August 3: Insomnia (1997 -- Erik Skjoldbjærg)

★★★★

Here is an unusual, engaging crime procedural that depends way more on atmosphere and psychology than on the case details that are slowly revealed to us.  Insomnia’s cinematography creates a world of flat, unexceptional interiors made of the mundane, baseboard heating and spare, functional furnishings.  The film’s high key lighting banishes shadows and contributes to the sense that the light in this town of the midnight sun fills every space.  And when when we're in Insomnia’s bright, flat interiors, every window shows us a burned out exterior where the light is so strong that no detail is visible.  The light in this film is a character, and it is an important factor in the increasing psychosis of the chief investigator, Jonas Engström.

From the time our we first meet Engström, we have the sense there is something wrong.  He’s on a plane with Erik Vik, his fellow investigator, when the pilot announces they've crossed the Arctic Circle.  The dozing Vik rouses a bit, and then we hear the exact same announcement again, as though Engström’s mind has momentarily slipped a notch, missed some information, or lapsed into a daydream.  It's not clear exactly what happens here, but we quickly realize that Engström’s mind is working in a way slightly different from ours.

We’re soon following the sleepless Engström as he tries to solve the murder of Tanja but accidentally shoots Vic.  The detective then begins to build a web of lies to frame Tanja's murderer, Jon Holt, for Vic’s death, but the lies becomes more and more complicated, and Engström finds himself both the object of a police investigation and victim of blackmail by Holt.  And as Engström increasingly struggles to create a coherent story to account for the facts, director Erik Skjoldbjærg also mixes in a couple of uncomfortable scenes charged with sexual energy between Engström and local women.  And all the while, Engström is unable to sleep because of the harsh, omnipresent light in Tromsø, and his psychology, fragile at the beginning of the film, shows more and more signs of strain.

Skjoldbjærg's achievement here is that the details of the crime are not the focus of interest in Insomnia. Instead, we have an edgy, fascinating, detective improvising an increasingly complex and increasingly high stakes network of lies while he is on the verge of cracking in this environment that would stress even a sane person.  And that is what we watch with fascination.

July 21: Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013 -- Frank Pavich)

★★★

Formally, Jodorowsky's Dune is a fairly conventional documentary.  It’s mostly a series of talking heads, though the animation from the detailed storyboards of the script certainly helps us get a modest feel for what the project might have looked like.  And though it’s hard to imagine another structure, the predictability of the film’s progress becomes somewhat boring.  We go from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s work before this project to a very long list of big-name people he got involved to a conclusion of the ripple effects of the project.  The form here isn’t what engages.

Instead, it’s the vision and audacity of Jodorowsky that keeps us in the film.  Jodorowsky was immersed in the cultural currents of the late 60s/early 70s.  From absurdist theater, we went on to make two wildly experimental films, and his Dune was to  be based on what he wanted to talk about – the expansion of consciousness – rather than the contents of Herbert’s work.  One of a couple of the self-referential aspects of this story shows how director Jodorowsky essentially became a prophet, like Paul of the novel, stimulating the disciples he recruited for the project to open their minds.  And we can note the ongoing effect of Jodorowsky's teaching in the subsequent careers of figures like HR Giger, Dan O’Bannon and Chris Foss.  Jodorowsky pulled these creative artists into film, and they all went on to make important contributions arising, in part, from the way Jodorowsky developed their talent.

There is a lot of Entertainment Tonight in the overlong middle section of the film as we hear funny stories about Jodorowsky’s encounter with Pink Floyd, Dalí, Jagger, David Carradine, and Welles.  But the range of Jodorowsky’s contacts, the countries he worked in, and the areas of 70s pop culture he mined are a fascinating look into that era and into some of the cultural trends at work.  Jodorowsky lived at the nexus of those trends at that time, and part of the pleasure of Jodorowsky's Dune is to participate in that moment.

