April 25: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004 -- Michel Gondry)

★★★★★

April 20: All About Eve (1950 -- Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

★★★★★

April 18: Sweet Smell of Success (1957 -- Alexander Mackendrick)

★★★★★

April 17: Night of the Hunter (1955 -- Charles Laughton)

★★★★★

Night of the Hunter is one of the most original, successful films I’ve seen in a long time. Where have I been all this time not to even know what’s up with it?

There are many things I like about this movie, but I’d have to say that its mood and psyche of German Expressionism appeals to me the most among them.  The BD notes say the film has a strong German Expressionist element, so I expected some low-angle lighting with big shadows.  And there are low angle lights like when Mitchum goes down the stairs to the cellar, the shadows making him even stranger and more deformed than his psychology already is.  There is a great scene that’s only done in silhouette, too.    However, Night of the Hunter uses a fuller range of expressionist vocabulary.  There are some sets that are over-the-top angled to look like a Caligari exterior, and there’s a weird psychology to the whole film that is elemental, as though all the characters had been dragged up from someone’s id.  Also, you see Expressionist body language, like when Mitchum twists his body to pick up the line of an interior and his twisted posture recalls a gesture in Murnau or the like.  There’s even an Expressionist plot line as the Reverend is caught and the angry townsfolk form a lynch mob to hang him.  At that point, Ben has a flashback to the persecution of his father and suddenly becomes a supporter of the man who would have killed him (and still would). In that scene, the angry mob is clearly out to kill a Frankenstein/Golem character like in a Wegener movie.  The stroke of inspiration here is that Charles Laughton has so fully adapted this anachronistic, foreign film vocabulary to a riverside America in the 30s; it’s a simply perfect fit.

And then there is the disturbing, dreamy quality of so many parts of the film.  The film opens with the head of Lillian Gish at the center of a circle of singing cherubs against the night sky; an image that’s both sweet but vaguely disturbing.  You get the same feeling in the river voyage of the children as they drift by a heavily foregrounded frog and some rabbits, animals that are just there, neither threatening nor helpful but neutrally watching the desperate children alone on the river.  And there’s the beautiful, lyrical disturbing scene of Willa, drowned in car at the bottom of the river with her hair flowing with the river plants.  Dreamy….and creepy.

And what great casting.  The hunky Robert Mitchum would seem to be the opposite of what you’d want in the role as the Reverend, but his good looks, deep voice and out-of-control public image are just perfect. His chemistry with the kids is apparent on screen, too.   And what better saving angel than Lillian Gish, not only Griffith’s regular icon-of-innocence but also identified so strongly with silent film.  Shelley Winters isn’t outstanding here, but she’s not bad, and I think this is one of the earliest roles I’ve seen her in.

Night of the Hunter is so over-the-top and out-of-the-box-- but  so well-done – that I’m planning to push it on everyone I can convince to give it a try.  There’s not a moment in the film to not be looking at the screen.

April 16: Suzhou River (2000 -- Lou Ye)

★★★★

Suzhou River has a couple of very strong points going for it.  For one, its plot seems straightforward at first but soon becomes complicated with stories within stories while one actress plays the female lead in all of them.  I enjoyed this story as it got more and more complicated and, instead of ending, took one more narrative turn.  After its somewhat slow beginning, Suzhou River quickly reeled me in.  I also liked the film’s setting along the Suzhou River in Shanghai.  This is a dirty, misty, industrial, rainy, humid environment – the environment good noir.  I don’t believe I’ll ever think of Shanghai in the same way after watching this film.  Like in African Queen, the setting here is as much a character as any of the people are.

There were some elements of the movie that I didn’t really care for, though.  For one, there’s a voiceover narration throughout the film, and I have a knee-jerk bias against that.  I wish the film could just tell the story with images, but I don’t know how Ye could have done that here.  However, he could have done it more, for sure.  I was slightly disappointed in the way the ending ties up all the ends in the plot and gives us a definitive interpretation of what has happened, too.  The film could have stopped a little earlier and left us with several interesting ways of thinking about what we’d seen, but it goes on to tell us what to think.  And along with the voiceover, a lot of Suzhou River uses a subjective point of view with a wobbly, hand held camera that grows a little old after awhile; and I got impatient with the voiceover and the takes of life along the river at the film’s opening.   I still don’t get how all that fits….

