December 30: Into the Woods (2014 -- Rob Marshall)

December 21: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940 -- Ford Beebe & Ray Taylor)

★★★

This Flash Gordon serial is at least as engaging as the two earlier and, in some ways, even more so.  Like the two previous, it starts with a threat to the earth, but while the other serials spend some time on discovery of the problem and pulling together a response, by the time this series has told us about the threat, Flash, Dale and Zarkov are already in space and engaged in an air battle.  And just as the episode's opening benefits from the condensed story, the rest of these episodes compress action and race forward.

Art director Harold MacArthur appears to have been given free rein to use any costumes he could find at Universal, and he embraced that freedom with relish.  Flash starts his adventures with his hunky body discretely wrapped in a military uniform, but he’s soon in tights and a Cossack hat, showing his contours.  Queen Fria’s court has an historical drama look that sometimes slips into a beauty pageant, while Ming and those who dance for him suggest an oriental adventure.  The local costume of Prince Barin’s realm appears to be cut from Robin Hood films with caps, sweeping feathers, tights and tunics.  And there are some plucky rock men in papier-mâché costumes perhaps created for the series.  The art design here is a great overview of the look of film of the 30s.

But the US was preparing for war in 1940, and that atmosphere is clear in many elements of this Flash Gordon.  While air battles had been a staple of the series, they’re far more common here than in previous Flash serials.  Ming is occasionally called a “dictator” instead of an emperor here, and there’s a whiff of eugenics in Fria’s condescension to the Rock People who, being dumb and blocky, should die.  Flash’s initial uniform is yet another index of the times, as are the long-range canon and the bombing of the castle.  And the presence of double agents and spies on both sides are new to the Flash serials, too.

And like the other series, Flash 40 lends itself to playing Spot-the-Star-Wars-Elements.  The game can start early as the first narrative titles, which scroll from the bottom of the page and recede into space above, just like they do in all the Star Wars movies.  Cloaking devices render spacecraft invisible to opposing armies, and Ming’s programed robots attack Flash & co.  Of course, there is both an emperor and a princess here, and there’s a particularly strong connection between the Rock People and the Jawa traders in Episode IV.  The Rock People blend in and out of the environment and speak their own language, just as we see the Jawa do on  Tatooine.  It’s a striking connection.

But the most fun in this Flash Gordon is the rush from one noble act to the next and the sincerity that Buster Crabb brings to the hero.  At one point here, Zarkov says of Ming: “We can destroy him and his palace, but that would mean our death as well.”  Undeterred, Flash responds, “It would be worth it if we could save the universe by doing so.”

They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

December 20: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014 -- Peter Jackson)

★★★

December 19: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013 -- Peter Jackson)

★★★

The Desolation of Smaug is a small step up from 2012’s Hobbit.  One of the improvements here is that the action sequences, still long, are more fun than those in Jackson’s 2012 film.  Smaug features a lively barrel run with the dwarves in the barrels being pursued by orcs onshore, who are themselves pursued by elves.  The bouncing barrels coupled with the aggressive orcs and agile elves makes for far more animated, martial arts-inflected fun than does a similarly active sequence in the first Hobbit, where dwarves are tossing plates around in Bilbo’s house.  And though this film pauses overly long to allow Bilbo and Smaug to engage in the Lonely Mountain, Smaug’s slithering, sardonic fire breathing is more interesting that the overly long escape of the dwarves from the goblin underground in The Hobbit. 

Another improvement is a subtlety that exists here more than in the previous Hobbit.  Throughout The Desolation of Smaug, we encounter hints and signs of the expansion of evil.  We learn, for example, that the spider incursions are getting worse in Mirkwood, and we see that the Nazgûl tombs are empty, surely a bad sign but one we can't completely interpret.  While the orc armies of Azog and the reveal of Sauron are rightly on-the-nose, little signs like the tired weakness of Thranduil and the isolated Smaug's awareness of Sauron’s rise all imply the increasing range of evil rather than making it explicit with exposition.  And on a purely visual level that the dialog doesn't even note, Smaug's eye looks remarkably like Sauron.  This Hobbit film has much more subtlety than the former.

Desolation of Smaug still has some serious flaws, though.  The worst problem with this long film is that it doesn't go anywhere.  There’s no resolution of an issue, and there’s no movement or idea at its core.  Dramatically, the film also has even less character development than The Hobbit, and vast majority of the script is declamation rather than dialog.  And there is so much CGI in Smaug that most of the film looks like a video game, one that someone else is playing and that we only get to watch.  And some parts of the film are simply hard to understand.  It’s difficult, for example, to catch that the orc in charge of catching Thorin, Bolg, is the son of the Azog, the orc commander.  And as to why that would be worth noting, perhaps the next film will tell.

Like its predecessor, Desolation of Smaug is not a great film.  People who love Middle Earth and its lore will relish the film’s visuals and the way Jackson weaves in background to create a sense of time and history.  But the overlong action sequences, the lack of character, and the meandering storyline here will leave many audiences on the side.

December 18: Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938 -- Ford Beebe, Robert F. Hill & Frederick Stephani)

★★★

Better isn’t always better, and the distance between the 1936 and the 1938 Flash Gordon serials is a case in point.  Flash ’38 has a tighter, more cohesive narrative than the earlier one.  For example, a parachute jump in the first episode prefigures several batwing jumps that are important on Mars, and though there are still some narrative gaps, they aren’t as numerous here as they are in Flash ’36.  Even the acting of Buster Crabbe has some of its rough edges chipped off.  Crabbe was positively bursting with enthusiasm in the ’36 Flash, hopping into the air as he ran short distances across a stage to simulate effort; in ’38, he doesn’t hop quite as high.

There’s a bit more self-consciousness in Flash ’38, too, and less of the “golly, gee” that’s endearing in the ’36 series.  We have the new character of the reporter, Happy Hapgood, whose wiseacre comments give this serial a distance, even irony, that it completely missing in the first serial.  Flash Gordon ’38 even winks self-consciously at the audience when the earth, as seen from space, resembles the Universal Studios logo.

