May 18: RKO 281 (1999 -- Benjamin Ross)

★★

This made-for-TV movie is just awful.  Liev Schreiber can't carry a film at this point in his career, and the script doesn't try to make it easy for him.  There’s no sense of Orson Welles that comes through here.  Welles does one thing and then another, has one opinion and then another, lacks passion, and verbalizes thoughts like “we all love in our own way,” which the film then blithely ignores ignores in terms of character action though repeats verbally.  RKO 281 is a waste of some very good talent.

As part of a series around Welles and Citizen Kane, though, RKO 281 offers a few small rewards.  For one, it's fun to spot Ross' restaging of some of the newsreel footage that's used in The Battle Over Citizen Kane.  And though the picture quality isn't great in the edition of RKO 281 that I saw, the lighting and sets were rich.  Good visuals redeem the movie a little.

But it's disappointing Ross isn't able to pull off a more cohesive portrait of Orson Welles here.  Instead, RKO 281 leaves that task to another project.

May 17: The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996 -- Michael Epstein & Thomas Lennon)

★★★★
After watching CItizen Kane with Roger Ebert's commentary, Lou and I decided to do a Kane series and cued up The Battle Over Citizen Kane.  It was a good choice to follow the Ebert commentary because, while Ebert focuses on technical aspects of the film, Epstein and Lennon fill in more of the historical context.  

Done mostly in a Ken Burns style, Battle uses photos and film clips, though it splices in a few talking heads, too.  It will satisfy people looking for a way to situate the many popular stories and claims around Citizen Kane.   For example, we've heard Welles was wildly popular as a high-profile, creative genius, but Battle fills out that cliche with details about Welles' WPA theatrical work, his racing around Manhattan in an ambulance, the publicity surrounding him after his War of the Worlds escapade, and his appearance on the cover of Time.  Details like that give some grounding to the claim we're familiar with, and they give some context for the power that RKO ceded to him in his movie contract.

Ditto for William Randolph Hearst.  It's known that he was a powerful media magnate, but the scale of his wealth and power become clearer in this documentary.  He not only covered the nation with his media empire, but his ego was so big that he presumed to create news -- like having a Hearst employee fake an accident to test government services -- and even manipulated issues of war and peace, as he did in Cuba, in order to sell his papers.  So entitled did he feel that he ran for president, became a target of Franklin Roosevelt and created an estate in California that was half the size of Rhode Island.  And filled it with whatever art and architectural elements he could buy.  His power and influence extended to Hollywood, where he bullied all the major studio heads into an effort to suppress  Citizen Kane.  The photos and documentary footage of Hearst in Battle show the extent of Hearst's power.

It there's a fault with Battle over Citizen Kane, it's that Epstein and Lennon don't demonstrate their central dramatic thesis: That Hearst and Welle's destroyed each other in this titanic clash.  Hearst was already failing by the time  Citizen Kane was released; the fact that it was released at all shows that.  Hearst had far more problems with cash flow and debt than he did with Welles.  As for Welles, despite the fact that Hearst had slung every type of moral and political smear he could, including the ever-useful "communist" epithet, Battle never shows that this campaign had a lasting impact on Welles' career.  The fact that Welles' popularity declined after he went to Hollywood doesn't mean that Hearst was responsible for the decline.  In fact, Battle doesn't explain what it means when it says Welles' career was destroyed.

But although The Battle Over Citizen Kane fails to portray an epic struggle between two titans that results in their mutual demise, the film still provides excellent social context for Welles' movie.  That's a valuable enough service. 

