strides forward with Burn After Reading, Moneyball, Tree of Life, and Killing Them Softly, takes a giant leap back. Dead on arrival folks; pay your respects and move on.

White House Dumb

(Warning: plot twists and devices discussed )

"What do they call White House Down in Paris?"

"Die Hard with cheese."

Not a fan of John McTiernan's 'masterpiece' (prefer the Hong Kong action filmmakers active during his heyday) but at least McTiernan was competently versed in the basics of action filmmaking, his sequences coherently staged, shot and cut.  This movie features a far less engaging lead (at least Willis had that jokey regular-dude persona, a leftover from his Moonlighting days) and a pair of criminally underused villains (at least Alan Rickman got to sport a cunningly broad Californian accent). Add Emmerich's mediocre brand of action filmmaking (y'know the drill: mostly shaky-cam footage, edited incoherently) with a generous dollop of digitally enhanced stunts and effects (say what you will about Die Hard, at least most of the stunts were done on-camera).

Channing Tatum plays police officer and former soldier John Cale (why 'Cale?'--because it's good for you?), who's at the right place and time to apply for a job as White House security (terrorists have just taken over, and Cale gets to show his chops); Joey King plays his insufferable daughter, Emily, who's been estranged from him ever since he volunteered to fight in Afghanistan. King's an expressive actress (she plays the China Girl in Oz The Great and Powerful) but she's poorly served by the script here, which presents her as a standard-issue helpless female hostage who thinks more about her political blog's hit counter than about her and her father's safety (she uploads incriminating footage of the terrorists at work, which they promptly view on nationwide TV), and when asked to run whines "I can't leave him!" at the least convenient moment (she makes you want to call out: "Go you dumb kid or you'll get them all killed!").

Intelligence isn't necessarily a requirement in these movies, but White House Down hits a new low: would a president trust a man who's suffered a tremendous personal blow (that may possibly have been said president's fault) to keep running his security operations? Would a villain planning a successful takeover of the White House use such a mix-and-match group of operatives (the Delta Force guy is a good choice but--redneck gun nut?)? Would an earnest do-gooder really be that clueless with regards to the motives of his adversaries and bosses--not suspect that perhaps they would be somehow be involved with each other? Would a Hollywood filmmaker be this shameless, to the point where all that stands between the White House and an incoming bomb-dropping F-22 Raptor is a teenaged pain-in-the-neck doing her flag-twirling routine with the Commander-in-Chief's banner? 

There's the school of thought that says: "it's only a movie; shut up and turn your brain off for a while." I'm happy to hand over my brain to those in charge but before I do I'd like to know just how competent they are--heard horror stories about the last time someone did so and his brain was dropped on the floor where someone slid on the juices. Come to think of it, that might be what had happened to Emmerich and company, right before they made this housewreck of a picture.

Too much woman, not enough girl

Ernst Lubitsch's The Loves of a Pharaoh would come as a surprise to those who know him mostly by his lighter-than-air comedies. Not a lot of humor in this film, except for the disturbingly buffoonish performance by Paul Wegener in blackface as Samlak, king of Ethiopia. The film is really a love triangle between the young Egyptian Ramphis (Harry Liedtke), who loves the escaped Greek slave Thonis (Dagny Servaes) who loves him back, who in turn is loved (unrequitedly) by Amenes (Emil Jannings), pharaoh of Egypt. 

It's a neat little melodrama where Jannings plays yet another bastard, a despotic ruler who is willing to threaten the life of Theonis' lover if she doesn't marry him. The girl here remains relatively spotless; it's her effect on men and not anything she wants in particular that causes all the trouble--every time men look at her this blank expression comes into their faces, as if their minds were being sapped (judging from the photo above she does have some appeal, if not necessarily actual allure).