But despite these updates, Flash Gordon ’38 is still a load of fun.  Sparking switches still typify the laboratories on Mars, and smoke drifts uncooperatively above the model spaceships as they circle and land.  The Incense of Forgetfulness shows the persistence of an interest in mind control.  A little, two-person car that runs in tunnels underground helps Flash and friends infiltrate the castle of Queen Azura, who is herself decked out like a contestant in the swimsuit competition of a beauty contest.  Ming is even more vile here than in the ’36 serial, and though Crabbe has clearly toned his acting down, he is no less committed to the role.  He shows less skin and pecs here than in the ’36 series, but his sense of honor propels the narrative and inspires.  Having saved the earth, Flash stays on Mars to honor his word and help free the Clay people from Queen Azura.  

Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars still works today.  Its visual inventiveness and cheesy gusto engage us, and even the drifting spaceship models and flat line delivery are a part of a cohesive whole that, no matter how contrived the ending of one episode, on some basic level, we want to find out what happens next.  

December 17: Flash Gordon (1936 -- Frederick Stephani & Ray Taylor)

★★★★

In the first episode of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, an adviser to Emperor Ming walks on screen and you’re immediately taken to Star Wars.  The adviser has the same costume, speech mannerisms, posture and even the same nose as a character in the more recent films.  So while watching Flash Gordon in our post-Lucas Star Wars days, one of the big pleasures is spotting references and influences.

And there are many.  The universe of Flash Gordon is one of multiple alien races – Lion Men, Shark Men, Hawkmen, a tiger woman, others – and all these races serve as subjects of the Emperor.  These races live in a variety of cities on land, under the ocean and in the sky, cities that call to mind those in the Star Wars series.  And Mongo is populated by a variety of menacing beasts.  There is also a variety of transportation here from spinning top ships to rockets to underwater craft.  Moment’s like the undersea trip, with its encounter with sea beasts, and Flash’s struggle in a chamber that is filling with water call to mind specific moments from the more recent films, too.  Some of Flash’s sword fights, and the sound that accompanies them, remind us of light saber duels, and even the text at the beginning of each “chapter” is suggested in the Star Wars saga.

But for all the fun echoes here, there are many elements here firmly planted in 1936.  This Flash Gordon serial has a couple of big dance productions like the one with women sprawled around a multi-armed deity and the one that is a celebration for King Vultan.  Also, the science of Flash Gordon is based on rays, electrical arcs and neon tubes, like you’d expect in Frankenstein rather than in today’s sci fi.  And the machinery here recalls that from films like Metropolis, with its big clock dial, and even Charlie Chaplin’s contemporary Modern Times.  The Flash Gordon episodes also play to an interest in identity and consciousness as Princess Aura wipes out Flash’s memory and tries to reconstruct it to her benefit.  Although it has clearly inspired later cinema, this Flash Gordon is very much a thing of its time.

Some of these 30s elements turn out to be drawbacks for a contemporary viewer of the series, though.  One element that hurts the film is its lack of psychology.  The episodes run completely on story, and characters are more plot functions than people.  Flash dotes on Dale because their relationship is a necessary part of the story, but there’s no motivation, passion or risk there.  In fact, if we weren't told that it exists, we might not even see a relationship at all.  And given the short serial format, there’s little in the way of overarching plot structure or theme: something happens, then something else happens, then something else happens.  Flash Gordon is a series actions and situations that barely grow out of the situation that immediately preceded.  And it’s worth noting that the acting is singularly bad.  The athletic Buster Crabbe bounds vertically as he runs and flails his arms since there’s not enough room to run on the soundstage, and flat line delivery is the standard.

But for all this, there’s fun to be had in this 1936 serial.  On some level, there’s a sincerity here.  Though it’s hard to know what audiences would have thought of the rocket exhaust drifting up rather than flying out behind the spaceships, there’s a refreshing lack of cynicism and self-consciousness throughout the series.  Each episode here is a fun, little adventure, and if we come to realize that the Emperor Ming sat on something that looks a lot like the Iron Throne, it’s an extra smile for the series.

December 15: Liliom (1934 -- Fritz Lang)

December 14: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse/Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933 -- Fritz Lang)

December 13: M (1931 -- Fritz Lang)

December 12: Woman in the Moon/Frau im Mond (1929 -- Fritz Lang)

December 11: Spies/Spione (1928 -- Fritz Lang)

December 9: Metropolis (1927 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★★★

December 8: Die Nibelungen: Pt. 2: Kriemhild's Revenge/Kriemhilds Rache (1924 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

By the end of Siegfried, we’re ready to say goodbye to Judeo-Christian forgiveness and root for a bitter, bloody vengeance on those who brought our hero down.  But even though we come to the film fully engaged, the second part of Die Nibelungen, Kriemhild’s Revenge, never quite rises to the level of Siegfried.  With our heroic paragon gone, we don’t have Paul Richter lighting up the screen, and the film doesn’t carry the wider moral significance of the earlier one.  Even more, compared to Siegfried, Kriemhild’s Revenge feels tired, as though Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou had put so much excited energy into Siegfried that there wasn’t much left for Part II.

Which is not to say that Kriemhild’s Revenge is a bad movie.  There are the same epic action sequences that we see in Siegfried. Hundreds of horsemen surge over a ridge and gallop toward the camera at one point, and later the same number assault first the door and then the walls of Attila’s palace as the Huns try to retake the hall from the Burgundian kings.  The subsequent burning of Attila’s hall is the high point of epic action in the film.  Kriemhild’s Revenge also uses epic scale we in non-action sequences.  Attila’s throne room is a mass of decoration, and the Burgundian festivities in the caverns are just as elaborate.