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May 16: Citizen Kane (1941 -- Orson Welles)

★★★★★

Sight & Sound can arrive at whatever conclusion it wants, Citizen Kane is a masterpiece of the highest creative order.  Lou and I wanted to rewatch the film, and the recent passing of Roger Ebert gave us a good opportunity.  We decided to watch Kane with the Ebert commentary.  We had a little toast to Ebert and settled in for an evening with him and Orson Welles.  It's a very fine way to spend some time with an intelligent, articulate critic and an important American film.  Ebert covers nearly every point I've heard about Kane's technique and then some;  it's like taking a film studies class about the movie.  A few of Ebert's observations:

• the constant position of the lit window in the opening sequence of cuts
• repeated patterns of motion or actions that link scenes in the film
• the low, muslin ceilings that allow even, diffused light
• holes in the floor to allow low-angle shots
• the difficulty of lighting the depth of the frame to let us see action far in the background
• use of lighting on faces to connote mood or morality
• Welles’ triangular compositions
• the regular placement of “witnesses” at the bottom right of the screen
• Welles’ use of visual perspective to increase or diminish a character’s importance, even as the character moves in the scene
• efforts of cinematographer Gregg Toland to create focus from the deep background to the foreground
• people’s dislike of that focus, which didn't tell the audience what to look at
• the use of motion in the frame to focus attention
• use of technology like mattes and the optical printer to reduce the cost of the film
• the low budget of the film
• editing to create crowd scenes
• watching scenes like the warehouse toward the end to see the accumulation of artifacts as a restatement of the film's story

Ebert also drops a few pithy insights.  He compares Kane to Star Wars in its heavy use of special effects.  He also compares Kane to Birth of a Nation by saying that Wells sums up sound film to that moment and points the way to medium's future in the same way that Griffith does with silent film.  It's in that last comment that the importance of Citizen Kane resides.

Ebert talks mostly nonstop for the entire two hours of the movie and engages throughout.  He doesn't have time to talk about the historical or biographical aspects of Kane, and he doesn't talk much about the characters or their psychology as presented in the film.  But the commentary fleshes out the technical achievement of Welles and his team, and the experience of watching the movie is richer for that.  And I'll add to the chorus: We'll miss Roger Ebert.

May 14: Restrepo (2010 -- Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger)

★★★★★

After watching Which Way is the Front from Here?, I decided to revist Restrepo to see if I liked as much as I thought I did and to see if some of the ideas in the recent documentary were, in fact, relevant to this film.  I did, and they were.

Restrepo is going to transcend many of the Iraq/Afganistan documentaries because it’s less about the specifics of the war than it is about the men pulling the trigger on the front lines.  This film isn't a critique of the rationale or conduct of the wars, and it isn't about the wars’ futility or the corruption of our nation’s profiteers.  Instead, Hetherington’s sympathy and his affection for his subjects – dwelt on in Which Way is the Front from Here? – create a compelling portrait of a group of young soldiers living together under unrelenting, life-threatening stress as the camera takes us through their moments of intense fighting and times of mundane work and play.  And this interspersed with moments of candid reflection, both in a studio setting as well as at OP Restrepo.

The candid moments are touching, as when the guys play guitars, work out, wrestle or recall growing up in a
protected environment.  They express honestly, in front of the camera, their anxieties about a patrol or activity before the camera heads out with them onto a hillside or village.  Their enemies are remote; the Americans don’t see their opponents’ eyes when they shoot at them, and incoming fire comes from far away. They respond to it with long-range weapons.   Death is only beside you in the OP, and the only blood you actually see is that of your fellow soldiers.  It’s a grim, hard, tense world.

With Hetherington and Junger embedded in 503^rd, Restrepo only shows us what the company sees.  Like the soldiers, viewers see nothing of the lives of the Afghans, and we watch powerlessly as military leaders talk to the Afghans like they are less than human.  One officer tells the local leadership to forget all the abuse that occurred under the leadership of the former officer, as though a slate of evident maltreatment could be wiped clean with a few glib phrases.  We see the fear on the face of another local who is suspected of Taliban alliance and, another time, we hear an officer apologize to a man after American forces have killed several members of his family, women and children.  His apology -- that we killed a lot of bad guys and that he’s sorry the man’s family was also killed -- underscores the dehumanizing gulf that exists between the local population and the men of the 503^rd, and  the situation bodes badly for America’s winning the hearts and minds of the locals.  But honestly, what else could the young officer say or do? 