What does convince is Jannings as the pharaoh. Jannings has often been accused of being a ham, not without cause; here though he delivers an early version of the fixated male that he will bring to even sharper detail on the big screen eight years later, in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel; watching his bewilderment, as if some spell had taken over his body and he can't understand why, you start looking at Servaes again, wondering if maybe she's some kind of enchantress after all. It's more his destructive obsessiveness than any obvious sexuality on Servaes' part that validates her fatale status.

Lubitsch films the gargantuan sets and ten-thousand cast battle sequences with impeccable taste, if not any especial flair--you can tell he's no D.W. Griffith, with a determination to write "history with lighting." More memorable is the love triangle, which flails melodramatically for most of the picture before plunging finally into disaster. By film's end several thoughts stay in mind: that the girl for all her sexual purity and relative innocence stands at some level justly accused of being the source of all Egypt's troubles (making you wonder just how pure or at least sincere she really was); that Ramphis for all his sense of honor and bravery is perfectly capable of betraying father and country for the sake of a woman, like any lovestruck hero; and that Janning's Amenes for all his cruelty sups full of the pathos of his situation (from pharaoh to outcast and back), and finally attains the dignity of a truly tragic figure. Not perhaps Lubitsch's best work (I'm personally partial to voting Trouble in Paradise to that lofty status, though any half-dozen titles including The Shop Around the Corner constantly vie for the position in my head), but an impressive, sobering work nevertheless. 

7.1.13

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)

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Don't talk

First of all Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist has had trouble being booked in Manila theaters--it took initiative on the part of this year's French Film Festival (officially known now as the Citi-Rustan's French Film Festival) to finally bring the movie to the Philippines, despite winning a Best Picture at this year's Golden Doorstop Awards ceremony.

Actually, it's always had trouble with bookings, even in the United States. An announcement had to be posted at ticket counters in American theaters, stating that refunds would not be given to audiences who belatedly realize that this is a silent picture, and black and white to boot; the movie's publicists (not to mention quite a few critics) practically had to apologize for the fact that it has no dialogue or color (“try it, you'll like it!”). 

To which I want to say: huh? What's the big hangup with black-and-white movies, much less silent movies? We deal with unorthodox viewing venues all the time--the latest technological advances have shrunk viewing screens to cellphone size or smaller; the computer freezes every five minutes because the phone line's bandwidth can't handle the traffic load. And then there's 3D, where you have to peer at the screen through thick sunglasses that make the image roughly three-fourths dimmer, and encourage your eyes to gaze at each other constantly, to achieve the illusion of depth.

So the movie's black-and-white and without dialogue? Grow up, kids--it's not as if you're being asked for your right pinkie in payment.

I do have to agree with the publicity on one point: Hazanavicius' movie is a charmer. Taking a page from the tragic story of John Gilbert while soft-pedaling the alcoholism and pathos, throwing in a parallel rags-to-riches plotline borrowed from George Cukor's A Star is Born, the picture gives us a brief (callow, unthreatening) view of the transition from silent to sound film (a transition also recorded in Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain).

As the Gilbert figure George Valentin, Jean Dujardin recalls the breezy unflappability of Gene Kelly, complete with wide-mouthed grin (he can dance too, though not with the same athletic exuberance); Berenice Bejo--Hazanavicius' wife--is a gentle, sunny presence as star-on-the-rise Peppy Miller, though she doesn't quite exhibit the kind of drive you imagine is needed by an actress out to reach celebrity status (I'm thinking of Judy Garland's sweet but determined Esther Blodgett in A Star is Born). They're both amiable personalities that trade on unconventional beauty (Dujardin's dark looks, Bejo's startlingly angular cheekbones and jaw) without digging too deep at the more disturbing implications of their characters.

And maybe that's my biggest problem with this picture--not that it's bad, exactly, but that it's so inoffensive and blandly likeable one wonders why anyone would be so excited over it, other than the fact that it's both black-and-white and silent (like I've said to those with problems: deal with it!). Gilbert's life was an occasion for high drama, not necessarily because he had a high-pitched voice (the official explanation), or because he had a thick accent (The Artist's version) but possibly because studio executive Louis B. Mayer was out to ruin him (reportedly Gilbert punched Mayer for disparaging his co-star, Greta Garbo); that, heavy alcoholism, and the swiftly shifting landscape of the sound era played their part in his downfall.

