April 4: Elephant Boy (1937 -- Robert Flaherty and Zoltán Korda)

★★★

I should concentrate on the child actor Sabu here, but it’s Robert Flaherty’s contribution to this film that I respond to.  I enjoyed the ethnographic elements here far more than the hackneyed dramatic elements and the Kipling storyline.  Many of the images from Elephant Boy are lush, black-and-white picturesques of an India that’s hard to find now: ornate temples framed in vegetation and compressed to fill the frame by a long focal length lens, lines of elephants walking over an old bridge, small towns whose streets teem with life, a beautiful water tank.  These parts of the film look like an artistic anthropology film.  And Elephant Boy pauses for animal shots like those of the baby elephant playing in the river, shots that recall the animals of other Flaherty projects and other non-narrative details like the horn summoning the drivers or nighttime storytelling lit by campfires in this film.  These are the sorts of ethnographic documentation details that give me a frisson--the same little thrill I got many times in Flaherty’s Man of Aran and the more famous Nanook of the North--when I recognize a cultural truth in this fictional work.

In this breakout role, Sabu plays a dynamic child, and there’s clearly a bond between boy and animal as he scampers over his pachyderm, both using the animal and caring for him.  Elephant Boy shows the closeness of that relationship the way we’d be more familiar seeing the relationship of a boy and his dog or his horse.  And I think I read somewhere that Sabu didn’t speak English and was just making the sounds he was taught to make when he spoke.  If that’s so, his performance here is doubly amazing because the bulk of his speaking is quite easy to follow.  As child actors of the era go—and I’m thinking of Shirley Temple here—Sabu manages more authenticity than most.

I enjoyed this film.  Some of the restored b/w images are spellbinding, and the little jewels of ethnographic truth in this Flaherty project give unexpected sparkles when the Kipling story starts to get dull.

March 31: The Four Feathers (1939 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★

I guess it’s obvious that a film's content affects the way we enjoy it, and though I try to look through aspects I find personally objectionable, sometimes I just can’t.  I’ll never like Birth of a Nation, its technical breakthroughs notwithstanding, and I can’t embrace Rome, Open City because of the way Rossellini conflates homosexuality with fascism and sexual perversion.  And I don’t respond to The Four Feathers the way I want to either because I so dislike the imperialist ideology at the center of this 1939 British film.

Some argue that Four Feathers is mostly about honor and duty, but in 19th century England, that was another way of saying imperialism.  Whether fighting the Turks in the Crimea or the Sudanese in Africa, a man of honor would prove himself on the field of conquest somewhere in the Empire and, duty done, he would reap the social rewards in British society.  This is the lesson of the child who likes poetry in Four Feathers as he learns to embrace the Empire and outdo his doubting comrades by braving the natives and their harsh climate.  In fact, everyone is brave, and everyone acts honorably in Four Feathers.  Among the colonialists, at least.  I doubt the dialog given to the targets of British imperialism here would fill two pages of script because we never see them do anything except menace the Brits and serve as the agency for the white man to prove his courage and honor.  The locals, apparently, have nothing that the audience might sympathize with.

The one part of this film I can have affection for, though, is the visuals.  There's more than a little taste of David Roberts' orientalism in the cinematography here, and I also enjoy the path I can imagine between Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia.  Less than a quarter of a century after Omdurman, David Lean’s desert adventurer has become complex, conflicted and flawed; the local people have identities and personal concerns; and 1.37:1 has become 2.20:1.  Korda clearly sees the open beauty of the desert, but Lean’s aspect ratio and F.A. Young’s cinematography are able to turn this desert in vast expanses of color and motion that Korda tries to capture but can’t.  Both also use a camera on a truck to track battle lines hurtling toward each other, though Lean’s later film takes advantage of 25 years of developing that technique and has smoother, more successful shots.  Both films have bone breaking treks without water and the hot visuals to intensify the risk.  As an outsized fan of Lawrence of Arabia, I enjoyed seeing a desert epic that predates that film by nearly a quarter century.  Four Feathers is a measure of the refinement of cinematic technique and sensibility that Lawrence represents.