And the melodrama of the film also aims to engage us in Kriemhild’s Revenge.  Kriemhild refuses to say good bye to her family as she leaves her home to marry Attila; von Harbou’s script subjects the queen to multiple entreaties for reconciliation and dwells on the extravagant emotional suffering of her family as Kriemhild rides stiffly away.  The extended assault on the Burgundians also offers many melodramatic moments.  Kriemhild repeatedly has the Huns attack the hall, all the while asking her brothers to give Hagen to her so she can spare the rest.  The kings, though, rally to Hagen and refuse to surrender in an emotional moment.  She also forces Ruediger to obey his oath to her, and the torn knight must kill the beloved husband of his own daughter to do so.  Meanwhile, all the Burgundians die, with the exception of the one Kriemhild wants dead, Hagen.  And in a final melodramatic twist, Kriemhild kills Hagen and is herself slain.  And Attila has her sent to be buried with Siegfried, the only man she’s ever loved.

But while Kriemhild’s Revenge has many of the same elements as Siegfried, the story here is far more monotonous.  Siegfried is a series of one interesting event after another, but in Kriemhild's Revenge, we know far ahead of time what's going to happen.  In fact, from the time Auberich curses the treasure in Siegfried and it ultimately passes into the hands of Gunther, it’s pretty clear that Gunther’s days are numbered and that we have only to wait to learn the vehicle.  And if that weren’t enough, Gunther’s breaking of his vow of brotherhood also sealed his fate.  And even Kriemhild vows vengeance in the end of Siegfried, meaning that Kriemhild’s Revenge is only the unveiling of how this will happen.  With all this destiny in the air, Kriemhild’s Revenge does little to interrupt the clear course of events.  While Siegfried fights a dragon, visits Auberich’s cave, bests Brunhild in trials and engages in court intrigue, Kriemhild is left to marry Attila and kill her family.  This short course of obvious events doesn’t make for a story nearly as engaging in Kriemhild’s Revenge as that in Siegfried.  

There’s much to enjoy in the visuals in Kriemhild’s Revenge, but with its clearly telegraphed story and unambiguous moral direction, Part Two of The Nibelungen falls short of the achievement of Part One.  It’s certainly an enjoyable cinematic experience, but Kriemhild’s Revenge is somewhat flat compared to the drama and stakes of its predecessor

December 7: Die Nibelungen: Pt. 1: Siegfried (1924 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★★★

There are many things to enjoy in this great Weimer silent.  One of Lang’s smartest strategies for keeping us in this 2-1/2 hour film is to put images of great beauty on the screen.  One of the most compelling occurs early as we see Siegfried walking around a forest of immense trees and, shortly after, riding though the same trees bare chested on a white horse with his big flow of blonde hair pulled back.  Later, we’re treated to the Alberich’s cave, whose interior looks like that of a fantasy Byzantine cathedral with its bulbous, fluted columns.  Too, we scenes of staged, formal beauty.  As the royal couples are walking to the altar to be married, Lang puts the camera behind a line of guardsmen so we see the royalty only as they cross the well-lit gaps between the dark backs of the guardsmen.  Throughout Siegfried, Lang aims to keep beauty on the screen.

And he enhances this beauty with effective lighting.  Throughout the introductory parts of the film, Lang uses low-key light on Siegfried to bring out the muscular definition of the actor, Paul Richter.  When Siegfried casts his sword, he stands aside from the forge and rotates his work in his extended right hand, the light bringing out the details of the musculature of that arm as the muscles shift from one configuration to another.  We see similar lighting soon afterwards as Siegfried approaches the dragon and again when he bathes in the dragon’s blood.  Later, as the hero approaches the cave, his white figure is silhouetted against the dark of a rock wall, and when he enters the light, an overhead light creates an aura around him that makes him stand out from the white background.  Lang’s lighting enhances the image throughout.

Lang also draws us with his cinematic special effects.  Among the most outstanding is the compelling dragon who, though his feet might not entirely touch the ground, can cut his eyes to the side with the best of silent actors.  His fire almost seems to singe Richter’s blonde hair at points, and deep in the background, the dragon adds to the beauty of many of the images he’s in.  Lang could also thrill his 1924 audience by having Alberich’s invisibility helmet make a figure vanish and transforming a boulder in the cave into a window that shows dwarves working on a crown for the Giant king.  Another type of special effect is Kriemhild’s animated dream of a white bird attacked by black ones, a premonition of Siegfried’s fate.  We also see Alberich and his dwarves turn to stone, and we see the fiery lake surrounding Brunhild’s castle cool down before Siegfried.  And though invisible, Siegfried is visible to us in glances as he uses the invisibility helmet to win Brunhild.  A chilling tour-de-force effect is when we watch Kriemhild’s memory of Siegfried’s last goodbye and see the tree beside him first whither, then die, and finally transform into a skull.   All these visual elements in Siegfried help keep us involved in the film.

The standard vocabulary of silent film keeps us invested, too.  We see intercutting throughout, starting early as one of the villagers tells the story of the Burgundian kings and the image cuts between the village and the kings’ palace.  Another outstanding use of the technique is when Lang cuts between the relationship of Siegfried/Kriemhild and Gunther/Brunhild to show the contrast between them.  Lang also uses the silents' love of scale in Siegfried.  Battle and hunt scenes flow with hundreds of extras, and the arrival of Gunther’s party from Brunhild’s castle is replete with the majesty of triumphant processional.

But it’s in Lang’s use of melodrama that we feel Siegfried most wed to a silent aesthetic.  The fight with the dragon and the excessive posing in the competition with Brunhild both draw on melodrama, and by the end of the film, melodrama has moved to center stage.  Capping all the foreshadowing, Kriemhild repeatedly begs Siegfried not to go on the hunt, and with excessive insouciance, Siegfried skips off anyway.  Soon we watch Gunter changing his mind repeatedly on whether or not to allow Hagan to kill the hero, drawing out the final decision, and when Siegfried is dead, the others on the hunt loudly lament their loss before painfully coming to the side of the murderers.  There’s even more emotional excess when Siegfried’s body is returned to the castle in a dark, windy night, and teh corpse is laid directly outside the widow’s door.  She’s dramatically horrified, and one member of her family after another refuses her impassioned entreaties for vengeance.  While engaging us, the melodrama in these scenes has an especially important function in the larger Die Nibelungen: The emotional intensity here has to serve as the motivation for the Kriemhild’s unflinching desire for vengeance in the next film.  And the compelling, melodramatic ending of Siegfried does just that.  By the end of this film, we want vengeance for Siegfried’s murder as much as Kriemhild does.