This film also makes the worthwhile observation that Jodorowsky's version of Dune became seminal to an important part of future sci fi cinema.  Like Paul’s death in Dune leads to the fertilization of the entire planet of Dune, so did the failure of Jodorowsky’s Dune lead to a dispersion of talent that went on to fertilize many important sci fi projects.  We see the echoes of Jodorowsky’s Dune in Star Wars, Alien, Prometheus, and Blade Runner among many important sci fi movies.  And it’s not that Lucas or Scott stole ideas from Jodorowsky but that the talent that worked on those later projects developed its vision from Jodorowsky’s prophetic leadership. 

It’s in describing this relationship that the important value, and pleasure, of Jodorowsky’s Dune lies.

July 1: The Freshman (1925 -- Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor)

★★★★

In a time that filmmakers would use melodrama to engage its audience, Lloyd created one of his most affective films in The Freshman.  It’s impossible not to empathize with Harold Lamb here.  The freshman is an archetypal American figure: optimistic, determined, and naïve.  Set upon becoming the Big Man on Campus, the hard-working Harold soon finds himself being abused by a jaded clique of college students who fake their like for him in order to trick him into using his limited money to buy them ice cream and sponsor a party.  Because of his naiveté, Harold doesn’t realize the ruse as they laugh at his jokes, imitate him, and pursue him to dance with; in fact, the group is mocking him to his very face in all these situations.  As Harold obliviously allows himself to be used by these people, our sympathy for him builds, stoked even further by comic misadventures like his unraveling suit and his role as the tackle dummy at football practice.  Our involvement climaxes when the angry Cad reveals the ruse to Harold, who tries to keep on a brave face before he breaks down into tears.  It’s inconceivable that Harold Lloyd at one time wanted to delete the crying scene from the film since this is the moment of our most intense involvement with the character.

The big ending of The Freshman has its own hooks.  Credit much of the success of this concluding episode to Pat Harmon as the Football Coach.  Harmon’s Coach is a bull of a man, prone to very physical expressions of his emotions like throwing his hands in the air, running in circles and bending over as if to beat the earth itself.  As his bench gets slimmer, the bad-tempered, stubborn man adamantly refuses to let Harold play even as the clock is running out and the refs are telling him he’ll have to forfeit.  His players can’t convince him to run Harold in and, as he fusses and fumes on the sidelines, Harmon takes the tension in the film to a new peak.  The Coach is also responsible for one last cruel joke on Harold, sending the eager sub in only to change sweaters with one of the other players.

But Harold finally gets to play, and as the seconds tick away, he almost saves the game and then quickly loses it again, with intercuts to the Coach’s sideline reactions building pressure at each shift and getting us more invested in the action.  Of course, this is a comedy and Harold is ultimately able to pull off a victory for Tate thanks to the same determination and optimism he brought to the school at the beginning of the film.  And he gets the girl.  But we've been put though an emotion ringer in getting there.

It’s The Freshman’s engagement with the audience that makes this comedy so strong.  The humor is cute, but it also develops the character and adds to the audience’s involvement in what’s happening.  If Lloyd's films break down in “thrill” and “character” categories, The Freshman is clearly in the latter.  The personality of Lloyd’s Harold is the spring that drives this movie and that keeps us in it.

June 30: Safety Last! (1923 -- Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor)

★★★★

Safety Last! is my first feature with Lloyd, and I see the appeal.  His Glasses Boy is as cute as a button and as animated as a Disney creation.  Lloyd seems to mine every moment of Safety Last! for its comic potential, whether he’s trying to get to work on time, waiting on ladies in the fabric department of a department store or climbing the façade of the Bolton Building.  His humor is sometimes more like that of the Three Stooges than of Chaplin or Keaton: Jackets get ripped up the back, people get kicked in the butt when they bend over, and witless police are continually outfoxed in pursuit of their suspect.  But despite the hooey that calls on us to suspend disbelief when Lloyd takes over his boss’ office and pushes buttons to call assistants, Lloyd’s screen presence has a charm that makes us willing to play along.

Part of the Boy’s charm here is his basic goodness.  He wants to bring his girlfriend to the city, so goes off in earnest to make money.  He wants to do well at work, help out his friend, and succeed, but he never tries to advance by stepping on others.  With his fresh face and sincerity of character, he’s a hard man not to like.