These reservations aside, there’s a lot to like in Suzhou River.  It’s worth the time as a unique vision of a unique place.

April 15: Source Code (2011 -- Duncan Jones)

★★★

This is a fun movie for a Friday night.  Carlos and I checked it out, and I was involved in it almost from the beginning.  I liked the acting (except Joe Wright, whose bad scientist was too over-the-top in the context), and I really enjoyed the story.  I just didn’t see most of the narrative turns coming.

I had some expections for the movie since Jones directed Moon, a sort of intellectual sci-fi movie from last summer which I appreciated.  And I could see the Jones imprint on Source Code, too: a series of shifting frames of reference which kept giving me new ways to interpret what was happening.  Like in Moon, where we keep learning new things about Sam Bell, we keep adjusting our understanding of Colter Stevens and his mission as this movie progresses.

Moon is about identity and what life means, and Source Code approaches the same issues.  But this film is mostly an action romance, great stuff for Fridays.

April 14: African Queen (1951 -- John Huston)

★★★★★

I think this one is the classic it’s considered.  African Queen is a romance and something of a comedy, so it doesn’t have the world view of, say, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, so rigorously foregrounded.  Yes, religious people are hypocrites, bad guys still kill people for no reason other than sheer meanness , and nature can be red in tooth and claw.  But there’s still love in the world, and scruffy Charlie finds it with prim Rose. 

I don’t completely understand how African Queen overcomes all the obstacles in its way and still ends up a fun, touching classic.  The script has one romantic cliché after another (alcoholic boat captain falls in love with missionary) and verbal comedy that’s only polite-smile worthy most of the time.  And yet, when Rose lets her hair reluctantly down and Charlie gives up his gin, it certainly touched me.  And I was happy for the two in their little dock with all the flowers.  And I was riveted as they cascaded down the rapids (perhaps a flashback to my own experience on the White Nile).  And  I sympathized as they dragged the Queen through the river grasses (perhaps a flashback to my own experience in the Okavango).  And I laughed at Charlie’s monkey faces and felt uncomfortable watching the crocs dive in the river.  In a word, I was engaged.  Even with the horrible, over-the-top melodrama and unlikely coincidences that conclude the film, I was following the two lovers closely all the way to Lake Victoria.

Part of the film’s success is certainly tight editing and a story that moves briskly, and the genuine chemistry and skill of the two stars is another component.  In addition, Africa itself is a real part of the film, and Africa here is clearly not a set.  African Queen has a verisimilitude that prevents you from being too complacent as you watch.

I’m tempted to see this movie as a thematic extension of Sierra Madre.  At the end of that film, the two men learn that the world is a hard, cruel place and go off to seek love as their only refuge in it.  In African Queen, the two main characters find love and cope with the world by loving each other.  Kate’s prayer pretty well sums up the philosophy of the film when she prays: “ Judge us not for our weakness but for our love.”

April 13: The Graduate (1967 -- Mike Nichols)

★★★★★

April 12: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947 -- John Huston)

★★★★★

As a guy, I found a lot going on here to like.  It’s man against nature, man against man, team dynamics, and struggle to achieve.  It’s a guy’s flic for sure.

I like the scope of the movie a lot too.  It’s operatic in dealing with grand issues with big stakes, only the film expresses these issues in a quest for money rather than for love.  The three men struggle against the pitiless heat and the scarcity of gold, then they struggle against ruthless bandits and claim jumpers.  And against their human distrust of each other.  In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the mother allusion notwithstanding, a man’s life is struggle with the ever-present risk of failure and death.  In that respect, the film reminds me of Sam Spade’s effort to save himself in The Maltese Falcon in a world with similar hazards and stakes.