While all these efforts by Lang pay off and keep us in Siegfried, it’s the titular character and the performance of Richter that make it such a powerful film.  Richter’s Siegfried is a paragon of energy, always on the move, smiling and engaging people directly and sincerely.  Even when threaten by Alberich, it almost seems that the invincible Siegfried would rather just get along than do battle.  Siegfried is friendly, warm and loving, but he’s nobody’s fool and fights when it’s right.  He both attracts and inspires us.

Thea von Harbou’s Siegfried goes beyond these conventions, though, to become a compelling existential tragic hero.  In Siegfried, we have someone who does only what’s good, virtuous and right, but in a tragic irony of life that goes back to Golden Age Greece, Siegfried is undone by that very characteristic.  Sworn as a brother to Gunther, the noble Siegfried helps his "brother" to woo and win Brunhild, even when he doesn't want to.   To Siegfried, a vow must be honored.  However, angry at Siegfried’s duplicitous role in her seduction, Brunhild manipulates Gunther into betraying and killing Siegfried precisely because th noble hero has done as Gunther asked.  This tragic aspect of the hero – brought down by the very virtue he embraces—puts moral tragedy at the center of Siegfried and raises this film far above most of its silent contemporaries.  It shows us that honor and virtue aren't a guarantee of success in the world.  And the film gives us a way to channel our frustration and anger at living in a world where morality doesn't win: Revenge.  It’s not only the melodrama outside of Kriemhild’s door that angers us at the end of Siegfried; we also feel an existential anger that goodness and virtue aren't rewarded in the world.

Good silent film-making keeps us invested in a movie.  Lang engages us with beauty and melodrama in Siegfried, and he increases our involvement by giving us an existential hero brought down by a world that has little regard for the good.  The existential disappointment and anger that we feel at the conclusion of Siegfried launches us fully invested into the second part of Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge.

December 6: Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler/Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler - Ein Bild der Zeit (1922 -- Fritz Lang)

December 5: Four around the Woman/Vier um die Frau (1921 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

In this second writing collaboration between Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, the two again overreach.   As in The Wandering Woman, we’re not given enough background to understand who the many characters are and why they are acting the way they do, and we have another pair of twins to complicate our understanding of the story.  We also have a minor character, Meunier, who suddenly becomes important and acts with little motivation, while another character, one of the Krafft brothers, should be more important than he is.  And the story has some large holes.  How, for examples, do the jewelry thieves know that Yqeum has paid them with counterfeit money when he was in disguise when he bought it?

But as in The Wandering Woman, viewers who don’t give up on the film eventually learn most of the information they need to make sense of things.  After a long beginning of confusing information, the film goes to a flashback that explains the origin of all these relationships and the motivations animating the primary characters.  It’s the same device the writing team uses in The Wandering Woman, but it’s done earlier and more neatly here.  In addition, Four around the Woman sees Lang and Harbou experiment with a new, complicated, suspenseful ending as four storylines in the film converge on 47 Tiergarten at the climax of the film.  Since the writers were clearly aiming at this ending, it’s not hard to imagine that Lang and Harbou needed both Meunier’s sudden, unmotivated interest in Florence and the thieves’ knowledge of Yquem’s trick so the story would have two of the four ending narrative threads.  While the addition of these lines damages the film’s continuity, the weaving of four stories and the intercutting that brings them along is more sure than in much of Lang’s previous work after The Golden Sea.  The complicated climax is overly drawn out and has lost its steam by the time it ends, it’s still more complex and surely-executed than Lang’s work to date.  Four around the Woman represents a strong step forward in storytelling if not yet the narrative mastery of a complex plot that was to develop later.

And the film has some classic Lang elements.  There are psychological cuts that show us what is in a character’s mind, as when the film cuts to an image of the working husband of one of Florence's society friends.  There’s also the strong low key interior lighting that figures in so many of Lang’s later films.  And Lang continues to use depth of field intentionally, both for narrative purposes and to keep his viewer’s eyes on the screen.  For example, a foregrounded Florence spots her husband changing disguise in the mid-ground in a shot whose composition spares Lang a cut.  One of the more interesting elements here is the hefty presence of a poor, criminal underworld.  From an early scene with a blind beggar that calls to mind M, Four around the Woman features a collection of thieves, drunkards, pimps and prostitutes.  And a similarly libertine upper class.  These are characters who make many appearances in Lang’s later work.  From The Wandering Woman, Lang uses close-ups for character development and to highlight the sinister and macabre among his more sinister figures.  And there’s even a pan in the opening of the film as Lang’s camera surveys the faces ranged along a bar.

Four around the Woman shows Lang’s increasing cinematic control.  It only remains for him and Harbou to get a firmer grasp on a narrative form that works well in film for their collaboration is soar.

December 4: The Wandering Shadow/Das wandernde Bild (1920 -- Fritz Lang)

★

The Wandering Shadow isn’t a promising start to the collaboration that would soon bring us Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, M and The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse.  Fritz Land and Thea von Harbou worked together to create a plot here that unexpectedly lurches from one event to the next, throwing in an occasional surprise and reversal.  A character like Wil Brandt can play a significant role early and then vanish for much of the rest of film until re-emerging at the end.  And there are numerous unmotivated character elements like Georg Vanderheit vowing for no apparent reason to remain isolated from society until the stone Madonna walks.  A full third of this film has been lost, but it’s hard to imagine that the missing third would have given lots more cohesion to this muddle.

