February 18: Titanic (1953 -- Jean Negulesco)

★★★
This is the fourth Titanic I’ve seen, and I’m enjoying how each film uses the disaster for a different purpose.  As would be expected from a 1953 Hollywood film, there’s a romance at the center here; Richard and Julia’s marriage has grown stale, and as they duke it out, there’s a major melodramatic reveal as well as the sinking of the great ship.  This is, however, Hollywood, and love eventually triumphs, if not over the cold Atlantic then over the coldness in the marriage.

Titanic 1953 has a larger idea to develop, too: the difference between good ole American values and the artificiality of European culture.  The source of the problems between Richard and Julia is this cultural difference because Julia wants the kids to have a stable home and to grow up without the ongoing seasonal migrations and the pretension that make up their European life.  Richard, however, wants them to fit into European high society with elegance and superficiality.  Americans are fun, earthy, energetic, warm and frank in this film, while Europeans are dull, mannered, stolid, cold and indirect.  Characters from the beau Gifford through the plainspoken Maude demonstrate the American outlook on life.  Titanic details the contrast in cultures most directly though the character arc of Richard, who is so superficial that he breaks the heart of his own young son by coldly rejecting him only to move toward the American value of family by embracing him at the end of the film. 

Perhaps an echo of the cultural duality at the center of the film, the characters here often move in contrasting light with bright whites and dark blacks.  While one character is walking to the bridge, we only see the headless torsos of crew members who are standing in sharp black and white.  And later, while Richard is shaving in the lounge, Julia startlingly emerges from the shadows of a corner to engage him in bright whiteness.  Even the kiss of Gifford and Annette is a series of rapidly shifting black-and-white.  This cinematography adds to the interest in the film, building an air of vague film noir menace that's first suggested in the opening calving of a white iceberg. 

Titanic 1953 isn’t the best cinema treatment of the catastrophe, but if we see the British cultural/documentary point of view in A Night to Remember and National Socialist ideology in 1943’s Titanic, here we watch Hollywood focus the tragedy on the love travails of a couple working though different cultural values.  In gorgeous black-and-white.  It’s a worthy addition to the Titanic canon.

February 15: Les Vampires (1915 -- Louis Feuillade)

★★★★★

Lou and I watched Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade over several nights, an internet age way to enjoy this 1915-1916 silent serial.  While some of the elements here are outdated, if you grant this serial a little of its historical context, it’s fun and engaging.

The flat-out, fifth-gear story in all the episodes is one of the major reasons we can still enjoy Les Vampires some hundred years after it was made.  People die, dare and make so many spontaneous decisions that, though some moves are clearly telegraphed ahead, you often don’t foresee how an element will be used until it is actually exploited.  And throughout, we’re involved in what’s going to happen to Philipe, Mazamette, Philipe’s mother, Irma and whoever happens to be the Grand Vampire.  Accidents and unlikely coincidences prevent you from getting complacent since storylines and characters can cross at any moment and send the plot off in an unexpected direction.  The story is fun.

There’s also a no-holds-barred element to the violence and daring in the series that keeps the audience on edge.  The severed head of an inspector makes a sudden appearance in the first episode, setting up not only the ruthlessness of the Vampires but also an expectation in the audience that anything can happen.  And it does happen.  There’s a murder by hatpin, a gassing of the social elite of a city, the poisoning of an innocent and several accidental killings or killings of innocents.  The Vampires are not Buster Keaton bad guys; they are brutal and ruthless.  These episodes don’t dwell on violence and enjoy it the way today’s film does, but the blunt brutality here is affective in a different way.

There’s a modern element here, too, in this serial before the time that audiences and filmmakers had worked out movie conventions.  I was struck that characters sometimes look directly at the audience and even play to camera.  In the very beginning, Mazamette winks at us as he tries to wiggle out of being caught stealing some of Philipe’s material, and later in the same episode, the inspector does the same.  A kid mugs for the camera in one of the latter episodes, too.  Most of this breaking the illusion of the movie is done for comic purposes, which is comedy being its irreverent self.  Les Vampires also tosses in some self-referentiality.  Characters go to movies for fun several times, and on one trip, a character in Les Vampires appears as a real woman in a news reel, thus playing with several levels of realism.  Gestures like these have a very modern feeling to them.

There’s interest in the contemporaneity of Les Vampires, too.  Unless Feuillade mounts it on a car to get a chase scene or action shot, the cumbersome camera of 1915 stays rock still, yet Les Vampires manages to engage us.  And the special effects here recall those we see in later silents by the likes of Buster Keaton as we watch real people climbing real walls, gutters and ropes, making real effort in real time.  There’s a thrill in recognizing that Musidora is at one point lying under a real train that pulls out over top of her.  We also get a few peeks into the social environment of early 20^th century Paris.  We see that today’s Parisian suburbs were quite undeveloped at that time, and we get to experience the small boxes of a turn-of-the-century theater and to review the menu for a fancy bourgeois dinner.  And the historical context touches this serial in other ways, too.  Filming in the middle of WW I, Feuillade brings in gas, canons and terrorism.  And if we keep losing the Grand Vampire through the series, that’s partly because young men were being conscripted for the trenches.