Valentin's descent is something of a puzzle. Yes he drinks; yes he has a heavy accent. But it's a reasonably soft, attractively deep-voiced accent, one that would fit many a melodrama, and Latino actors weren't all that unknown in Hollywood (thanks to Ramon Novarro and Rudolph Valentino Latino actors were so popular aspiring actor Jacob Krantz changed his name to Ricardo Cortez to take advantage of the fad; Novarro himself worked a few years into the sound era). Plus Valentin as Dujardin plays him is such an affable actor one wonders why no one wants to hire him for anything (couldn't he cuss someone out, act like a jerk, or even punch a studio exec, like Gilbert?). The man doesn't even seem to have the kind of overreaching pride required to motivate his precipitous decline storyline (“I AM big; it's the pictures that got small”).

Hazanavicius is talented; he manages to capture some of the look and feel of a silent film without, sadly, injecting his own brand of poetry (the way, say, Guy Maddin or Raya Martin can). He tells his story swiftly enough, he has a pair of attractive lovers at the heart of his production, he has a heroic animal sidekick helping out (the remarkable Uggie, a Jack Russell terrier that resembles in appearance and spirit the legendary Asta, of The Thin Man fame). 

He does commit a major misstep in using Bernard Herrmann's music for Vertigo to paper over his finale--said music with its repetitive melody and resemblance to the “Lieberstod” aria of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde being so deeply ingrained in the mind with the idea of obsessive, undying love one wonders why Hazanavicius wants to yoke such tremendously operatic music (even in the mainly piano-based arrangement found in Hazanavicius' production) to his little fluff piece. Does Hazanavicius really want his picture compared to Hitchcock's masterpiece, one of the greatest films ever made? One wonders.

First published in Businessworld, 6.14.12

L'Inferno and Nosferatu

A still from L'Inferno

The horror, the horror

Thanks to the generosity of the Goethe Institut, the Japan Foundation, The Instituto Cervantes, the Embassies of Italy and Greece, The 5^th International Silent Film Festival will unfold from August 26 to 28 at the Shang Cineplex 2, in Shangri-La Plaza Mandaluyong, and oh, wonders of wonders--at least two of them are horror films (well, one indisputably is; so is the other if you stretch definitions a little).

The rarer creature (and borderline horror) is Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro's L'Inferno (1911). This largely forgotten silent was a huge hit at the time of its release, with plenty of applause during and after its premiere screening in Naples (the film went on to gross over two million dollars in the United States). Today it stands as a curiosity, at sixty-eight minutes the first Italian feature ever made.

Mind you, we're not talking D.W. Griffith here; the intertitles do most of the narrative heavy-lifting, giving us a clunky ten minutes of exposition explaining what's going on in Dante's life, who Beatrice is, why he's wandering a desolate wood, threatened by various largely symbolic predators. When Virgil finally takes him under wing (at the behest of his beloved Beatrice, who descends upon the great classical poet like the Good Witch of the North) he is informed that the path to salvation leads first through the depths of hell--you have to know the worst in human nature, Virgil seems to say, before you start trying for the best. It's not going to be an easy path; “abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Dante is warned before entering. The line still retains a chill, even in this film, even now.

Griffith's ghosts, and Cahier's 100 most beautiful films

Arguably NY Times' DVD critic Dave Kehr's blog is one of the most active online site for film around; it's easily the most lively.

Take the case of his recent article on Kino's release of the second volume of the films of D.W. Griffith, and read the commentary page, which runs to over 160 posts as of this time.