My takeaway from Four Feathers is that content can matter.  This film has beautiful Technicolor and lavish sets, but that feels like attractive make-up on something very ugly.  Powell and Pressberger’s 1943 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp manage to address many of the same issues as Korda does here, but their story manages to avoid the overt, grating imperialist assumptions that inform Four Feathers.

March 23: The Hunger Games (2012 -- Gary Ross)

★★★

I hadn’t read any of the books before I went to see The Hunger Games and, in fact, hardly knew anything about the series.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself at a movie that I’d group with Gattaca, Never Let Me Go and Moon as futuristic sci-fi with an intellectual bent.

That said, Another Earth also falls into that category, and it isn’t a good film at all.  And while The Hunger Games isn’t nearly as weak as Another Earth, it’s not as good as my favorites in the category either.  On the positive side, I respond tothe parody of reality TV in Hunger Games--maybe I’m still basking in the aura of Network—and it’s hard not to be drawn by the class/power structure so clearly at the center of the film.  And I like the look of the movie a lot with its costumes, make-up and design that are as over-the-top as that of Fifth Element.  I saw Hunger Games in IMAX, and the colors filled the screen.  The acting wasn’t bad either.  I’d have to say that I wasn’t compelled by the performances, but no one appeared to be merely reciting lines.

My only reservation about the film is that it seems to be too much in thrall to a book rather than being a film.  I don’t, for example, understand why the Woody Harrelson character and the Lenny Kravitz  character couldn’t have been combined; they both advise the Tributes, but neither character has enough time or depth to warrant being singular with the result that neither has much presence beyond being a plot device.  The game itself was a bit over-sized, too, and we didn’t develop much attachment to or understanding of most of the characters.  I recognize this plot as resembling that of films like Murder on the Orient Express (another nod to Sidney Lumet), disaster movies like Towering Inferno or most slasher films: characters get bumped off sequentially.  But the list of victims in Hunger Games is too long and we can lose interest in its unfolding even with the scoreboard in the sky.  …unless , of course, we’re already book fans and want to see how the things we loved in the book develop in the movie.  And I gather that the fans of the book are legion, so it makes some commercial sense to orient the film toward them.

All of that aside, I came out of The Hunger Games curious about the second book, which means I connected with the film in some way.  I plan to pick up that second book and see how things go for Katniss, Peeta and Gale.  Perhaps by the time the sequel comes out, I’ll be joining the segment of the audience wearing a Mocking Jay t-shirt.

March 21: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (2011 -- Bill Condon)

★
About half way through this film, I hit the timeline button on my PS 3 to see how much longer it was going to be.  Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 is that bad.

At least the first half is.  It’s a long wedding and honeymoon fantasy that was so long and so bad that I was sure throughout that something was about to happen.  But it didn’t, and I was about to quit on the film when a story finally started.  Newlyweds Bella and Edward return from their honeymoon with Bella carrying a miscegenetic, vampire/human child with all the attendant problems that crossing racial boundaries has.  The Werewolves soon head out to fight the Vampires because of the situation.

This part of the film has its heart in the right place, dwelling on the theme of harmony among people, er, beings.  I was struck with how similar this theme is to that in The Host, in which same author, Stephanie Meyers, deals with the same issue through a war between humans and Souls.  And she resolves that war by the merging of the two groups in flesh.  Here in Twilight, the tension is between Vampires and Werewolves, and Jacob’s imprinting on the child points to some reconciliation there.  If I watch Part 2, I’ll be interested to see how that goes.

But I got very tired of another point in this film--its persistent, smack-in-the-face, anti-abortion message.  It reminds me of the abstention message of Eclipse, and it strikes me as a pity that both films make such strident and irresponsible points to the target audience of young girls.