Although this serial is far removed from us, it still holds elements of life that span the century and touch us.  French body language has apparently changed little since 1915; even today, a perplexed Frenchman will hunch his shoulder an say “bof” with exactly the same expression as we see Philipe do.  And Feuillade flounders in front of the same paradox as English poet Milton and many after him: Evil is more interesting and fun than good.  To see this contrast, one only has to consider the extravagant energy of Irma’s wedding to Venomous – with its fun spontaneity, irreverent games, creative play and passionate dance – with the boring affair that is Philipe’s marriage to Jane.  And that’s how the serial ends.  Irrepressible Irma will no longer wear her sleek signature tights, and the Vampires will no longer terrorize Paris.  But despite the triumph of law and order, something has been lost.

January 11: Argo (2012 -- Ben Affleck)

★★★

I’m at a loss to explain all the accolades Argo has been receiving.  Of course there are things I like about the film very much.  For one, the art direction evokes 1980 so well that, from the cars to the clothes to the colors, I can’t deny a bit of a nostalgia tug.  The film looks so familiar to me and yet so forgotten; I like that sensation.  There’s also some good cinematic story-telling here in Affleck’s resurrecting action thriller narrative techniques while sparing the viewer the now-common explosions and frenetic chase scenes we're so used to.  Scenes like the opening assault on the embassy, conversations among the Americans at the Canadian ambassador’s house and the tense exchange in the Iranian market all have a deft economy that creates tension and uncertainty.  And the humor and parody in Argo are fun, too.  Credit Alan Arkin and John Goodman with pulling off some very funny pokes at Hollywood, though the film ultimately goes on to show us how patriotic Hollywood actually is.

And it’s that heavy hand of conventionality that keeps Argo from soaring.  Affleck shows us he can build suspense effectively, but we see he doesn’t sustain the suspense as the film loses its balance at the very points near the end that should be the closer.  There’s tension at the airport as the guards begin to question the Americans, but the sequence goes on far overlong, eventually including the predictable character reversal of the dissenting American escapee.  And shortly after that, when we watch the soldiers chase the airplane in jeeps just as the plane takes off, Hollywood cliches have taken over so visibly that it’s hard to remain in the spell of the movie.  Conventions more hoary than those two would be difficult to find.

Which is only to say that Argo is good, capable entertainment even if it doesn’t break new ground or offer new insights.  There’s some controversy about the film drumming up anger against Iranians in our own time of American/Iranian tension, but the opening historical background certainly explains the anti-American anger of 1979 Iran.  And if that’s not enough, the Iranian housekeeper lies to the Revolutionary Guards in order to protect the Canadians and the Americans and has to go into exile as a result.  Through the history and through the housekeeper character, Argo goes to some length not to condemn the country or its people.  And it manages to create a fun cinematic thrill while doing it.

January 5:Grave of the Fireflies/Hotaru no haka (1988 -- Isao Takahata)

★★★★★

January 4:The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012 -- Peter Jackson)

★★★
The Hobbit is a film to see in Imax and 3D.  There’s no character development and little character to develop, but the story moves along as a series of chases and fights.  The pleasures of this Middle Earth are mostly visual, so the better you can see it, the better the experience.  And it looks great.

As I recall, Tolkien’s Hobbit is lighter fare than his trilogy, and Jackson and his co-producers reach to other Tolkien material to fill out a trilogy based on this prequel.  As a result, there’s some depth to the world that Bilbo is running around in, but the film lingers long on episodes like the dwarfs assembling at Frodo’s or having adventures among the goblin caverns.  It feels like there’s an effort here to fill out the film’s three-hour running time.  And, too, the narrative line sometimes takes a breather to give us a bit of flashback history that provides context for the action but doesn’t succeed in elevating the film’s stakes.  And the bottom line here is that we’re not very invested in the object of the quest: Foreshadowing aside, restoring Erebor to the dwarves lacks the impact of the earlier quest trilogy to save the world from encroaching evil by destroying the ring. 

Even though none of the characters is terribly engaging and we don’t feel there’s a lot at risk in the film, The Hobbit is still a load of special effects fun and lets fans linger once again in The Shire and Rivendell.  That’s not enough to create cinema with the heft of the trilogy, but it’s not a bad way to spend several hours at the movies either.

December 16:Wreck-It Ralph (2012 -- Rich Moore)

★★★

October 17: The Leopard/Il gattopardo (1963 -- Luchino Visconti)