104 in 2009 Week 30: Trouble in Paradise and Made in USA

This was a really disappointing week, which is part of why it's taken me so long to get this entry done. I don't mean that in the sense that both movies were terrible - in fact, they both fall on the "good" side of the spectrum. I mean it in the literal sense of disappointment - both movies should have been a lot better than they were. Perhaps frustrating is a better word. Yes . . . in fact, I think I may even have used it in one of the reviews. Frustrating. It was a frustrating week.

Trouble in Paradise
Ernst Lubitsch, 1932

Veteran thieves (and lovers) Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) and the surname-less Lily (Miriam Hopkins) plot to steal a large amount of money from Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), the heiress to a large cosmetics fortune by having Gaston pose as her secretary. The plan falls apart when Gaston and Mariette begin to fall in love.

Trouble in Paradise is a highly acclaimed classic, and there are many things to admire about it – the generally clever, snappy dialogue; the great two-man act of Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles; Miriam Hopkins’ lively performance, and the refreshing pre-code amorality. Unfortunately, Trouble in Paradise is a romantic comedy that centers on a dud of a romance, which renders many of the positive elements moot. Marshall and Francis, while just fine individually, have very little chemistry together – and what little they have is smothered by the clumsy wink-wink-nudge-nudge-aren’t-we-getting-hot-and-heavy tone of most of their scenes together. It seems that every time they talk, they lean in close, as if to kiss. . . she closes her eyes. . . and then, unmoving, they start delivering their lines to the camera, as if the other person wasn’t even there. I never once believed these characters even knew each other, much less loved each other. I’m at a loss as to how this could have happened – Lubitsch was clearly capable of directing a relationship, as the scenes between Marshall and Hopkins positively sparkle, particularly the early courtship sequence in which they reveal just how many things they have stolen from each other.

It’s very frustrating. There are a lot of things I liked about this movie. Some I liked an awful lot. But it’s all built on such a shaky foundation.

5.5/10

Made in USA
Jean-Luc Godard, 1967

A reporter (Anna Karina) journeys to Atlantic City (no, not the real one) to investigate the murder of her former lover at the hands of the police. Politics ensue.

This is a difficult movie for me to wrap my head around, not only in terms of the fairly obscure narrative, but in terms of figuring out how I feel about it. On the one hand, it’s a gorgeous movie. Godard’s (or, perhaps, Raoul Coutard’s) affinity for bright, primary colors reaches near fetishistic levels, and it’s consistently a wonder to behold. There are probably no more than a handful of shots that don’t have prominent red, white, and blue elements. I never got tired of looking at this movie. There is also a scene, about a half hour in, in which Anna Karina argues about the nature of words and sentences with a bartender and customer, after which Marianne Faithful (another patron of the bar) spontaneously sings a song. Taken on its own, this is a tremendous piece, easily one of my favorite individual scenes that I’ve seen in quite some time.

The problem then becomes putting it all together. The second half of Made in USA gets bogged down in endless political diatribes played from a reel to reel tape recorder. A lot of the energy, which is an especially critical element of a Godard film, drains out of the picture, and while the climax is quite interesting, it’s followed by yet another political discussion, this one even more ham-handed than the rest. The thing just can’t hold together as a complete experience. It’s a shame, really. I want to love this movie – and I do love parts of it – but I can’t seem to muster much more than a mild liking.

6/10


Progress: 68 (Par +8)

104 in 2009 Week 29: The General and Chinese Roulette

Just two this week, but I also got the chance to rewatch Alphaville, which I saw a few years ago (March 19, 2006). As I mentioned in my review of A Woman is a Woman, I hated it at the time - but after enjoying Woman and Pierrot Le Fou immensely, I started to wonder if I had misjudged it. I'm pleased to say that this is the case - while it's not nearly the equal of the other two, it's a solid, interesting film in its own right. I've re-rated it from a 2 to a 7, which is very nearly the largest jump any movie has made on my scale. It is beaton only by The Limey, which, over the course of several viewings, moved its way up from a 4.5 to a 10. But enough about that, on to this week's movies. . .

The General
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1927

A southern train engineer (Keaton) is unable to enlist in the Confederate Army because his job is too important. The love of his life, Annabelle (Marion Mack), rejects him for cowardice because he doesn’t enlist – but he gets the chance to prove his bravery when Union soldiers steal his train and kidnap Annabelle.

