October 11: Mystery Train (1989 -- Jim Jarmusch)

★★★★

I get pulled into movies like Mystery Train easily.  This one teased me by giving me touchpoints among three narratives that enticed me to compare the stories.  In two of the sections, the characters walk by the same empty lot with a city scape in back.  All characters pass by an abandoned movie theater.  All also go to the same hotel, and all comment about the lack of a TV.  All listen to the same radio show with Elvis’ version of "Blue Moon."  All rooms have a little chain that holds (or held) a plastic radio, and all the rooms have a picture of Elvis.  In each story, there’s the same crumbling overpass with the same train passing over it, and a gunshot punctuates each story.  I can’t stay away from an enticement like that.

Each of these stories has foreigners in Memphis, too, and they’re all dealing with crises in this city of logistics (there is transportation everywhere) and rock n roll/blues legends.  It’s an empty, desolate cityscape, and the young, hyper-styled, Japanese couple fixates on music while they work out their relationship.  The Italian recent-widow, who seems to know a good deal about guns, has just lost her husband and finds herself drawn in by a ghost story about Elvis…until Elvis actually appears to her.  A Brit hipster deals with his breakup and loss of a job by dragging his friends into an evening of drinking and violence.  

The Memphis cityscape is tired and beaten down, and the characters of the story, universal in their cultural range, are beaten down, too.  However, as the city has given rise to musical legends, so does it (and its music) get these pilgrims to pull themselves together and head  down the road to the rest of their lives.  It’s a wonderful experience to watch this happen in all three stories as the owner and desk clerk wearily take stock of yet another set of people moving on with their lives.

There’s something oddly positive about Memphis in Mystery Train.  It’s not a city of people – in fact, the city appears to almost devoid of residents. – but it’s a city of inspiration, a city where the urban ruin somehow lifts people up and sends them on their way.  Like its trains, planes and trucks do.  And like the music that found its birth here does.  

October 8: Drive (2011 -- Nicolas Winding Refn)

★★★★

There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them. (Naked City, ending)

There's a hundred streets in this city. You don't need to know the route.  (Drive, opening)

There’s more similarity between Drive and noir classic Naked City than grammar structures and language rhythm.  Both films use specificity of location extensively; LA’s wide boulevards, sports arena, strip mall restaurants and river serve as settings for important actions in Drive.  And this LA is a complicated, corrupt, claustrophobic world where innocents are in grave danger, unrecognized conspiracies menace, and taciturn characters speak little.  Low angle cinematography and shadows also play an important role here.  The scene where Driver steps back out of the light after killing his first two attackers is such a heavy use of shadow that it would be at home in a classic noir.

Drive goes further than a lot of noir does, though.  The film has an intense, compelling opening that marries muscle car film convention to noir lighting and suspense.  The image of the helicopter light searching for the car is as tense and arty as any shot of noir police hunting for a fugitive.  And Nicolas Winding Refn’s soundtrack adds to the tension throughout the scene with the sports announcer calling a game on the radio and the car engine racing and quieting down rapidly. 

As Refn’s effective use of soundtrack throughout suggests, Drive veers from noir grammar in several other ways.  For example, there is no femme fatal to bring the hero down; instead, Driver is trying to save an innocent Irene from the complicated tentacles of corruption around them both.  And the focus of this film, while partly about solving the complicated mystery, is also about what happens to a man who tries to fight such decay.  Driver starts the film as an isolated warrior with rules and a code, but his movement is increasingly into violence even as he reaches out to Irene.  His character arc leads simultaneously toward social integration as well as toward horrible, graphic, gory violence as Driver finds he must fight evil by drawing on that within him that addresses the darkness around him

Stylish, noir and intense, Drive is a great, if disturbing, ride.

October 7: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998 -- Terry Gilliam)

October 4: Rango (2011 -- Gore Verbinski)

★★★

October 2: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007 -- Paul Greengrass)

★★★

Of the three Bourne movies, this is my least favorite, thought that might not have been the case if I hadn’t watched Supremacy just last night.  Unfortunately though, I had, and I found Ultimatum to be a rehash of the same – same story, same techniques, same issues, same lack of empathy for the hero.  Ultimatum is capable but covers little new ground.