Griffith almost a hundred years later is still the provocateur, still able to raise a good if not always civil or intelligently reasoned (or worse, unoriginal) fracas. All to the good despite the negativity, I say; better by far than if no one cared at all.

Didn't want to add fuel to the fire (or static to the already considerable noise), so I'll just comment on the whole debate here. Been an Asian living in America for five years, and for the past half decade, has not been entirely unaware of the problem of racism in this country. Been called everything from 'spic' to 'nigger' (apparently Filipinos are not a very common sight), and accused of being racist myself (among other less savory things). I get that sidelong glance when walking into a store, or public institution; I've felt that closemouthed tension whenever entering a room full of white people. Racism--or at least its simmering, tightly-plated-over-with-a-thick-layer-of-courtesy equivalent--is something I have to live with all the time.

I can see what an appalling tract Griffith's The Birth of a Nation is; I know something of its history, and the role it played in reviving the Ku Klux Klan. Watching the film, I cringe at the blackfaced stereotypes depicted onscreen, running apelike after Flora Cameron (the ever-sunny Mae Marsh), or wreaking havoc in Congress.

And it's not just the racism; if the racism were hamhanded and obvious (as I have to admit it often is here), it wouldn't be such a thorny issue. It's in how persuasive the film at its best can be. If a black man (or an actor in blackface) running after a woman hoping to have sex with her is too grotesque to take seriously, the subplot about the mulatto Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) trying to force marriage with Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) is sufficiently and subtly developed to actually make one bristle at the thought of a subhuman brute laying his hands on Gish's lily-white limbs (not to mention make one feel the satisfaction of seeing a do-gooding liberal (Austin Stoneman, played by Ralph Lewis) being confronted with the consequences of his own 'wrongheadedness'). The climax is easily the film's most powerful moment, a thrilling rescue sequence to rival anything done by Kurosawa or Spielberg, and not the least of Griffith's accomplishments is in having you cheer a band of Klansmen riding to the rescue.

All that said and considering what I am, I take what I think's the middle view on Griffith: the man was a social naïf, but he could direct like an angel (or devil, if you like). For every scene with a slouched and gibbering white man in blackface, he's got a scene of exuberant gallantry, like a wounded Confederate, defiantly stuffing a Union cannon with its own flag, or of surpassing tenderness, like a soldier's halting, hesitant homecoming. Griffith in film took sides and dug in like a soldier, and people cheered or condemned him for that--still do to this day. I do think you're probably something of a naïf if you can dismiss his racism as "a product of his times;" if you can manage to totally ignore his filmmaking, though, you're probably also blind (or maybe just not paying attention).

Also found in the commentary pages is a link to Cahiers du Cinema's 100 films pour une cinematheque ideale. It's not a bad effort, for an attempt at something definitive (personally, I prefer a whole score of lists, and refusing to tally them up in any shape or size whatsoever), and probably the most credible outside of Sight and Sound's and Senses of Cinema's.

I've heard minor cavils--no Borzage, no Naruse. To which I'd like to throw in "What, no Guru Dutt, or Raj Kapoor, or Bimal Roy (what, are Donen and Minnelli the only masters of the musical?); no Anthony Mann; no Hou Hsiao Hsien; no animation (unless you consider King Kong, which is arguably stop-motion)? Nicholas Ray represented by a kitschy work (I'd love to see him recognized for In a Lonely Place)?Welles present, but represented by the usual suspect (Citizen Kane--though it's nice to see Touch of Evil included)?"

To be fair, I do appreciate the high ranking of Laughton's Night of the Hunter, which critic David Ehrenstein considers the greatest American film ever made (I don't know if I'd go so far, but I understand where he's coming from, and I do love the picture myself), of M (my favorite Lang), and of City Lights, which I do love to death but have failed to keep in my own top ten , due to overfamiliarity. Maybe I should look at it again.