That said, some elements here point to better things to come.  For one, the intercutting between the cabin and the burning dynamite fuse shows Lang remembers how to create suspense by editing instead of simply showing simultaneous action.  There’s also a good deal of Germanic folklore, from the decorated wedding canoes to the rustic mountain cabins and the bells that are associated with death.  There’s even a hint of the supernatural that includes a fade-in of a skeletal arm ringing a bell.  As in Spiders, a claustrophobic, underground chamber hosts some of the suspenseful action when the cabin is covered in a landslide, an image that recurs in Lang’s work.  And his eye for composition again dominates Lang's frame, as does his skillful use of depth of field.

And for all its problems, Lang and Harbou’s story creates suspense and engagement with the audience.  Early in the film, we have to wonder why John is pursuing Irmgard so relentlessly and calling her his wife; all the while, Wil Brandt is called George’s rightful heir although Irmgard is George’s widow.  All this early confusion for the viewer in the film – and made more confusing by the same actor playing the role of both George and John – lasts until a flashback explains the mysteries.  But no sooner do we understand these mysteries than the writers add new narrative questions to engage the audience.  The complexity of some of the narrative mysteries here overly confuses, but Wandering Shadow shows the screenwriters honing their skills.

With a third of Wandering Shadows lost, it's hard to judge precisely what the complete film looked like in 1920, but based on what we have here, it might have been an overly ambitious first collaboration between the two writers, While this film is really of interest only to dedicated fans, history shows us that these collaborators would soon meld their respective talents into a formidable cinematic team.

December 3: Harakiri (1919 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

With Harakiri wedged between the first and second Spiders films, Lang goes to a similar toolkit in it.  The camera hardly moves, and while the director uses editing to show simultaneous time, he doesn't create suspense by intercutting here as much as in the other two films.  These characters pose in each episodic scene, and we don’t learn enough to sympathize with any of .  And unlike in the Spiders films, where space and time are very logical and clear, this story has gaps, inconsistencies and unclear points.  It takes some time to figure out the setting of the opening part of the film (shrine or official’s home?), and character motivations are elusive throughout.  At one moment Olaf Anderson loves O-Take-San, and although we don't see the psychology behind the change, he's soon home with his European wife ignoring his abandoned love's pleas for support.  When Olaf returns to Japan, he takes his European wife with him for reasons that are never clear, and he resists claiming his own biracial son until his European wife goes to meet O-Take-San.  Even O-Take-San herself elicits little character sympathy.  Her situation is sad because of its melodramatic circumstances, but rather than taking on any agency in her own life, she simply responds to those around her, from her father to the High Priest to Olaf to Prince Matahari.  Her sole effort at using her own will is to refuse when she’s offered a way out of her problems.  Neither of the two principals engages.

With so little happening technically or narratively, Lang still grabs us to some extent here with exotic visuals.  As in The Golden Sea, every scene of Harakiri is packed with interesting visuals.  Here, Oriental art and furniture decorate the frame, and the gardens have a distinctly Japanese quality to them with overgrown pines framing figures.  Some of Lang’s exterior shots trade in East Asian art composition, too, with small figures in a confined space placed on a larger landscape.  To better show off all this engaging detail, Lang again uses depth of field effectively.  One tour de force moment of his using depth is when O-Take-San comes towards us in the foreground as her father ominously says goodby in the midground against a background of elaborate Japanese decoration.  Likewise, Lang uses depth of field symbolically when the tender of the shrine walks in the foreground past a large midground urn to then head into the background to sleep in the bushes.  All these show off Lang's already thorough grasp of space in the frame.  And in a more cinematic sphere, as Olaf and his naval mates head to the red light district, a subject Lang often turns to, Lang uses red tint rather than a typical blue for the night,.  This little gesture is a hint of the boldness he’ll soon employ in larger, expressionist works.

The short story “Madame Butterfly” inherently lends itself to melodrama given the basic narrative, and Lang combines that with some visual flourish to create a worthwhile film.  But this rendition doesn’t engage us with full characters or involve us in the story, so we’re left with a sequence of episodes that lack a rich unifying unity.  Better films were to come.

November 23: The Spiders/Die Spinnen (1919-20 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

There’s a giddiness in Spiders that makes this film and sequal worthwhile.   Just as the erstwhile hero,  Kay Hoog, dashes from San Francisco to South America to an underground metropolitan Chinatown with little or tenuous reason, Spiders blasts forward in an orgy of décor, adventure and stunts that often lack a motive other than to pleasure the audience.  Keying on this excess is the way to enjoy the film.

As early as the first scenes of Part 1: The Golden Sea, the viewer knows how the rest of the series will work.  There’s a close-up of a scruffy, tattered sailor hurriedly putting a message in an ornate bottle.  Soon, we cut to a native American dressed as though from a Mayan stele.  The Indian spears the sailor just he throws the bottle into the sea, and the story is begun.

And Spiders gets more elaborate from there.  The sets in San Francisco are stuffed with orientalia: Chinese screens, Persian tapestries, Buddha statues, ornate doorways, Chinese robes and hats, large urns, Moroccan décor.  In the action itself, Kay and the Spiders vie to find a gold treasure hidden under a lost lake that human eyes have never seen and that is in the country of a lost Incan tribe that lives among Mayan ruins.  The Inca sport grand, feathered headdresses and plan human sacrifices to their gods.  Meanwhile, the Spiders are led by a foxy lady in jodhpurs and a Teddy Roosevelt tie, Lio Sha.  

And a lot of the action is as outrageous as the visuals.  At one point, somewhere in South America, Kay spies Lio with some of the gangsters recruiting local cowboys for their expedition to beat Kay at finding the treasure.  Seeing this horde in the saloon, Kay goes in, has a drink, starts a fight and is soon in a standoff with the whole gang.  In realistic terms, it’s hard to see why Kay would've gone in, but in cinematic terms, Kay’s action sets up a great fight scene followed by a cowboy-on-horseback pursuit across the countryside so he can leap into the basket of a hot air balloon that is just taking off.