I will credit Greengrass with introducing some of the political issues that have arisen since 9-11 because the main concern here is with a government agency that is happy to target Americans in the name of national security.  That aside, this film is starting to feel a little formulaic: compelling chase scenes; compelling fights; exotic, European urban locations; omnipotent CIA; girl interest; handheld camera; fast editing.  There are even parallel scenes like Bourne leaving his arch-assassin rival stuck in a wrecked car and the love interest cutting and dying her hair. 

Bourne Ultimatum is a good, fun movie, but this is the second go round with all this stuff.  I would've hoped for a little more innovation.

October 1: The Bourne Supremacy (2004 -- Paul Greengrass)

★★★★

Another rockin’ thriller.  With the change in director from Identity to Supremacy, there are changes in approach to film, but the changes are more or less a wash to me.  I enjoyed the film.

A plus in this film is the technique.  Greengrass amps up the handheld camera here, always giving the viewer a sense of participation.  Sometimes the POV is though the eye of Bourne, but the camera is often the eye of an independent viewer who is right in the action, trying to see what’s going on, to see where the danger is.  So Supremacy is constantly pulling us in but also disorienting us, making us strain to see what’s happening while the camera jogs through the action.  It’s an extremely effective technique, and it’s coupled with editing that reinforces the participant view.  There are rapid cuts in action sequences and longer takes in meetings, though the latter use editing to keep us involved in the film.  In one CIA meeting, while the handheld camera follows what’s happening, there are a several cuts to close-ups and super close-ups, surprising us in their contrast from wide shot to close-up but also duplicating the way a spectator would look to study a reaction.  I think of music video when I think of a technique like this, and in Supremacy, the hand-held camera and fast editing keep you involved throughout.  You’re never lost in chaos, either, even in the chase scenes and fights.  Greengrass skillfully follows the narrative line as he cuts and jostles the camera though the fights and chases.

Supremacy is also strong on the level of image.  The opening sequences in Goa are bathed in warm reds, oranges and browns with bits of more saturated colors dribbled in, and you appreciate this pallet even more because it’s contrasted with the cold blues and greens of Berlin that it’s intercut with.  Greengrass also uses architectural elements to create bold patterns across the screen, like the banks of windows outside the temporary CIA office.  And though there are many woman-underwater-with-floating-hair scenes in film, that scene in Supremacy feels like it owes a special debt to the parallel scene in Night of the Hunter.  Greengrass clearly has a skill at creating strong images.

As skillful and engaging as Greengrass’ technique is here, there is one loss in the move from Identity to Supremacy – a loss of warmth and personality.  In Identity, there is at least some psychology to Bourne, and viewers can feel some empathy with him.  In Supremacy, though, narrative has top billing, and there is little real character development.  Even scenes that should involve some audience sympathy, like the time Bourne spends at the site of his earlier crime and his later visit to the girl, fail to involve us as much as the action and meeting sequences.  Maybe that's a limitation of Greengrass’ technique since you don’t get much intimacy or empathy if you’re at the mercy of an active camera and active editor.

Still, Bourne Supremacy is a great, fun action movie, clearly a notch above much of what is around.

September 30: The Bourne Identity (2002 -- Doug Liman)

★★★★

What’s not to enjoy in this film?  It’s a thriller that thrills, a suspense movie with tension, and an action movie with a lot of fights and chase scenes.  And they’re all done well.   It has very effective, fast editing and the story never rests.  Matt Damon brings real presence to someone who is lost, and you empathize with Bourne’s quest and qualms throughout even if you can’t identify with his prowess.  You’re pulling for the guy throughout the film.

And Identity is a revved-up version of one of my favorite genres -- the great 60s thrillers that are set in exotic European cities.  The combination of action and Europe works in films like Charade and The Italian Job, and it works here under Doug Lyman’s skillful direction. I thoroughly enjoyed his rhythmic, economic editing and the cinematography of the urban Old World.  And the soundtrack song by Moby, “Extreme Ways,” complements the action and story.

I didn’t miss the lack of philosophical aspiration or thematic ambition in Bourne Identity.  I liked the characters, and I felt invested in them as the story unfolded.  The film is a pure cinematic pleasure that you can spend two good hours involved with.