Restrepo is mostly a vivid portrait of the comradeship that emerges between men at war, and the strength of the film is the tender, detailed soldier’s life that emerges.  But it’s also about war itself, the way postcard scenery is a field of battle and the way absurdities make bitter sense.  And it's for this amalgam that the film will last.

April 29: From Up on Poppy Hill/Kokuriko-zaka kara (2011 -- Gorō Miyazaki)

★★★★★

This film has lots of what I like to see when go to a Studio Ghibli project.  I enjoy the lush visuals, the somewhat stilted characters, the unlikely narrative, and the Japanese cuteness.  At Ghibli, these elements always seem to come together to create something that’s deeply fleshed out, internally consistent as well as absolutely unique and absorbing.  To watch From Up on Poppy Hill is to enter into an aesthetic space that exists only in this particular film, and while you’re there, you give yourself to its complete world with its own imaginative rules.  The what-if atmosphere is warm and tender, not only arising from the rich imagery of the port, the gardens and the clubhouse, but also from the adolescent fantasy that informs the movie.  From Up on Poppy Hill has hard-working teens, gallant teens striving against obtuse adults, teens consumed with the excitement of learning, and teens dealing with romantic awakenings.  And all of this to a nostalgic soundtrack that harkens back to accessible 60s jazz and some pop.  The film is a satisfying immersion in a deeply imagined and rendered world.

It’s not hard to imagine an element of meta-signification in the film either.  Aside from the teen romance that is fraught with complication, From Up on Poppy Hill deals with the tension between the past and now.  The baroque clubhouse is facing demolition to make way for the new era that the 1964 Tokyo Olympics will usher in, but heroes Umi and Shun have a vision for the restoration of the old building, partly gleaned from the beauty of the renovated boarding house she helps run.  The film calls for preserving the past as we move into the future.  This is the same approach that director Gorō Miyazaki takes in making this film.  The son of Ghibli master Hayao Miyazaki, Gorō builds on the achievement of his father rather than abandoning the Ghibli approach to go in a different direction.  The rich visuals and intensity of imagination he brings here extend the approach to anime that his father has developed, and Gorō even has his father Hayao as a scriptwriter, ensuring that From Up on Poppy Hill builds on this tradition.  And Gorō succeeds convincingly  from up on his own Poppy Hill  by following  in the footsteps of those who worked before him in this absorbing film about respecting tradition. 

April 27: Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (2013 -- Sebastian Junger)

★★
I found this documentary to be disappointing.  The great strength here is that we see lots of Tim Hetherington’s work, both video and stills, and the work is dynamic, personal, loving and warm.  Hetherington says early on that his interest is the humanity that survives in war, and we see this humanity in war photo after war photo and in the behind-the-scenes video we watch of Hetherington at work with his subjects.  He likes the people he photographs.

But Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? stumbles when Hetherington isn’t onscreen.  Junger intimates a different motivation for each different theater Hetherington works in.  He says that Hetherington  wants to show war by photographing its effects in Liberia, but he also says Hetherington is interested in the soldiers’ posturing to get keyed up.  Later, it’s male bonding that interests Hetherington in Afghanistan.  And in the six-year period the photographer stayed in Liberia after the war, his interest is……well, Junger doesn’t say at all.  We're not sure why Hetherington decided to leave Liberia, and we don't know why he wanted to go to Afganistan.  Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? moves from one idea about Hetherington’s work to another, leaving us with a series of touching, compelling moments, but it ultimately fails to give us a core to help us understand this artist who worked as a photojournalist.  In fact, it doesn’t even try.

It’s hard to leave this film without an appreciation of Hetherington’s work since we get to enjoy so much of it.  However, as a documentary, Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? disappoints because we can’t learn more of the aesthetic behind Hetherington's work or of what motivated it.  The important takeaway from the film is that we lost a talented documentarian when Hetherington was killed in Libya, and that counts for something anyway.

April 25: Lawrence of Arabia (1962 -- David Lean)

★★★★★