Part 2: The Diamond Ship is no less over-the-top.  A police raid on an illegal diamond auction leads to the search for a Buddha diamond that will liberate all of Asia, and that search takes Kay and the Spiders first to England and then to the Falkands in search of a pirate treasure there.  The Spiders hypnotize a yogi to get him to divine the location of the jewel, but a crater that spews poisonous gas at night complicates the salvage of the treasure.  There are even Indian spies in turbans in this episode.  Like The Golden Sea, The Diamond Ship is beside itself with outrageousness.

It’s hard not to think of Louis Feuillade’s Les vampires while watching Spiders.  Kay Hoog’s struggle with the Spiders certainly calls to mind Philipe Guérande’s with the Vampires, and character of Spider leader Lio Sha resembles that of Irma Vep.  Robbers wear tight black outfits in both, and there are WW I worries in both.  But the comparison pretty much ends there.  At this point in his career, Lang’s direction is't nearly as controlled or fluid as Feuillade’s, and the stasis that characterizes Spiders despite its excess would make it hard to enjoy 6-1/2 hours of it.

But in Spiders, we can already see some of the techniques and images that will recur in  Lang's work later.  Close-ups abound here, starting with the very first shot, and there is also intercutting to maintain two story lines and, occasionally, create suspense.  We watch the action of cowboys chasing Kay alternate with his acquaintance trying to decide whether to take off in the balloon; later, we switch between Lio being prepared for sacrifice and the troop of cowboys looking for her.  Another typical Langian technique here is use of depth of field.  For instance, the background space is important as Kay stands beside the window of the cantina and we see Lio conspiring in the background; in a later example, we watch Kay as he passes some caged tigers in the background menacing him.  There is also some of Lang's love for flashback in Spiders.  A clear example starts Part 2 as the story flashes back to Kay's discovery of his wife's body and the plastic spider the gang has left as its calling card.

Some of the imagery of Spiders also prefigures that in other Lang films.  The underground Chinese city here calls strongly to mind the underground city of Metropolis, and the menace of water is also strong in both films.  Spider’s cowboys are threatened with drowning when they steal the treasure, just as the workers’ children are in Metropolis.  And caves and catacombs occur in a lot of early Lang.

Spiders is a particular kind of cinematic fun.  Many of the Lang's images have descendents in more recent films.  Kay's adventurous dashing around establishes him as a forebear of Indiana Jones, and the scene with Kay risking death in a compacting shaft has many future echoes, including a very similar scene in Star Wars.  And from an auteur perspective, it’s interesting to pick out elements here that Lang will develop more in the future.  But the strongest pleasure here is the sheer delirium of story and image that rushes onto the screen here.  There’s fun to be had in sitting back and waiting for whatever outrageousness happens next in this film.

November 9: Interstellar (2014 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★

What a disappointment this latest Christopher Nolan film is.  The film creaks with movie clichés and unconcealed pandering to the audience.  From a struggling farm family to several heroic rescues and an evil betrayal, Interstellar tugs at our heartstrings a little too firmly.  The ending could have come out of a 40s melodrama.

Unfortunately, the dialog isn’t much better.  It’s rare that the language of a film takes me out of the movie and brings home to me that that I'm watching actors reading lines, but in Interstellar, that’s exactly what happened.  The stilted language that Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie Foy, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine have to speak feels more like that of a sophomore physics lab report than a conversation.  And while the script mostly avoids the narrative gimmicks that Nolan can employ (though there’s an echo of Inception when we learn that an hour near the black hole is seven years in earth time), the sprawl of the The Dark Knight Rises is much in evidence here.  But while it’s hard to stay engaged in this film for its nearly three-hour run time, at least the score by Hans Zimmer cues us in on how you should respond to a character or event when we're uncertain.

Interstellar has wonderful production values and a lot of good acting that remains firm in the face of some terrible writing.  And it’s pleasant to watch the echoes of other sci fi touchstones like 2001 and its reflections on helmet faceplates.  But there’s nothing much at the core of all this technique in Interstellar, which makes the movie's thee-hour length seem like 21 earth years.

November 4: TBA (2014 -- tba)

October 31: TBA (1944 -- tba)

October 29: TBA (1961 -- tba)

September 11: Edge of Tomorrow (2014 -- Doug Liman)

★★★

This is a fun summer movie.  We have sci-fi action Tom Cruise again, but this year it’s fun watching him play against type.  Rather than the in-control hero we’re used to, he starts as a man of little courage who grows into the role of hero through a series of time reboots that give him the opportunity to hone his combat skills.  He repeatedly goes into battle against the alien Mimics, gets killed, and restarts the day in J-Squad on the morning of the invasion he is to fight in.  In addition to building his fighting skills, he picks up a love interest, Rose Vrataski, who has previously had the time reboot power, and Dr. Carter, a scientist who is trying to figure out what is happening. 

Edge of Tomorrow is a fun action thriller though most of its run.  The repeated scenes of the human counter attack on the beach echo the Normandy opening of Saving Private Ryan, except here we get lots of laser beams, slashing robotic tentacles and ugly, nimble aliens all jammed into the battle.  And Doug Liman takes the film beyond the beach landing on a romp to Paris to discover the Omega alien hidden away in the basement of the Louvre.  It's all fun.

Another point of interest here is watching the same series of events repeated with each reboot.  We experience most of the detail of first day as we run follow Major Cage's activities, but Liman then removes and tweeks details with each retelling to get Major Cage further into the action.  There’re more than a little fun in watching the witty interplay between the action of the current iteration of events and our experience of the first and other versions.  This technique is a clever and engaging use of the time travel trope.

Which is not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is without problems.  The most limiting element of the film is that the rules of its universe are so complicated that we’re left with lots of exposition and can still be confused about how or why something is happening.  To feel that the ending of the film isn’t a cheat, for example, it’s important to know that the killing of an Alpha would reset time and that Cage couldn’t come back to try to kill the Omega if that happened.  This isn’t an intuitive element of the film, and it's the kind of detail that the audience has to pick up on among all the SFX.  The main drawback to the film is that Edge of Tomorrow has a complicated set of alternative-universe rules that are as central to the action as they are byzantine.