His comedy also has an engaging, agile physicality.  We watch him brushing aside pigeons while he clings to the side of a building, and we see him hook his foot through a looped rope and become a human pendulum when he falls.  He jumps from a bus and into a car.  And even less dramatic moments of his comedy rely on his supple dexterity.  At one point, he wraps himself up in a mannequin to get into De Vore’s unobserved, and he then folds himself into a human crab to walk to his post unobserved.

And Safety Last! builds itself into something close to an action thriller in its last, extended skit.  The Boy climbs the Bolton Building one story at a time, at each floor expecting his human fly pal, Bill, to replace him.  The friend, though, is unrelentingly pursued by the policeman and has to flee at each floor just as the Boy gets there.  And the Boy also encounters an obstacle at each floor, from an over-large large ledge to a volleyball net, pigeons, office workers and even a fussy grandmother.  And the famous clock.  Tension builds steadily as we watch the Boy’s danger increase and his hope of salvation retreat.

Safety Last! is a fun movie.  Some of the gags are forced – and even stupid – but that's to be expected in such an intense concentration of humor.  The film is nonetheless fun, energetic and far more inventive than many other comedies.

June 22: To Be or Not to Be (1942 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★★

Controversial at the time, Ernst Lubitsch’s strategy of fighting fascism with wit and finesse led to one of his most effective works in To Be or Not to Be.  Lubitsch’s cinematic strength isn't drama, adventure or broad comedy, so when wanted to take aim at what was happening in Europe, he applied his Lubitsch Touch to deflate National Socialism rather than confront it.

The witty layers that are so important to the film are apparent from the opening, which is as bravura an opening as any Indiana Jones faced.  The film starts with Hitler window shopping on a street in Warsaw and then cuts to a scene in a Gestapo office.  Aside from the Nazi connection, little binds these two shots, but the Gestapo scene is interrupted by yet a third narrative line that tells us the Gestapo office interaction isn't real but is part of a play.  With this new layer of information, the audience reinterprets the office scene as a piece of performance rather than the story of the film.  Meanwhile, the director of the play becomes involved in a discussion of the scene, which reveals that the Hitler we originally saw on the Warsaw street was actually one of these actors dressed as Hitler.  So we add a new layer of meaning to that first scene, and To Be or Not to Be then returns to it as the actor tries to prove he’s a convincing Hitler.  This four-part opening is a skilled, zippy run through several frames of reference that reinterpret and add layers of meaning to what we have in front of us onscreen.

And this opening is a microcosm of how Lubitsch uses complex, multiple layers of reinterpretation and meaning throughout the movie, usually to humorous effect and often at the expense of the Nazis.  When Joseph is impersonating Col. Ehrhardt with Siletsky, for example, the Professor jokes that Maria Tura’s husband was being fooled, and “Col. Ehrhardt” immediately moves to correct the situation because he is, in fact, Joseph.  It’s the reaction of a husband in the role of a Gestapo official, and we follow the scene on two levels.  This same scene sets up another example of layering.  During their conversation, Siletsky tells “Ehrhart” that he’s known as Concentration Camp Erhart, and Joseph/Ehrhart, unsure how to respond, replies “Ah, is that so”?  Later, when Joseph is playing Siletsky with the real Ehrhardt and tells the Colonel about the nickname, Ehrhart replies exactly as Joseph had previously. This response is an obvious ironic nod to the previous encounter, but Joseph’s multi-layered follow-up is that he’d thought Ehrhart would react that way, an appropriate comment in the immediate situation but also one that harkens back to the previous scene.  And even in small gestures, Lubitsch provides multiple layers of meaning.  As Joseph walks sadly into Maria’s dressing room after the announcement of the invasion of Poland, we assume he is sad over the news; in fact, he’s sad because someone has walked out of his performance.  Added to the irony of the two interpretations of Joseph’s sadness is that Maria had set up the walk-out for her own purposes.  To Be or Not to Be spends much of its run time building multiple layers of meaning for scenes.

