January 5: The Doll/Die Puppe (1919 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★

This is a funny movie.  It’s 1919, but there are already filmic elements that persist to today.  The cute, smart-aleck kid, for one, reminds me of the kids in so many TV sit-coms today, and the story is a romantic comedy that ends in marriage.  I was a little surprised to see these already so well-developed in 1919.

The Doll is also another early film that plays with question of what a human is.  The doll here is not far from the machine that will imitate Maria eight years later in Metropolis, and we see some of the same concern about the mechanization of humanity in Eisenstein’s Strike and Potemkin.  And, later, in Charlie Chaplin.   Somnambulism suggests a human body without human consciousness, too, and that plays a role in The Doll as it will the following year in Dr. Caligari.  And all this brings to mind the human/nonhuman intersection in Island of Lost Souls (1933), where animal and human consciousness battle in bodies that are human and animal.  But all these later films take a serious approach to the subject; in The Doll, Lubitsch uses his mechanized creature as a device for satire and for comedy.

And The Doll bursts with good humor.  There is satire about specific institutions like the monastery and the court, and there is satire about human nature as we see the relatives checking out their future inheritance and finding a chamber pot.  I don’t know exactly what to make out of Lancelot, the hero, but much of the comedy revolves around him.  He’s either gay or just a dandy who is inexperienced and insecure around women, but whatever his situation, his character leads us to a lot of the laughs in the film.  The chase scene as he runs around the city pursued by the nubile women is very funny -- and a device we still see in comedy today -- and there is additional humor as the sequence is intercut with the occasional aside of the sulking boyfriends the women have abandoned to pursue royalty. Likewise, the wedding is memorably comic. I’m especially fond of the horses that pull Lancelot's carriage at one point.

I also like the opening of the film a lot.  The Doll starts with the Lubitsch himself taking miniature props out of a box and arranging a set that the film soon cuts to with Hilarious walking down the hillside of the prop.  I’d guess this self-reflective, anti-mimetic  gesture arises from the same modern theatrical background that Bertold Brecht was contemporaneously participating in.  But Lubitsch’s comic sensibility comes into play here because the set he constructs for the audience is impossibly small; in fact, his “distancing effect” of showing the props as fake only add to a mimetic sense by making the opening itself feel real.  But this first scene underscores the theatrical irreality of the rest of The Doll’s sets.

I like Lubitsch’s comedy, whether it’s the “Lubitsch Touch” or whatever.  Never broad or heavy-handed, Lubitsch is deft with his humor.  He brings an intelligent lightness to his satire and a delicacy to his situational comedy. 

It was a pleasure to find that touch again in this film.

January 4: War Horse (2011 -- Steven Spielberg)

★★★

This movie doesn’t set any new standards in film, but it’s a good watch.  Instead of drawing from the action/adventure tradition of American film, Spielberg is mining the melodrama here.  I felt manipulated throughout the film, and usually in a way to evoke tears: Albert and Joey plow the field, Ted sells Joey, Cpt. Nicholls gets shot…..  But I didn’t care because I felt for the characters in front of me, especially for the horse, Joey.

War Horse hearkens back to older anti-war films like All’s Quiet on the Western Front with its détente on the front lines. And war here corrupts, damages, breaks or destroys everything.  Even Joey, an animal, experiences traumatic loss because of the war.  The film also looks to other types of melodrama.  The end of the movie, supposedly in England, looks every bit like the Midwest during the depression in Grapes of Wrath with its silhouettes and bright backlighting.  And both film citations work great.

There isn’t a single surprise in this story, but at least one of sequences is unforgettable.  What Spielberg accomplished at the opening of Saving Private Ryan with the landing at Normandy he duplicated with Joey panicked and running through the trench lines getting entangled in barbed wire and dragging it with him until he can run no further.  That is one powerful film sequence.

You’d hardly say War Horse is creative or ground-breaking, but it’s a compellingly entertaining film that certainly had me engaged throughout its 2-1/2 hour, episodic run.  It’s emotional and moving -- a good quality time at the movies.

January 1: The Skin I Live In/La piel que habito (2011 -- Pedro Almodovar)

★★★★

This is a movie I liked a lot.  I rediscovered everything I like about Almodovar here, and he has it all under more control than he sometimes has recently.

I watched The Skin I Live In as something like a Douglas Sirk melodrama, but one that’s incredibly magnified and distorted through a gay perspective.  In Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, for example, a playboy has a boat accident that results in an innocent woman’s blindness.  The playboy then becomes a brain surgeon and cures the woman.  The Skin I Live In also starts with an initiation accident, but the film then goes off in a series of ridiculously unlikely consequences as the wife commits suicide, the daughter has a mental breakdown and is raped, and the father kidnaps the rapist and transforms the rapist’s gender and appearance to resemble that of his lost wife.  And the transgendered rapist is then raped by the father’s hitherto unknown brother.  Almodovar’s film is clearly in the same line of melodrama as Sirk's, but Skin I Live In intensifies the already-intense melodrama tone and adds a dollop of interest in gender identity and even horror.

And the film is peppered through with themes that Almodovar regularly returns to – identity, sexuality, mothers, the hidden.  There are hidden identities and identities that change.  Mothers try to protect their sons but become involved as agents in the spiraling action.  There are gay relationships and straight relationships, but that becomes confused as Vincente becomes Vera and is involved with the two brothers, Roberto and Zeca, in different ways.  The Skin I Live In doubles characters and actions to create a wonderfully complicated mix of themes and characters.

And as Almodovar keeps all the characters and stories in balance, he does so by creating striking images of beauty and surprise.  One of the more surprising images occurs as a man in a tiger outfit walks up to the estate, rings the bell and is admitted by Marilia.  It’s carnival, and Zeca is using the festival to travel in disguise, but the scene is visually striking until we get that information.  Similarly, the interior of the Legard mansion is beautiful, an interior out of Sirk.  The images here are yet another element of the pleasure this film gives.

It’s great to see Almodovar working at the peak of his powers again in a film like this.  It’s a pleasure to watch a master do what he does so well.

December 31: The Descendants (2011 -- Alexander Payne)

★★★

December 30: Hugo (2011 -- Martin Scorsese)

★★★

December 29: The Adventures of Tintin (2011 -- Steven Spielberg)

★★★

December 23: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011 -- Guy Ritchie)

★★★