February 19: Beauty and the Beast/La belle et la bête (1946 -- Jean Cocteau)

★★★★

Cocteau’s 1946 classic has a stagy quality at times that can be off-putting to today’s realist audience, but there’s so much else that’s worthwhile.  I don’t know another film that that creates such a lush, original, atmosphere of magic – of fairy tale – while getting at serious yet barely ineffable wisdom.  Like the prelude says, we children have to believe what Cocteau tells us and we have to have complete faith in him.  Our reward is delight and an experience of beauty.

Much of the magic of Beauty and the Beast comes from the visuals.  The arm sconces that move and even point directions are certainly suis generis – original and vaguely disturbing as, on some level, it’s disquieting to think of amputated arms that move and even have will and purpose.  Likewise, the faces on the caryatids with eyes that follow the action suggest a haunted, profoundly disturbing rupture of reality.  The hand that serves wine, the mirror that shows truth, the glide down the hall that doesn’t require Belle to move her legs, the statue of Diana coming fatally to life – all these elements exist at the fine juncture of fairy tale and surrealism, an art movement that Cocteau was involved in.  Added to all this originality are lavish costumes,   extravagant furnishings, hedges that open and close, unique garden statuary and volumes of smoke.  There are few times in Beauty and the Beast that the eye isn’t ravished.

Then there’s the Beast himself, who manages to seem appealing when he drinks from Belle’s hands yet menacing as he struggles to control his animal element with his hands steaming from the kill.  You can feel the Beast’s inner tension as he restrains himself at Belle’s door, and you sense his need as he makes tentative advances at offering himself to Belle.  Jean Marais deserves credit for creating such a compelling character under all his make-up and exaggerated costuming; his character becomes the narrative center of the film.

In addition to these physical elements, Cocteau avails himself of contemporary special effects in creating this tale.  We see a magical transformation when the Beast carries Belle into her room and her clothes are daily peasant outside the door and elegant aristocrat inside.  Other striking effects are Belle emerging from the wall when she uses the glove to transport herself home and the transformation of the Beast into the Prince at the end of the film.  Even the Baroque ending with Belle and the Prince seen from below as they ascend into clouds relies on double exposure.  Such filmic elements add to the fairy tale atmosphere.

But what to make of this ending?  The handsome though vaguely unsympathetic Avenant pursues Belle in her home, but she rejects him to stay with her father.  When Belle later tells the Beast of Avenant’s proposal, the Beast is pained by knowing about his rival, who ultimately conspires to follow Belle to the Beast’s castle to kill the Beast and steal his treasure.  Gallant or not, Avenant isn’t easy to like in this film.  So when Avenant is killed by Diana while he is trying to rob the palace and the Beast is transformed into an Avenant lookalike, it’s hard to know exactly what’s happened.  You can certainly understand Marlene Dietrich’s famous reaction ("Where is my beautiful Beast?"), and that is perfectly part of the effect.  Jean Marias plays Avenant, Beast and Prince, and all of these are bound together in the film in a poetic way that doesn’t lend itself to analysis.  This linkage is another part of the elusive beauty here.

The magic kingdom of Beauty and the Beast is the most interesting part of the film; the dull causality of Belle’s home only serves to make the Beast’s palace more wonderful.  It’s very worthwhile to spend time in the lair of the Beast, even if you have to abide the duller fairy tale reality outside.

February 17: Vampyr (1932 -- Carl Theodor Dreyer)

February 16: Pina (2011 -- Wim Wenders)

★★★★★

February 15: Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts (2011 -- Various)

After we watched the live-action nominees, Linda, Carlos and I stepped out for a beer to talk about work and movies before coming back in for the nominated animated shorts.  While we responded to different things in the live-action shorts, we were pretty much on the same page for our favorite here:  The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. I'd be very surprised if it doesn't win the Oscar.  In another year, a film like  Luna or Sunday/Dimanche  would have a good shot at it, but  Fantastic Flying Books is in a class by itself.

★★★★ Patrick Doyon: Sunday/Dimanche -- This is a fun little Canadian movie that evokes small-town, family-centric, flat Canada through the fantasy eye of a kid.  Dream, reality, imagination, and a taste of childlike deadpan humor meld in this fun animation.  You gotta love the crows....and the fish.

★★★★★ William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg: Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore -- There is more creativity in thirty seconds of this film than I've seen in many feature-length movies.  Starting out in a hurricane in New Orleans with more than a few glances to The Wizard of Oz, Lessmore moves to a land of color and books where Joyce and Oldenburg manage to breath real life into bound sets of paper.  Life on this side of the rainbow suggests life in Snow White's kitchen with all its magical help, but in addition to the inventive animation and rustling soundtrack, Lessmore has a touching story that moves to poignancy at its end.  And a life lesson.  This is an amazing film.

