December 3: Harakiri (1919 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

With Harakiri wedged between the first and second Spiders films, Lang goes to a similar toolkit in it.  The camera hardly moves, and while the director uses editing to show simultaneous time, he doesn't create suspense by intercutting here as much as in the other two films.  These characters pose in each episodic scene, and we don’t learn enough to sympathize with any of .  And unlike in the Spiders films, where space and time are very logical and clear, this story has gaps, inconsistencies and unclear points.  It takes some time to figure out the setting of the opening part of the film (shrine or official’s home?), and character motivations are elusive throughout.  At one moment Olaf Anderson loves O-Take-San, and although we don't see the psychology behind the change, he's soon home with his European wife ignoring his abandoned love's pleas for support.  When Olaf returns to Japan, he takes his European wife with him for reasons that are never clear, and he resists claiming his own biracial son until his European wife goes to meet O-Take-San.  Even O-Take-San herself elicits little character sympathy.  Her situation is sad because of its melodramatic circumstances, but rather than taking on any agency in her own life, she simply responds to those around her, from her father to the High Priest to Olaf to Prince Matahari.  Her sole effort at using her own will is to refuse when she’s offered a way out of her problems.  Neither of the two principals engages.

With so little happening technically or narratively, Lang still grabs us to some extent here with exotic visuals.  As in The Golden Sea, every scene of Harakiri is packed with interesting visuals.  Here, Oriental art and furniture decorate the frame, and the gardens have a distinctly Japanese quality to them with overgrown pines framing figures.  Some of Lang’s exterior shots trade in East Asian art composition, too, with small figures in a confined space placed on a larger landscape.  To better show off all this engaging detail, Lang again uses depth of field effectively.  One tour de force moment of his using depth is when O-Take-San comes towards us in the foreground as her father ominously says goodby in the midground against a background of elaborate Japanese decoration.  Likewise, Lang uses depth of field symbolically when the tender of the shrine walks in the foreground past a large midground urn to then head into the background to sleep in the bushes.  All these show off Lang's already thorough grasp of space in the frame.  And in a more cinematic sphere, as Olaf and his naval mates head to the red light district, a subject Lang often turns to, Lang uses red tint rather than a typical blue for the night,.  This little gesture is a hint of the boldness he’ll soon employ in larger, expressionist works.

The short story “Madame Butterfly” inherently lends itself to melodrama given the basic narrative, and Lang combines that with some visual flourish to create a worthwhile film.  But this rendition doesn’t engage us with full characters or involve us in the story, so we’re left with a sequence of episodes that lack a rich unifying unity.  Better films were to come.

November 23: The Spiders/Die Spinnen (1919-20 -- Fritz Lang)

★★★

There’s a giddiness in Spiders that makes this film and sequal worthwhile.   Just as the erstwhile hero,  Kay Hoog, dashes from San Francisco to South America to an underground metropolitan Chinatown with little or tenuous reason, Spiders blasts forward in an orgy of décor, adventure and stunts that often lack a motive other than to pleasure the audience.  Keying on this excess is the way to enjoy the film.

As early as the first scenes of Part 1: The Golden Sea, the viewer knows how the rest of the series will work.  There’s a close-up of a scruffy, tattered sailor hurriedly putting a message in an ornate bottle.  Soon, we cut to a native American dressed as though from a Mayan stele.  The Indian spears the sailor just he throws the bottle into the sea, and the story is begun.

And Spiders gets more elaborate from there.  The sets in San Francisco are stuffed with orientalia: Chinese screens, Persian tapestries, Buddha statues, ornate doorways, Chinese robes and hats, large urns, Moroccan décor.  In the action itself, Kay and the Spiders vie to find a gold treasure hidden under a lost lake that human eyes have never seen and that is in the country of a lost Incan tribe that lives among Mayan ruins.  The Inca sport grand, feathered headdresses and plan human sacrifices to their gods.  Meanwhile, the Spiders are led by a foxy lady in jodhpurs and a Teddy Roosevelt tie, Lio Sha.  

And a lot of the action is as outrageous as the visuals.  At one point, somewhere in South America, Kay spies Lio with some of the gangsters recruiting local cowboys for their expedition to beat Kay at finding the treasure.  Seeing this horde in the saloon, Kay goes in, has a drink, starts a fight and is soon in a standoff with the whole gang.  In realistic terms, it’s hard to see why Kay would've gone in, but in cinematic terms, Kay’s action sets up a great fight scene followed by a cowboy-on-horseback pursuit across the countryside so he can leap into the basket of a hot air balloon that is just taking off.

Part 2: The Diamond Ship is no less over-the-top.  A police raid on an illegal diamond auction leads to the search for a Buddha diamond that will liberate all of Asia, and that search takes Kay and the Spiders first to England and then to the Falkands in search of a pirate treasure there.  The Spiders hypnotize a yogi to get him to divine the location of the jewel, but a crater that spews poisonous gas at night complicates the salvage of the treasure.  There are even Indian spies in turbans in this episode.  Like The Golden Sea, The Diamond Ship is beside itself with outrageousness.

It’s hard not to think of Louis Feuillade’s Les vampires while watching Spiders.  Kay Hoog’s struggle with the Spiders certainly calls to mind Philipe Guérande’s with the Vampires, and character of Spider leader Lio Sha resembles that of Irma Vep.  Robbers wear tight black outfits in both, and there are WW I worries in both.  But the comparison pretty much ends there.  At this point in his career, Lang’s direction is't nearly as controlled or fluid as Feuillade’s, and the stasis that characterizes Spiders despite its excess would make it hard to enjoy 6-1/2 hours of it.