The men here cope with this life with varying degrees of success.  Bogart’s Dobbs cracks under the strain of their work and his paranoid greed, and he becomes a danger to his partners before the evil in the world ultimately catches up with him.  The claim jumper tries to leverage himself into the group but is killed, ironically as he is finally on the cusp of making it. On the other hand, Howard and Curtin survive and maintain their humanity despite the many blows that life deals them.  One of my favorite moments in the film is theirs, in fact.  After they’ve discovered that their gold has been blown away by the wind, the two men break into a loud, existential laugh, finding humor the only way to deal with the black irony that all their struggles have faced this ultimate frustration.  And both then head off for love and integration into community: Howard goes back to the Indians who have adopted him, and Curtin goes to find the widow of the claim jumper.  Our only consolation in a world dominated by force, purposelessness, irony and death is in finding love. Huston goes a step beyond The Maltese Falcon here by giving existential man at least the possibility of a way out.

Characters and plot aside, I haven’t noticed a similar visual style in Huston’s work so far.  There is some nice composition both within the frame and with characters moving through cacti and plant fronds, but there’s not a strong visual trend I’ve noticed so far.  But even without a consistent compositional approach or tendency in camera movement , I still enjoy watching Huston films.  And it’s easy to see why Treasure of the Sierra Madre is considered such a classic.

April 11: The Maltese Falcon (1941 -- John Huston)

★★★★★

Oh yeah, it’s all that.  For sure.

Popped this in the player for an hour and a half of fun, and I got all of that.  Everything I’ve always heard about this film is there…in Spades (pardon the pun).  The noir lighting adds drama with big shadows cast across faces and behind characters, the tough guy detective tries to cope with the femme fatale, a sense of omnipresent bad permeates.  Everything I know about John Huston makes me think this would be a great fit for him.  I was even surprised at how compelling Boogie’s acting was.

But what I enjoyed so much here is the script.  This is a movie about a man confronting mystery and who has to generate story after story in order to try to understand. even survive.  I shouted out loud at the bravura moment when the police, questioning Sam at his door, hear a sound inside and shove past Sam to find a fight just ending in the apartment.  Sam generates three or four explanations in such rapid succession that I could hardly keep them straight, each perfectly cogent and each explaining the rapidly changing facts at hand.  In fact, even the characters comment on Sam’s fabulation skills at this point.  Throughout the movie, Sam is trying to build a story to include all the info he’s discovering; he not only wants to discover a story that will fit the facts he knows…his very survival is at stake because, if he fails, he dies.  All detective stories involve the creation of a narrative to explain information, but few do so to the degree that The Maltese Falcon does.  And with such great style, suspense and characters.  The Maltese Falcon is a movie about a story-teller who is making stories to live. 

And I always like the dark side of Huston’s films.  I think of Huston as an American existentialist who doesn’t let his aspirations ever get far outside his pessimistic expectations.  Therefore, you can be sure that no one is telling the full truth here and that no one will do what they say for the reasons they give.  The closing lines of the movie pretty much sum up what I expect in the world of a Huston film. At the end, the ultimate betrayal is revealed when all those concerned discover that the falcon is a fake, that it’s actually lead instead of coated gold.  The erstwhile detective, who doesn’t know what’s been happening, asks what the falcon is, and Sam replies that it’s the stuff that dreams are made of.  That’s Huston’s world, and after a steady diet of Battle: Los Angeles and The Adjustment Bureau, I find that refreshing.

April 10: Battle: Los Angeles (2011 -- Jonathan Liebesman)

★★★

C’mon movie critics, lighten up!

Carlos and I decided to give this one a chance, resurrecting a years-long tradition of going to a brain-numbing movie on a Friday night.  This is a perfect Friday Night Movie: it’s very capably done, rigorously follows a by-the-book plot structure, and uses cool special effects.  Just what you want on a Friday night.

