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……