And if the opening of the film is a preview of Lubitsch’s use of multi-layered significance, it also points to how tightly To Be or Not to Be is constructed.  Detail after detail in the opening is picked up later in the film.  Joseph’s jealousy of Maria becomes clear in some of the dialog of the opening, and it is very important later when the jealous husband accidentally reveals his identity to Siletsky.  And Bronsky’s portrayal of Hitler, which we see in the opening, becomes important in the escape scene later; there is also humorous reference several times to the scene stealing of Rawich, starting in the opening.  It is also in the opening that we first hear Greenberg refer to Shylock’s if-you-prick-us monologue, a monologue that takes on great, multi-layered pathos when the Jewish Greenberg delivers it to Hitler’s guard at the theater.  Even the joke in the opening about Hitler being remembered as a type of cheese resurfaces several times in the rest of the film.

The tightness of the introduction is only a foretaste of a script that wastes no detail.  For example, a reference to Joseph’s losing his fake beard and having a spare one becomes important when the actor has to shave the dead Siletsky’s face and use the spare on it.  And in fact, as the group is making its escape, Joseph again loses his beard.  Likewise, Hamlet’s to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy has multiple uses throughout the film.  Originally a signal for Stanislav to come to Maria’s dressing room, it becomes a code that Stanislav uses to send a message to Maria.  And there’s the unexpected humor at the end of film when Joseph begins his soliloquy with Stanislav in the audience and, instead of Stanislav using it as cue to leave the audience, yet another soldier stands and makes his way out, surprising both of the men.  Details have functions in this tight script.

To Be or Not to Be sparkles with wit and economy.  A basic decision like casting Jack Benny as a Shakespearean actor carries no small amount of ironic wit, and when Benny walks on the stage as an old, tights-wearing Hamlet, the image is comic in itself.  There’s wit everywhere in the dialog, too.  “Does the fact that I can drop two tons of dynamite in three minutes interest you?” asks the young, sincere, smitten Stanslav.  “It CERTAINLY DOES!” leers Maria, playing with a double entendre.  There’s hardly a moment of the film that isn’t showing its wit or setting up a clever moment for later in the film.

But To Be or Not to Be isn’t all frothy comedy; Lubitsch lets the brutality of National Socialism show through clearly at points.  The film opens by showing the store signs of businesses in Warsaw, but after the Nazi conquest, we see the same signs fallen, broken and burned.  There’s no clever wit in these images.  Nor is the delivery by Greenberg of Shylock’s if-you-prick-us monologue a witty joke.  As the Jew stands in front of Hitler’s guard, the camera zooms in on his face, and the movie pauses to hear the Shakespearean anti-racist plea.  In context, it’s a plea for Poles, but the actor’s Jewish identity makes it also a plea for that persecuted minority.  We also see the reality of death in the macabre scene when Joseph finds himself, impersonating Siletsky, in the same room with the real Siletsky’s body.  Although the film is justly praised for its light Lubitsch Touch, there’s more than a little of the reality of the horrors of Nazism in the film.

It’s not hard to see the influence of To Be or Not to Be on Wes Anderson’s recent Grand Budapest Hotel.  Both films are articulate and witty, and both use this elegance in a critique of Nazism.  Gustave H. with his elaborate schemes and witty repartee would not be out of place in the world of To Be or Not to Be.  And in both films, there is also a brutality that occasionally jags through the comic artifice to remind us we’re not watching a film that is simply an ornate confection.  The brutal murder of  Vilmos Kovacs in Grand Budapest keeps the real subject of the film before us.  Overall, the common inspiration of the two films is striking.

To Be or Not to Be is an elegant, clever set of parallels, wit and layered meanings, but all this is in service of a deep critique of the horror that was already gripping Europe.  It’s no small task to pull such disparate elements together; it takes comprehensive vision and the touch of a director like Ernst Lubitsch.