(But waitaminute--only one Keaton, while Chaplin has five? What's going on here? (Only, I suppose, the rubbing off of strange protuberances and projections in the lists--one reason I dislike tallies is that they usually end up giving us what the mainstream considers top quality; give me heterogeneous lists anytime, where a man's quirks and eccentricities are clearly on display))

But yeah--maybe the most painful omission is any word or mention of a Filipino filmmaker, Brocka or Bernal or Ad. Castillo or either of the two De Leons or Diaz or Red or even O'Hara. Still have a long way to go with the French critics, I suppose. To work, then.

Der Mude Tod (Destiny, Fritz Lang, 1921)

Death becomes her

Fritz Lang's 1921 Der Mude Tod (Destiny), which the Goethe Institute will be presenting this November 8, 7 pm at the St. Joseph Parish Church Las Pinas (Stephan von Bothmer to play accompaniment in the church's famous bamboo organ), is a wonder of a film, and a hugely influential one. Its effects have inspired Raoul Walsh's 1924 Thief of Baghdad, not to mention Michael Powell's 1940 remake. Its portrait of Death (Bernhard Goetzke) has affected both F.W. Murnau's outsized Mephisto (played by the equally outsized Emil Jannings), looming over Murnau's 1927 masterpiece Faust - Eine deutsche Volkssage (Faust - A German Folktale) and Ingmar Bergman's famously pale and hooded figure of Death (Bengt Ekerot) in Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957)--and, if I'm not mistaken, has lent a bittersweet flavor to Lotte Reiniger's Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926). It set a young Luis Bunuel on the path to filmmaking, and is considered one of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite films.

The story is simple enough--a young woman (Lil Dagover) realizes that Death has taken her lover (Walter Janssen); she attempts suicide, but is stopped at the entranceway to the afterlife by Death. She begs him to let her beloved go, and Death, professing a weariness of his role as doomsayer and all-around spoilsport, presents a counteroffer: he will let her lover go if she can save at least one of three lives in danger of being extinguished.

Over and over again the young woman tries; in various forms--as a Caliph's slave, as a Renaissance lady, as a Chinese magician's assistant--she's constantly risking life and limb to save her lover, who also takes on various roles. Over and over again the young man is stabbed, shot with an arrow, buried alive; Death, the third party in this triangle, each time takes on the role of enabler or executioner, each time is labeled with names like "The Moor" or "El Mot." The repetition becomes inevitable, oppressive; the woman's plight gains a sharpened sense of fatalistic poignancy with each succeeding failure.

Is the story key, however, to the film's greatness? I don't know--the script seems mostly a series of scenarios, designed to appeal to an audience's desire for foreign exotica (interesting though that Lang (with the help of his wife and scenarist Thea von Harbou) manages to impose a rigorously defining pattern over all that variety, and out of that pattern work out the film's themes), with a last-minute moral point thrown in. Possibly a matter of taste, but give me Goethe's style of dramaturgy in his masterwork, where the moral quandary is thoroughly foreshadowed, exhaustively debated, constantly framed and re-framed in each and every scene the hero is in, to the point that the tension becomes almost unbearable when the deadline nears and Faust's soul is in peril of damnation.

It doesn't help that Dagover represents the kind of heavy-boned Teutonic type actress, full of 19th century theatrical gestures that weighs on the early scenes of tender romance. It's only later, when she's lit and shot to emphasize her suffering, when she transcends hysteria to attain a higher plane of what I suppose is serenity (or the kind of acceptance you see in dumb beasts about to go under the knife) that she acquires a martyr's beauty.

Goetzke, though, makes for a perfect Death. Solemn and serene, with massive architectural cheeks and sunken eyes that Lang as often obscures in hooded shadows as he does reveal in flat, undistinguished light (Goetzke's gaze actually seems more expressive, more human when it's hidden). You don't doubt that he's the ancestor of Eskerot's Death; you also don't doubt that the original is more inscrutable, more serenely unsettling.