But for those of us wanting a sci-fi action thrill with lots of special effects and a dribble of a love story, Edge of Tomorrow is perfect.  And for the true sci fi aficionados, the film has also offers a layer of concept.

September 10: Rififi/ Du rififi chez les hommes (1955 -- Jules Dassin)

★★★★★

Rififi is a great heist procedural that sets the standard for suspense in showing a complicated theft.  It’s one of the first films in which we watch the gang collect their information and tools with such studied precision.  From a hotel window, Jo watches the neighborhood’s regular comings and goings, and we watch Jo through a downward tilted camera that puts him in the foreground and lets us see what’s outside the window in the background.  We get the whole scene.  The team methodically gets key castings, times car trips, cases the safe and tests the alarm system.  But the crown jewel is the heist itself, a 28-minute study in how silence can make good cinema.  Quiet beyond the moment they don’t need be, the quartet of robbers tip toe around the closed jewelry store, flinching at every sudden noise and hitting our nerves with theirs.  Jules Dassin amps the tension here beyond that of many more technically involved heist flics.

But Rififi doesn’t stop at effective suspense.  It creates an interesting character, the middle-aged Tony, and follows the challenges that he faces after he’s released from five years in jail.  Like Eddie Coyle in Peter Yates’ movie, le Stéphanois here is no longer at the top of his game.  In the first scene of Rififi, we meet him losing at a card game and unable to continue playing because he is out of money.  His old reputation doesn’t have the value of hard cash with the other players, and a persistent cough shows his health to be broken.  In addition, his girlfriend has long abandoned him, and younger criminals question whether he’s up to pulling off a job.  Dassin’s Tony, though, isn’t a man who is ready to end his career at this point.  Tony gives a severe, and unwarranted, beating to his former girlfriend, Mado, but he shortly has to reckon with his own injustice when he realizes that Mado’s still enough in love with him not to betray him.  Tony also a passion for his godson, Tonio, and his love for the boy has an important bearing on the outcome of the film.  As Rififi speeds toward its conclusion, we watch Tony draw on his past experience and connections to track down the people who have kidnapped the boy and to take his revenge on them.  In Tony, Dassin gives us an aging man who can still grow and can muster himself enough to be effective in the world, even if he can’t ultimately sustain the effort.

Another of the other attractions of Rififi is its affection for Paris.  Dassin’s camera loves the city and moves throughout it day and night.  We see the location of the heist in the Place Vendôme and watch the beginning of the robbery in a car theft at the nocturnal Place de l’Opéra. The Paris Metro figures in the film as Tony rides across the Pont de Bercy and when he follows a drug delivery that starts at the Art Nouveau Port-Royal station.  Tonio is kidnapped in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and Tony consults contacts in Montmartre to help find the boy.  And then there’s the shootout climax in the suburbs.  Rififi loves the city of Paris at all hours of the day and in all weather conditions, and Paris is an important part of the beauty of Dassin’s images.

Another important part of this beauty is Dassin’s cinematic technique.  He uses low key lighting often to create gritty visuals that are a standard element of film noir vocabulary.   Even early in the film, at the card game and, shortly later, at the café, we see rough men with their faces sharply cut by shadow.  And accompanying this lighting is a persistent use of deep focus.  During the robbery, for example, low key light adds drama while the expansive depth of field lets us watch and respond to the faces of several of the robbers at the same time.  Dassin uses deep focus for other purposes, too.   For example, when Mario and his wife Ida are killed, the deep focus maintains a same-shot, visual dialog between them as they face Grutter and Remi.  In other scenes, Dassin uses depth of field to portray action without cutting.  After a rapid series of cuts as Tony drives his godson home, Tony stops the car at the house, and the camera backs up and, too, stops.  The shot continues without a cut, though,  while from the back of the extreme depth of field, we watch the Tonio’s mother run to the car.  The deep focus lets Dassin give us all this information in one shot so he can rhythmically reinforce the action.

One of the most effective of Dassin’s techniques is the way Rififi slowly moves from the stark, steady realism of the card game and the robbery to increasingly macabre visuals.   Once the robbery has been completed and Grutter has started to try to grab the jewels, we encounter an odd tracking shot that shows Grutter leading César though an unlikely forest of floorshow props.  The props separate as the two go through and close around the tracking camera, a claustrophobic shot style we have yet to encounter in the film.  And we get a similar image when Tony later finds César there.  The claustrophobia and odd props add to the sense that the characters are leaving the bounds of the normal and moving into another sphere.  In another unusual image shortly after, Dassin places Tonio’s large, inflatable clown squarely in the center of the screen as the London fence brings his cash for the jewels.  In fact, the fence even comments on the big, ghoulish toy and playfully punches it, giving the whole scene an unusual, menacing, surreal air.

Rififi continues into increasingly macabre imagery.  When Tony shoots the drug-addled Remi, water is running into a small sink above the body, and Dassin’s camera lingers on the sink as it fills and then overflows onto the floor, a visual representation of how what's typical and to be expected have been usurped.  Shortly after, we experience the strangest imagery in the film.  As the wounded Tony tries to drive his godson home in a convertible, we see upward images of the child standing in the car seat dressed as a cowboy and waving his gun around.  Cold, he puts on his godfather’s over-sized coat, and we watch shots of the car moving quickly along the road with bare tree branches reflected on the windshield intercut with shots of the road and shots of the sky.  It’s a disturbing sequence of short, discordant images that captures Tony’s desperation as he tries to get the boy home.

Rififi is a dark, skillful blend of many compelling elements of film noir that goes beyond the genre to create a memorable film.  Blacklisted in the US and working with a small budget, Jules Dassin creates an important crime film with more creativity than resources here.  It's an effective cinema experience.