June 18: Grand Hotel (1932 -- Edmund Goulding)

★★★★★

Grand Hotel is a cinematic pleasure. A big part of the enjoyment here comes from the stylish art direction.  The film’s interiors draw the eye to their German modernist furnishings, and the camera celebrates this style with its panning and its overhead shots.  The fashion here, too, makes us want to oogle, especially the way the women are dressed.  The lithesome forms of Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford are clad in tight, slimming dresses that flair into shoulder pads or furs at the top.  The sleek lines of their hats complement the outfits.  And Goulding’s direction evokes inhumanly elegant postures from his women, both as they sit talking and as they walk.  Garbo and Crawford move like the languid women from contemporary cartoons in pages of the New Yorker.  The affected dialogue adds to the elegance of the hotel, too.  “I've never been so tired in my life,” laments Garbo’s world-weary Grusinskaya .  And when she talks about retiring from dance, she ponders,  “What would I do? Grow orchids? Keep white peacocks? Die!”  The affected elegance of Grand Hotel is a pleasure we don’t find in film today.

There’s also an unexpected darkness informing this film.  WW I is evident in the background as Baron von Gaigern refers to his wartime experience.  At one point, he bitterly observes that he learned how to pray and lie in school and to kill and hide in the war.  And Dr. Otternschlag, half his face covered with a black, war-caused scar, always has a pessimistic observation to make about the frothy life of the hotel.  “People coming, going.  Nothing ever happens” at the hotel, he observes. “And when you leave, someone occupies your room, lies in your bed, that's the end."  Death also follows the characters here.  The accountant Kringelein is mortally ill and may die at any moment, and the Baron is shot dead just as happiness is within his grasp.  The Grand Hotel may be elegant, but it’s shot through with a deep pessimism.

This mood of pessimistic darkness overlain with elegance is one of the most significant elements that Goulding’s Grand Hotel shares with the recent Wes Anderson Grand Budapest Hotel.  It’s not hard to feel this fundamental similarity.  And Anderson’s Grand Budapest picks up a few other details, too.  In Grand Budapest, we learn about horrors of war from Zero just as we hear about the war in Grand Hotel, and Zero’s bellboy training owes some debt to the end of Grand Hotel when a manager inspects the bellboys’ gloves for cleanliness and fit.  There’s even some reference to Dr. Otternschlag’s conspicuous facial deformation in the otherwise gratuitous scar on Clotilde’s face in Grand Budapest.  Such imperfection is what the world is made of despite all the gestures to style and civility.

Both films also show the era of the 30s as a time of transition.  The sporty American couple rolls up in their car at the end of Grand Hotel as a new economic power and set of social conventions arrives, and fascism blooms in the final part of Wes Anderson’s film.  Both movies show the period between the wars as a transition from an era of ineffective grace and style to something less elegant and less high-minded, though the hotel of the earlier film is clearly more impervious to history that that of the later movie.

Grand Hotel is wonderful cinema experience.  Really, they don't make 'em like this anymore.

May 20: Grand Budapest Hotel (2014 -- Wes Anderson)

★★★★★

Grand Budapest Hotel has the technique, wit and insight that Wes Anderson has brought to his last several films.  We see the stiff tracking shots, formal compositions, bright color palette, stylized dialog and sharp intelligence that have become signature elements of his style.  Grand Budapest snaps with these.  But what’s interesting here is the way Anderson continues to tell stories with these elements while breaking new ground in his cinema.

Of all Anderson’s films, Grand Budapest most successfully incorporates the director’s stylistic elements in a consistent way by highlighting storytelling as a theme of the movie.  We start with a woman reading a book at the grave of an author and soon see a recording of the deceased author talking about his creative process, an introduction that communicates storytelling as an important part of the movie; the kid who keeps interrupting with a toy pistol foreshadows what we’re to see later, too.  Anderson though, in typical fashion, complicates this frame when the elderly author talks about a story he heard when he was young and the film then takes us to that moment in storytelling, the moment that the younger author is hearing the story of Gustave H. as told by the elderly Zero.  But there’s more.  Zero himself is recounting his own early life as Gustave’s protégé.  So Grand Budapest is a story told by an older writer, heard as a youth, from an older man who was talking about part of his own youth.  Or it’s all in the head of the woman who is reading graveside.  The movie is a dizzying regression of frames of stories recalled years after the narrators’ experiences.  These frames not only help account for Anderson’s characteristic foregrounding of narrative devices, but they also explain some of the content of the images we see on screen.