Beyond Goetzke, though, is Lang's inimitable filmmaking. Working on a limited budget (I imagine Murnau and Griffith (whose Intolerance (1916) was an aesthetic ancestor in its use of multiple storylines and fatalist tone) enjoyed more financial resources while doing their fantasies), Lang creates a metaphysical drama as compelling, if not more so, using effects as basic as lighting, framing, and the multiple exposure. Death comes to a small Flemish town, buys land near a cemetery, erects an impossibly high wall around the land without gate or door; Lang shoots the wall head-on, filling the screen with mortared stone--we see Death walking at the foot of the wall, a small figure cuing us to the size and scale of the edifice. The young woman picks up a bottle of poison; Lang drops out the image of her actually drinking and fades directly to her hands in repose, her face looking in wonder at her suddenly new surroundings (it's as if Lang were suggesting death was as much a matter of falling asleep and dreaming as it was a state of physical reality). She walks through a portal shaped and lit to resemble a shining sword (a metaphysical blade, that inserts itself between the realms of life and death?), to a staircase that reaches endlessly heavenwards.

In the Muslim sequence one remembers the rooftop sequence, the sense of dread felt while waiting for the young woman to realize her lover's fate; Lang stages this as if it were a play, with the crucial action happening off-camera, leaving the audience with this urgent need to look down past the lower right side of the screen. In the Renaissance sequence one remembers the gigantic curtains, the deadly duel played out before it moving back and forth, the assassin behind the curtains preparing to deal the death blow (if in earlier story death is brutally out in the open here, Lang suggests, death is the distance in steps from an unnoticed curtain, and a treacherously hidden poisoned blade). In the third sequence the lovers transform into a holy statue and a giant cat, a startling show of imagination and defiance in the face of the inevitable.

The film's finest effect, however, is its simplest: a trio of candles that gradually expire, one after another, at the end of each story. A more potent image of the transient nature of life I'd be hard put to name; the smoke curling up from the just-extinguished flame suggests just-snuffed souls rising heavenwards.

I called the film's conclusion a 'sudden moral point.' I'm being ungenerous--it's an ironic finale that plays ruthlessly fair to the story's premise, at the same time it mutes the harsh conclusion with a strange tenderness. The film's German title translates literally to "the weary Death," and throughout the film you can't help but feel that despite his impassivity, Death does harbor some sympathy for the film's heroine; the conclusion, unless I'm reading too much between the lines (between the intertitles?) seems to bear this out. It's a great albeit flawed film, very much worth watching. Go, see.

VCDs of two major Mario O'Hara films (Bakit Bughaw and Kastilyong Buhangin); plus other DVD releases

Tremendous news--kind of. But still.

Two of Mario O'Hara most highly regarded films--largely unseen for over twenty years--are finally, finally available on VCD format (that's the 'tremendous' part), but unsubtitled (that's the 'kind of' part): Kastilyong Buhangin (Sand Castle, 1980) and Bakit Bughaw ang Langit (Why Is the Sky Blue? 1981).

Basically, Kastilyong Buhangin was a pop vehicle for drama queen/music diva Nora Aunor and rising stuntman turned actor Lito Lapid, so the film is a mix of melodrama and action setpieces--a cross, in effect, between George Cukor's A Star is Born and Ringo Lam's Prison on Fire. Stuntmen choreographing their own stunts, Nora Aunor singing a George Canseco classic (if you've ever been to a karaoke bar in Manila--or any Filipino home with a karaoke set--you've probably spotted the title song in their catalogue). What's not to like?

Bakit Bughaw is even better, a Lino Brocka melodrama played with an understatement and laser-beam focus I submit Brocka never achieved in his own films. Some say this is O'Hara's masterpiece; I may not agree, but I understand their regard.