★★★★ Enrico Casarosa: Luna -- Pixar's nominee in this category has a lot of heart, too.  Luna is a fairy tale about the moon and its phases, but it's also about a boy and his relationship to the men in his family.  And the way the men relate to each other.  And the coming of age of the boy.  Luna accomplishes all this in a short seven minutes, an outstanding, if at times cliched, achievement.  There's no question though about the inventiveness of the visuals here.

★★★ Grant Orchard: Morning Stroll -- I've never been a fan of zombie movies or Adult Swim animation, but I did enjoy seeing Orchard defamiliarize those genres in this short film and reduce them to style conventions.  It's about time.

★★★ Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby: Wild Life --  In this understated, intelligent Canada animation, a Brit heads to frontier flatland Canada to make his fortune.  There's a social as well as historical comment here.  I kept thinking of Into the Wild while watching this short because, though the interspersed comet lore lends this a complexity lacking in the Alaska film, the face-off between nature and culture is familiar.

February 15: Oscar Nominated Live-Action Shorts (2011 -- Various)

I checked out this program with Carlos and Linda, and it was good to see what's happening in short films.  I never encounter these movies in my daily life.

We had a range of opinion on them.  Carlos liked my least favorite, Pentecost, and Linda responded to Shore, a film I had a little love for.  I most enjoyed Tuba Atlantic though.  Clearly there is something for everyone here.

★★★ Peter McDonald: Pentecost -- I find this Irish film more clever than anything else.  It's draws a parallel between altar boys who celebrate mass and a team that plays football.  We hear the priest exhorting his boys to fight the good fight.  The film doesn't go much further than that conceit, though it's humorous and warm.

★★★★ Max Zähle: Raju -- This German short packs a lot into its short run:  It gives you Calcutta in just a few shots, it portrays an entire relationship in just a few scenes, and it advocates against illegal adoption practices overall.  The lead child is cute, big-headed, and big-eyed, while the lead actor has  strikingly handsome good looks.  There is a lot packed into this short.

★★★ Terry George: Shore -- This is another effective Irish film, and like Raju, it packs a lot of info into just a few minutes.  Here we see a complex relationship among three people who have decades of history, and there is a strong sense of local color with the men living on the shore.  And there must be something about Irish humor because, like in Pentecost, humor plays a big role, though one such scene gets too much of the limited time available in the film.  It's easy to respond to the warm affirmation that this movie leads to.

★★★ Andrew Bowler: Time Freak -- I like this American film; it's a clever take on time travel and uses that spin for both humor and character development.  It's very juvenile but very fun for that very reason.

★★★★★ Hallvar Witzo: Tuba Atlantic -- This film from Norway is my favorite of the group.  While quirkiness doesn't always appeal to me, it's hard not to like these characters, and the technique here is as fun as the issues are heavy.  A grumpy old man realizes a life ambition and reconciles with his brother at the end of his life, while an archetypal teenager grows.  A little.  There's a lot in this film that resists pigeon-holing.  And it all happens in a bleak Norwegian landscape with distinct local color.  I'm sure I'll sometimes think of the Death Angel from this film when I hear the sound of a scooter.   

February 12: Rules of the Game/La règle du jeu (1939 -- Jean Renoir)

★★★★★

February 11: Moneyball (2011 -- Bennett Miller)

★★★

This is a fairly classic movie, but it completely drew me in.  It’s the beaten down outsider who throws himself against a huge institution and changes the institution, it’s the triumph of the underdog against the enemy, and it’s the leader with his own insecurities who continues to lead.  And it’s baseball.  It’s hard to be more American than this, but films like it aren’t always done well.

Moneyball is done well.  The main character here, Billy Beane, has a lot of complexity, which is not common in such sports movies.  We like as he butts heads with his own institutional scouts and his tradition-oriented manager, but we squirm a little as we see him making hard calls by firing nice people, feeling conflicted about his own failure to pursue an education and succeed as a player, and trying to be a part-time father.  There’s a mix in the character of estimable and conflicted that you don’t usually see in mainstream Hollywood, and that makes the center of the film, Billy, more interesting.

Being about baseball, this is a guy’s movie, and the guys pull it off well enough.  Brad Pitt plays in his typically limited range here, so he’s a better general manager than ex-husband or part-time dad.  His numbers cruncher Peter Brand as Jonah Hill has a similarly limited range, but that works for him, too, in the role of a young geek with authority for the first time.  In contrast to those two, Philip Seymour Hoffman owns every scene he’s in.  He is the A’s manager, an immersion that Pitt nor Brand is able to pull off.  But the acting works here; Moneyball doesn’t necessarily need more from the central roles as written.

I was very engrossed in the film, so engrossed, in fact, that I eventually came to use the highly-manipulative soundtrack to help me reduce my anxiety: minor key vibration means something bad is going to happen, major key tone means something good.  When the story suspense got too intense, I focused on the music soundtrack, and the music's helped me reduce my anxiety.  Without them, the suspense would have been harder to bear.

This is a notch above average film.  I felt I was getting a little look behind what runs MLB as well as some good, capable entertainment.