Storytelling, we’re told by the old author, is artifice, and Grand Budapest highlights the elements of cinematic storytelling.  An overlong tracking shot like that of Gustave and Zero crossing the hotel lobby makes us wonder how hard it was to choreograph the presence of various staff at just the right time while Gustave corrects bad behavior and continues his discourse.  It’s such a tour-de-force moment that it calls attention to itself.  Likewise, the film often uses obviously color-coordinated, symmetrical shots like the one of the pink Mendl’s truck in front of the pink hotel with its balanced lines of dark on both sides.  Anderson also elicits an artificial, mannered delivery from his actors and makes abrupt cuts from one scene to another, even using an iris at times, to create a movie that consistently directs attention to its narrative devices.

Another element of storytelling, point of view, also accounts for a lot of what we see on screen.  Zero’s perspective and storytelling dominate the film, and there are many visual elements that clearly have their origin in him.  For example, after learning of Madam D’s death, Gustave sends Zero on an errand, telling him to give the change to the “crippled shoeshine boy.” Right after Gustave’s line, the onscreen image flits momentarily to the shoeshine boy.  As my cinema bud, Lou, pointed out, this is just the sort of image that would register on the mind of a young kid.  Other parts of the storytelling in Grand Budapest have a similar origin.  The stop-motion animation of the ski chase could have its roots in a boy’s memory of 30s motion picture storytelling techniques, and the elaborate model of the hotel with its stiff funicular could come from the same recollection.  It’s not hard to imagine the colors, décor and immaculate dress as being partly in the memory of the young Zero either.

Recollections of the past tend to be tinged with nostalgia and a sense of decline, and since Grand Budapest is contained within two narrative frames of memories of lost youth, it’s not surprising to find decline as a theme here.  The film shows us an elegant, civilized culture in transition to something more base.  The ever-immaculate Gustave knows his role in this cultured civilization and works to keep it in place.  The hotel rules are formal and must be obeyed; even his role as gigolo to the wealthy, elderly patrons of the hotel is part of this same set of values.  Kiss, but don’t tell.  Grand Budapest, however, doesn’t tell us the story of an aristocratic society but rather the story of an order being undermined by something darker and less.  Madame D is killed, the lawyer is hunted down in a museum and gruesomely murdered, and people are beaten and shot.  A ruthless, fascist political order replaces the courtly aristocracy, and the Grand Budapest itself becomes first a barracks and then a battlefield.  Even the lawyer’s cat meets an untimely end.  And the décor of the hotel tells this same story of decline as the earlier scenes teem with art and color while the later ones take place in a Soviet-style establishment of indifferent service and cheap, dull, functional furnishings.  Grand Budapest is a tale of decline and loss.

In many ways, this film is the most pessimistic and violent in Anderson’s canon to date, but at the same time, the movie is making a statement about the value of art.  And storytelling is an art.  Art, in one point of view, gives us order from the disorder we actually live in; it gives us a way of seeing and understanding the world as having form and direction instead of being without.  The stories of Grand Budapest participate in that ordering, explaining to us how we got to the point we are at the film’s opening.  And the film even offers Gustave as an artist who uses form to combat chaos.  Gustave’s insistence on rules and formality are his effort make sense out of the world, but in a universe without real order, art ultimately fails.  As the older Zero says of Gustave, “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he even entered it. But I must say, he maintained the illusion with grace.”  Grand Budapest gives us an artist who maintains form to counter chaos, and though the artist loses this fight, like all art does, he “maintains the illusion with grace” as long as he’s there.

Many people, including Anderson himself, have talked about the influences behind Grand Budapest, but Ernst Lubitsch is the clearest to me.  Lubitsch’s films faced fascism directly, and even before that, they dealt with social class, hypocrisy and oppression.  Lubitsch addressed these ills by using a uniquely light satire that skewered the darkness without being heavy handed or direct.  A similar satire underlies Grand Budapest, a satire that remains as light as a Mendl’s cake with some steel in middle to aid our escape.