I've written on both films--on Kastilyong Buhangin here and on Bakit Bughaw ang Langit here, and I cannot, can not recommend them highly enough. VCDs work on my Philips DVD player, so there's a chance they'll work on yours; the video quality will be bad, but this may be the only way the films are ever going to be seen (the prints and negatives are gone, as far as I know, and believe me I've looked). If you're not fluent in Tagalog chances are you'll have trouble understanding the story, so now's your chance to either learn the language or befriend a Filipino, take him or her to your home, and have them watch two of the finest films in Philippine cinema, translating the dialogue benshi-style for your benefit.

Abel Gance's J'Accuse (1919) is great, and moving in ways Napoleon (a more visually spectacular and complex film) is not. The storyline is pure melodrama, but the way it's carried out is hard to resist--Gance's hokiness is so much more sophisticated than Griffith's, or even Murnau's, at least in Sunrise (1927) (which can be off-putting, if you're not ready for it).

Again and again Jean Diaz (Victor Francen) proves himself self-sacrificing, totally unselfish and sensitive to the needs of the people and of Edith, the woman he loves (Line Noro), who happens to be married to another man. Your eyebrows rise but you can't quite bring yourself to laugh--Gance has Francen underplay his acting so well, largely subordinates his not inconsiderable visual style to the story so completely that Diaz's deeds come across as simple expediency, dictated by circumstances, with only a trailing whiff of nobility in the air. I for one was completely seduced by this plaster saint posing so effectively as a human being.

The truly three-dimensional figure in the film is Edith's husband Francois (Marcel Delaitre), who makes for a magnificent peasant brute; with his howitzer of a shotgun and battleship prow of a nose, when he glares at the camera (often at Diaz or at his own erring wife), you expect the theater screen to singe a little. All the more moving, then, when he is confronted with his own implacable sense of honor, and his granite facade cracks a little.

Great scenes combining actual combat with reenacted footage, and I don't know if it's an accident or conscious decision on Gance's part, but the soldiers captured on film are faceless figures, foreshadowing the harrowing sequence where the dead rise up to judge the living (Romero's entire work, and even Dante's Homecoming (2005), anyone?). That final scene, with the dead in long shot, even in bright sunlight, is unsettling--they're solid, not phantoms, but you still get this hair-raising sense that they're not completely of this world.

Again, again, that's why I think Romero's slow-shuffling undead (or Kurosawa Kiyoshi's in Kairo, for that matter) are so disturbing. They're don't quite move to our beat--don't swim in the same currents of time. The more recent, faster-moving ghouls (28 Days Later; the Dawn of the Dead remake) are just wild animals on the loose; Romero's (and Kiyoshi's) cry out from beyond.

Finally: Desu noto (Death Note, 2006). Tetsuo Araki's adaptation of the manga by they psuedonymous Tsugumi Ohba. John Powers reviewed the series in NPR, quoting someone as saying this is the best thing to come out of Japan in reecent years.

It's fascinating for the intricate plotting, mainly, and the jawdropping twists introduced along the way. And of course for L, the bug-eyed pale-skinned, honey-voiced (Alessandro Juliani who, if they ever remade 2001: A Space Odyssey, would be a shoo-in to play HAL 9000) genius behind the the manhunt for Kira, the unknown killer who strikes down criminals the world over just by looking at their faces, and writing down their names in an ordinary notebook.

It's not particularly profound, and it doesn't make any grand statements on the human condition; it's just a fantasy of two youths possessed of extraordinary abilities (as Powers notes, the two main characters represent two distinct types: Kira (a.k.a. Light Yagami) is the handsome honor student, ladies' man, and athlete, while L (real name unknown) represents the weird otaku, or geek). L and Kira are alike, they're deadly enemies, they're also, strangely enough, tentatively good friends, mainly because they are the only two people in the world, apparently, intelligent enough to truly appreciate each other (in a late episode, perhaps the creepiest moment in a series full of creepy moments, L washes Kira's feet).

I don't agree about that 'best thing to come from Japan recently' bit--Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Takeshi Kitano are still working (haven't seen their latest, though), and Oshii wowed me with his last picture--but it's defintely interesting, addictive stuff.