However, we couldn’t resist plugging in our brain to some extent, so we found out afterwards that we’d both spent part of our movie experience counting the movies this one cited: Black Hawk Down, Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Alien(s), Pearl Harbor (or any of the 60s war movies about cadres of male soldiers).  If you can do it for Tarantino movies like Inglorious Bastards, why can’t you name-that-movie-citation for Battle: Los Angeles?

Anyway, I found nothing objectionable here at all; in fact, I liked it as entertainment.  It was far better than Tron Legacy……

April 9: Nice Guy Johnny (2010 -- Edward Burns)

★★★

This is an impressive movie for what went into it.  It was shot with a digital camera and a tiny budget of $25,000; I think I read the actors did their own clothes, hair and make-up, too.  Director Edward Burns even played one of the main roles, and you have to think that might’ve been yet another budget decision.  And Burns is distributing the movie thru i-tunes and VOD since he doesn’t have studio backing.  It’s an independent, independent movie.

And lots of it is good.  I like the strong sense of place in the film, almost like seeing through a camera wandering around the Hamptons with a not-long-out-of-college kid who is trying to make decisions about his future.  And the story is on, too, dealing with that decision and with young adults deciding how to move into adulthood.  Script isn’t bad either.

My only strong reservation here is the acting.  Knowing that the set and staff was small, I was still constantly taken out of the film by the declamatory delivery of lines.  And though many would disagree, the delivery of Burns himself was one of the weakest elements.  The near shouting and limited tonal range of the actors’ voices would probably work alright on a stage, but it didn’t work at all in this intimate filmof a big decision point in a life. 

Nice Guy Johnny has lots going for it, especially given its indie context…..I really wish it had had better performances.

April 4: Pan's Labyrinth (2006 -- Guillermo del Toro)

★★★★★
 

What a step from Cronos to Pan’s Labyrinth!  This film does so much more, is so much more compelling, and holds its unusual tone so much better than Cronos does.  This is one of those rare films that’s actually better than I remembered.

Of course, there’s the fantasy element here with the amazing Faun and Pale Man; they’re the stuff of creep shows.  But it’s not just chills and thrills here.  The film has two realms (the fantasy world and the real world), and both have a dark feeling about them where awful things can (and do) happen.  Part of the tension in the movie is that we learn quickly that Labyrinth isn’t timid about horrid violence, and knowing that creates a lot of suspense in various scenes.  The evil father is capable of the terrible violence with a distinct sado-masochistic element, and the Faun always seems like he could as easily kill Ofelia as crown her princess.  Resistance leaders get shot at point blank range, and fairies get their heads bitten off.  Menace and violence dominate both realms.

And there’s a connection of some kind between these two worlds.  Both, for example, have keys, and both have prohibitions and other rules.  Actions in one world can affect the other, too.  For example, the mandrake root comes from the fantasy world but works (or not) in the real. 

Which leads to the most pleasing aspect of the movie for me, its ambiguity.  You can’t really nail down the connection between reality and fantasy here because the echoes and links between the two aren’t sharp.  I had the overwhelming temptation to see the fantasy world as the way Ofelia dealt with the horror she experienced in her life, but there was no way to connect events like the attack to what was happening Ophelia’s world.  In fact, I even got to the point where I couldn’t be sure that the fantasy world was fantasy, at least in terms of the movie.  I’m still not sure if I think the fantasy world was Ophelia’s hallucination or if it was real and that she was the only one who could see it.  There is a lot of eye imagery in the film, after all, in both the real and fantasy realms.

There are many other engaging elements of the film like repeated images, parallel plot actions, and meticulous color schemes, but the important thing is that they’re all tied together organically by the hand of a most capable director.  And this adult can still enjoy a good story told right…and enjoy it even more on the second go-round.

April 3: Cronos (1998 -- Guillermo del Toro)

★★★

I remember seeing this when it first came out…it was at the High Museum’s Latin American Film festival.  At that time, I didn’t know quite what to make of it.  It was oddly evocative, but it was hard to put my finger on why.