But in Spiders, we can already see some of the techniques and images that will recur in  Lang's work later.  Close-ups abound here, starting with the very first shot, and there is also intercutting to maintain two story lines and, occasionally, create suspense.  We watch the action of cowboys chasing Kay alternate with his acquaintance trying to decide whether to take off in the balloon; later, we switch between Lio being prepared for sacrifice and the troop of cowboys looking for her.  Another typical Langian technique here is use of depth of field.  For instance, the background space is important as Kay stands beside the window of the cantina and we see Lio conspiring in the background; in a later example, we watch Kay as he passes some caged tigers in the background menacing him.  There is also some of Lang's love for flashback in Spiders.  A clear example starts Part 2 as the story flashes back to Kay's discovery of his wife's body and the plastic spider the gang has left as its calling card.

Some of the imagery of Spiders also prefigures that in other Lang films.  The underground Chinese city here calls strongly to mind the underground city of Metropolis, and the menace of water is also strong in both films.  Spider’s cowboys are threatened with drowning when they steal the treasure, just as the workers’ children are in Metropolis.  And caves and catacombs occur in a lot of early Lang.

Spiders is a particular kind of cinematic fun.  Many of the Lang's images have descendents in more recent films.  Kay's adventurous dashing around establishes him as a forebear of Indiana Jones, and the scene with Kay risking death in a compacting shaft has many future echoes, including a very similar scene in Star Wars.  And from an auteur perspective, it’s interesting to pick out elements here that Lang will develop more in the future.  But the strongest pleasure here is the sheer delirium of story and image that rushes onto the screen here.  There’s fun to be had in sitting back and waiting for whatever outrageousness happens next in this film.

November 9: Interstellar (2014 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★

What a disappointment this latest Christopher Nolan film is.  The film creaks with movie clichés and unconcealed pandering to the audience.  From a struggling farm family to several heroic rescues and an evil betrayal, Interstellar tugs at our heartstrings a little too firmly.  The ending could have come out of a 40s melodrama.

Unfortunately, the dialog isn’t much better.  It’s rare that the language of a film takes me out of the movie and brings home to me that that I'm watching actors reading lines, but in Interstellar, that’s exactly what happened.  The stilted language that Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie Foy, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine have to speak feels more like that of a sophomore physics lab report than a conversation.  And while the script mostly avoids the narrative gimmicks that Nolan can employ (though there’s an echo of Inception when we learn that an hour near the black hole is seven years in earth time), the sprawl of the The Dark Knight Rises is much in evidence here.  But while it’s hard to stay engaged in this film for its nearly three-hour run time, at least the score by Hans Zimmer cues us in on how you should respond to a character or event when we're uncertain.

Interstellar has wonderful production values and a lot of good acting that remains firm in the face of some terrible writing.  And it’s pleasant to watch the echoes of other sci fi touchstones like 2001 and its reflections on helmet faceplates.  But there’s nothing much at the core of all this technique in Interstellar, which makes the movie's thee-hour length seem like 21 earth years.

November 4: TBA (2014 -- tba)

October 31: TBA (1944 -- tba)

October 29: TBA (1961 -- tba)

September 11: Edge of Tomorrow (2014 -- Doug Liman)

★★★

This is a fun summer movie.  We have sci-fi action Tom Cruise again, but this year it’s fun watching him play against type.  Rather than the in-control hero we’re used to, he starts as a man of little courage who grows into the role of hero through a series of time reboots that give him the opportunity to hone his combat skills.  He repeatedly goes into battle against the alien Mimics, gets killed, and restarts the day in J-Squad on the morning of the invasion he is to fight in.  In addition to building his fighting skills, he picks up a love interest, Rose Vrataski, who has previously had the time reboot power, and Dr. Carter, a scientist who is trying to figure out what is happening. 

Edge of Tomorrow is a fun action thriller though most of its run.  The repeated scenes of the human counter attack on the beach echo the Normandy opening of Saving Private Ryan, except here we get lots of laser beams, slashing robotic tentacles and ugly, nimble aliens all jammed into the battle.  And Doug Liman takes the film beyond the beach landing on a romp to Paris to discover the Omega alien hidden away in the basement of the Louvre.  It's all fun.

Another point of interest here is watching the same series of events repeated with each reboot.  We experience most of the detail of first day as we run follow Major Cage's activities, but Liman then removes and tweeks details with each retelling to get Major Cage further into the action.  There’re more than a little fun in watching the witty interplay between the action of the current iteration of events and our experience of the first and other versions.  This technique is a clever and engaging use of the time travel trope.

Which is not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is without problems.  The most limiting element of the film is that the rules of its universe are so complicated that we’re left with lots of exposition and can still be confused about how or why something is happening.  To feel that the ending of the film isn’t a cheat, for example, it’s important to know that the killing of an Alpha would reset time and that Cage couldn’t come back to try to kill the Omega if that happened.  This isn’t an intuitive element of the film, and it's the kind of detail that the audience has to pick up on among all the SFX.  The main drawback to the film is that Edge of Tomorrow has a complicated set of alternative-universe rules that are as central to the action as they are byzantine.

But for those of us wanting a sci-fi action thrill with lots of special effects and a dribble of a love story, Edge of Tomorrow is perfect.  And for the true sci fi aficionados, the film has also offers a layer of concept.