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.