This time around…knowing del Toro’s work so much better…I had no such problem.  Cronos is a del Toro fantasy tale, plain and simple, and that’s what makes the film so compelling.  First, there’s the dark morality issue.  The grandfather, Jesus, makes a bad choice and is punished for that error.  As that story element is worked out, del Toro uses elements that are bizarre or baroque, a tool kit he frequently uses.  Scenes such as those with the cronos machine digging in suggest things I’d see later in Hell Boy and Blade II, as does the extreme make-up we see in Jesus.  I saw another del Toro interest as I watched the preternatural granddaughter Aurora, who prefigures characters in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Laybrinth.  And then there’s the vaguely once-upon-a-time feeling here.  That’s certainly something we see in later del Toro, too.

My hang up first time around was that I kept wanting to see what the story was getting at beyond what I was watching.  This time around, I watched Cronos as a fantasy that had no real significance beyond being an engaging story with fantastic elements.  For a good movie, that’s plenty. 

April 2: The Adjustment Bureau (2011 -- George Nolfi)

★★★

Not a terrible way to spend an hour and a half, but there are probably better ways, too.  Matt Damon is quite good as David Norris, and Emily Blunt is an often-engaging Elise.  And they connect on-screen.  And there’s a little Phillip Dick sci-fi , too......meaning that the story isn’t just thrills.  Do we have free will?  If we do, what is it?  These are weighty questions, but in The Adjustment Bureau, they have more of a stoner tone than a philosophical.

 Overall, the boy wants the girl and is very determined to get her; the rest isn’t hard to figure out.  Some of the obstacles to the hero are fun, but this is a Hollywood movie, so the outcome is pre-ordained.  J

April 1: The Darjeeling Limited (2007 -- Wes Anderson)

★★★

A smarmy Christian podcast I heard likes Wes Anderson: they see him as pro-family because his films center on family dynamics and the healing in them.  While I didn’t like their “family-friendly” attitude, the podcasters hit the nail on the head with their point about family dynamics in Anderson’s films.  The subject notwithstanding, the key question in Anderson’s films for me is whether he deals with family dynamics in a real way or through some gauze of cliché, convention, quirk or other distancing mechanism.

It’s distancing mechanisms in Darjeeling Limited.  The three brothers in this film all suffer from grief at the loss of their father and the fleeting – usually absent – affection of their mother, but the movie has them doing cute, stagey actions and speaking in stiff, artificial language around their hurt.  The plot here moves mechanically in a series of set pieces, and the film is burdened with overt symbols like the baggage (guess what it means) and repeated actions (do they TRUST Francis with the passports?).  This tone risks trivializing the very real pain and loss of the characters.

But something halfway works with this approach.  For one thing, the brothers seem almost childishly cute as they pose their way through their sense of loss and the problems this sense has created in their lives, and this childishness creates some sympathy.  I also respond to their movement through healing, initiated in the village and the funeral they’re able to participate in and advanced in their meeting with their conditional-love mother.  It’s corny and stagey, but it’s satisifying to watch them drop their baggage as they get on the departing train.

There are other elements in the movie I like, too.  It has a beautiful color palette of pastels and browns, and there are some great cinematic flourishes.  For example, the crane shot of the three brothers at the market is really skillful and fun as the camera swoops in on each of the three doing his shopping individually.  My favorite cinematic point is the interruption of the story with a series of images of the cars of the train, each interior representing a moment in the brothers’ lives or in the movie itself.  This brief moment of pure cinema is the most pleasing film moment in the movie.

Other things I like about the movie are the fun cameos – Angelica Huston and Barbet Schroeder in particular – and the music, which varies from pop to pop-with-Indian-arrangement to the fun, concluding French song.  These elements all work for me.

Even with all these very fine elements, the ironic distance that characterizes the film limited(!) my response.  While I like so much of what is going on here, and I like the trajectory of the characters, I found it hard to connect to or be really touched by the movie.  Amused? Yes.  Moved? No…