 I hope that Part 2 manages to be more of a film than a wedding fantasy followed by preaching.

March 19: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010 -- David Slade)

★★★
There’s no reason to be snarky about this film.  It’s has some painfully bad elements, among them a very predictable plot and some  terrible acting, especially on the part of part of Taylor Lautner, the werewolf whose smooth, ripped, mostly shirtless body obviates the need for acting chops.  …but that’s being snarky.

It’s interesting to watch a film like this one, which I can’t connect with but which teens clearly can.  There’s a lot of confusion and talk about feelings, and I’m struck that the pivot of the whole film is Bella, a girl; it’s significant that, for once, the female is at the center and the two male protagonists are mostly functions of her.  And the two main males are object lessons for teen boys: selfish jocks don’t get the girl, and the successful boyfriend listens to the object of his affection.  Girls get their lesson, too: family is important and don’t have sex before you’re married.  That latter lesson was so over-the-head that…..but I’m being snarky.

It’s not a terrible film, and with no ads and good special effects, it’s better than TV.  (darn, there goes that snarky thing again…..)

March 17: 12 Angry Men (1957 -- Sidney Lumet)

March 16: Network (1976 -- Sidney Lumet)

★★★★★

Network is such a prescient film that it’s almost eerie to watch it today, and it’s been prophetic throughout the 35 years since it was made.  These decades have seen the decline of news departments, the growth of conglomerates that swallow and then squeeze networks, and an increase in “personality” news. More striking still from today’s perspective is the rise of media that thrives on stoking anger—you have only to think of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity—and the blossoming of reality TV.  Paddy Chayefsky’s script couldn’t anticipate the way media has changed because of technological innovation that opened the door for cable and the internet, but in 1976, Network already saw that that the media was going to become all entertainment all the time. With anger as it's main attraction.

Beyond its vision for the media itself, Network also talks about what will happen to media consumers.  Max is old school –married with friends, family, integrity and a long career.  In Network, he’s having problems in life, but he deals with them directly by having his winter/spring romance with Diana and negotiating the terms of his marriage with his wife.  His is a real life.  The new media person, the character of Diana, is one who doesn’t experience life directly but instead lives through the media she loves.  Diana has several former marriages, she doesn’t connect on a personal level, she lacks integrity, and she’s abrupt in sex.  All these characteristics show how she has trouble with real people and real emotions.  In fact, although Network seems a little on-the-nose in describing her as trying to turn her life into a series of TV program plots, that is how she lives.  Throughout her brief sex scene, she talks about ratings, and to talk with her about their relationship, Max has to talk about possible plot lines.  Perhaps because Network is so heavy-handed and affected with this observation, it rings somewhat hollow today, but as we watched Newt Gingrich in the 2012 Iowa Republican primary go from first to last as a result of negative campaign advertising on TV, a movie like this one does make you pause and wonder how much we’re inscribed by the media around us.


Network is unquestionably of its time, as New Hollywood as any movie you’ll see.  It’s earnest, advocative, and critical.  Lumet goes beyond the ideas, though, by getting strong performances, especially from William Holden and Peter Finch.  Robert Duvall, though sometimes too over-the-top, still brings a cinematic intensity to his role engages.  The weak acting in this film is, unfortunately, at the center—Faye Dunaway as Diana.  A lot of the dialog here is stagy and theatrical, and even Holden and Duvall sometimes have to work to keep the language from taking us out of the movie.  Dunaway doesn’t have the chops to do that though, and scenes like the one where she bustles into her office giving orders are more painful than anything else.


That reservation aside, this is an eye-opening movie.  It transcends its 70s topicality and manages to pull off social satire while making a surprisingly accurate critique of public media.  I remember rewatching Brazil ten years ago and being surprised at how it anticipated the Bush administration’s creating the Department of Homeland Security and increasing governmental powers in order to "combat terrorism"; rewatching Network today, when anger is entertainment, I had the same feeling of eerie amazement.