August 20: Mood Indigo/L'Écume des jours (2014 -- Michel Gondry)

★★★★

Mood Indigo is a visual treat that aims no further than its visual inventiveness.  It has the completely predictable narrative of an opera – boy meets girl, they marry, she dies – but if the focus of opera is music, the creativity here is visuals.  It’s a thrill to watch how Gondry embellishes this thin story line with outrageous creativity.

A lot of the visual strength here comes from Gondry’s ability to violate categories and scale.  In Colin’s kitchen, Nicholas cooks from a video cookbook, but when the right ingredientss aren't available, the video chef’s hand emerges from the screen and hands them to Nicholas.  Video in Mood Indigo doesn't remain a series of stimulated pixels but becomes physical reality.  And there are other wild kitchen fantasies, too, including meals that assemble and dissemble themselves as well as eels coming out of faucets.  Gondry’s visuals can have a logic of shape and form rather than reliance on typical cognitive categories.  The same categorical violation lets Gondry invent Colin’s pianocktail. which translates music to mixed drinks, and it's behind the weapons manufacturing that requires nude men to incubate the guns.

Another part of Gondry’s inventiveness comes from his ability to play with space and scale.  The man in the mouse costume is the size of a mouse we'd see in everyday reality, a cloud-car can tour Paris, and there’s a car race to the altar for the wedding of Colin and Chloé with little automobiles racing through church stairwells and up walls to get to the altar.  And in all this fantasy, Gondry is still happy to throw in some very recognizable barbs at the venality of the church.

There is also a lot of recognizable play with materials here.  Feathers float as snow but act as feathers when they land, and amid all the hard surfaces of Mood Indigo’s world, Gondry chooses soft yarns when the camera goes into Chloé’s body and we see her vulnerable organs.  After their wedding, the newly-weds leave the church dressed but floating in water with bubbles around them.  Throughout the film, a textural richness amplifies the creativity of its images.

There is also multi-leveled self-referentiality at work in Mood Indigo.  The film opens with a view of rows of people on typewriters, the typewriters moving along each row from one typist to the next.  This scene suggests Brazil and evokes the complexity of Terry Gilliam, whose inventiveness would be quite at home in this film.  There’s no manifest causal link between the story of Colin and Chloé, though viewers are clearly invited to try to make one, and the possibility of such a connection is completely void when we see Colin himself trying to type, apparently wanting to save Chloé by writing.  The mise en abyme here is a purely aesthetic pleasure.

Viewers wanting character arcs and plot twists are certain to be disappointed in Mood Indigo because Gondry has little interest in these elements of cinematic storytelling.  Instead, this film is an intense imaginative engagement with a series of poses, poses which follow the most basic of narratives.  For viewers inclined to marvel at ingenious visual creativity, Mood Indigo will be a treat.  And at moments, it can even touch the fragile heart in us all.  

August 9: Sorcerer (1977 -- William Friedkin)

★★★

If this had turned out to be the film that Friedkin intended, it would have been fantastic.  Unfortunately, Sorcerer has many problems, and the coup de grâce is that it never approaches the quality of Clouzot’s cover of the same material, The Wages of Fear.

In Clouzot’s tight film, the opening section sets up a world whose values inform the subsequent road adventures.  These values – pessimism, opportunism, amorality -- heighten the suspense as well as give us an investment in the characters.  Friedkin might have been trying to do the same in the opening section of Sorcerer, but the film rambles into a two-stage opening that neither creates a sustained mood nor establishes characters that we care much about.  In the first stage, we meet the characters on their individual home turfs as assassins, robbers, terrorists and con artists; after this extended section on four continents, we then see these characters for a while in a small, Latin village.  This extended introductory section of the movie has so much sprawl that we have no time to connect with any of the quartet; worse still, the information in this section is only modestly important later in the film.  While we eventually have the Palestinian bomber, Kassim, blowing a fallen tree out of the road, the Frenchman Victor’s fraud is irrelevant to the rest of the film, we learn so little of Latin Nilo in the intro that he’s even hard to recognize when he arrives in the village, and the calm efficiency we see of the American Jackie in the introduction has little take up in the rest of the film.  It feels as if Friedkin is aiming to recreate the pervasive existentialism of Clouzot’s opening, but Sorcerer instead gives us a long, diffuse introduction to some bad guys who inhabit a world that isn’t necessarily corrupt.

When the trucks finally get rolling, so does Sorcerer.  While there are several fine action and thrill scenes in the film, the best by far is the scene of the trucks crossing the rope bridge in a storm.  As the trucks lurch and lean, it’s only the most jaded of viewers who won’t gasp and wonder how Friedkin created the effects.  But such action sequences aside, the other elements of the film are sour here.  We are most attached to Victor through the introductory section, but his role is diminished in the travel section; conversely, the man we see the least in the introduction, Nilo, becomes one of the most important characters on the trip.  As Nilo becomes the coward we recall in Clouzot’s Jo, we are far less disgusted here because we don’t know much about him and we don’t see the hypocritical contrast between the gangster poseur and scared weakling Nilo soon becomes.  And one of the strangest transformations is when a shot of the grimly determined Jackie cuts to a shot of Jackie having a hallucinatory nervous breakdown.  And that in a desert that has suddenly replaced the rain forest.  Such contrastive cuts can have an effective role, but in a film that doesn’t use this technique for the first two hours of narrative, it feels more like bad film-making than innovative styling.

Friedkin’s ambitions are evident here -- grand existentialist statement, explicit anti-Americanism, intertextuality with his earlier Exorcist success (witness the title, flashes to pre-Colombian masks, and the menacing grill of one of the trucks).  But Friedkin’s failure to focus and his lack of control prevents Sorcerer from delivering on any of them, and there’s not even enough excess to provide the kind of pleasure we might get from a similar effort by a director like Herzog.  Sorcerer delivers us some grand action scenes in the middle of muddle that neither achieves the profundity it aspires to nor satisfies our desire for a tight aesthetic experience.