Wow. When you come across something like this, it’s always kind of exciting. I’d always written Buster Keaton off because of my general dislike for the extreme mugging that seems to be an inherent part of the comedy of the era – but it turns out that what he does is something else altogether. This is a comedy that is played almost completely straight, with big budget action sequences and a story that could work just as well without the jokes. I have to give a certain degree of credit to the new 2003 score by the Alloy Orchestra – while it sounds a tad modern and synth-ey, it accompanies the action very well and almost never lets on that this is a comedy, which makes it all the funnier. I can’t imagine how painful this could be if there were a cartoony score full of whistles and cymbal hits. Of course, somewhere out there that painful score may well exist – silent movies rarely had specific scores, so for the most part, the local theater played whatever they thought was appropriate. Is it appropriate to take the score into account when considering the effect of a silent movie? Perhaps not, but at the same time, music has such a tremendous impact that it’s nearly impossible not to.

The really amazing thing, though, are the ridiculously difficult and dangerous stunts and gags that Keaton pulls off, without the use of a double and usually on a fast-moving train. We’re all used to extreme computer-generated stunts now, and they’re pulled off very smoothly, so it almost doesn’t register just how absurd the things he does are – like sitting on the front of a moving train and throwing a large chunk of lumber at another chunk in order to bounce it away before the train hits. Hell, they even blew up a bridge with a locomotive driving across it. Not a model bridge, mind you, a real bridge. With a real train. And the whole time, Keaton keeps his wonderful deadpan expression. Fantastic.

9/10

Chinesiches Roulette (Chinese Roulette)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1977

A married couple (Margit Carstensen and Alexander Allerson), their respective lovers (Anna Karina and Ulli Lommel), and the hired help (Brigitte Mira, Volker Spengler, and Macha Meril) all converge on a mansion at the behest of the angry, polio-stricken daughter (Andrea Schober), who intends to manipulate them all into honest expressions of hatred and cruelty.
The word dysfunctional is often used to describe relationships, especially in fiction. Here, I think it applies to the individuals as well – the people in this movie don’t seem like they should be able to function on their own, much less in relation to one another. Basically, Chinese Roulette is an exercise in getting these people together and be horribly, horribly cruel to one another. At this, it succeeds spectacularly – and I'm not damning with faint praise, it actually is fascinating to watch the dynamics between the characters, with all of their sublimated rage. The Chinese Roulette game itself, which takes up almost the entire last half hour of the movie, serves to provide structure and impetus to the cruelty: The players divide into two teams. One team picks a member of the other team, and then the second team asks a series of questions (for instance, “what would be an appropriate death for this person?”) to try and figure out which of them was selected. Without a superhumanly friendly crowd, it would take a sick, sick bastard to want to play this game. As you can guess, it was the highlight of the movie.

The problem is, as much as I enjoyed wallowing in anger and misery, the plot is too thin for the already short running time, and it never really amounts to anything. The very end is a total cheat as well, a way to artificially create a mystery that doesn’t really add any meaning to anything else that happened. Also, despite receiving top billing (most likely, a good chunk of the funding came from her name), Anna Karina was criminally underused. There’s definitely plenty of good in this movie, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the problems.

4.5/10

Progress: 66 (Par + 8)

104 in 2009 Week 28: Orpheus, The Firemen's Ball, The Quiet Earth, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, and The Man Who Never Was

A big five movies this week. Or, at least, four movies and a. . .thing.

Orphee (Orpheus)
Jean Cocteau, 1950

Orpheus (Jean Marais), a poet, becomes ensnared in a deadly love quadrangle (love square?) involving his wife, Euridyce (Marie Dea), the physical embodiment of death (Maria Casares), and death’s servant/chauffeur (Francoise Perier).

Orpheus is a wildly uneven movie, full of striking images (the bombed out buildings in the world of the dead) and clever conceits (the explanation for why mirrors serve as the gateway to the world of the dead) that coexist with effects that were crude even for the time (all of the reversed action) and bizarrely tone-deaf farce (Orpheus’s attempts not to look at his wife). The negatives have a way of canceling out the positives – because the effects are so crude, and the artifice so apparent, they fantastical elements never really reach the level of surrealism, instead seeming silly most of the time.

The terrible and intrusive narration doesn’t help matters, particularly with the oddly defensive and apologetic introduction that tells us the story of Orpheus is a legend and it doesn’t matter when it takes place. It’s really not a relevant point to make, though, because this movie has about as much to do with the myth of Orpheus as O Brother, Where Art Thou has to do with The Odyssey – that is to say, there are names in common, and plot points, but they’re all twisted around to the point of losing all of the original meaning. This isn’t inherently a problem, but Orpheus would probably stand better on its own, without the clumsy attempt to graft on that additional layer of meaning. In fact, despite the title, Orpheus himself is really a supporting character – the way the movie concludes makes it clear that it is Heurtebise (the chauffeur)’s story being told. This explains why I spent most of the running time wondering why Huertebise was so much more interesting and likable than the ostensible lead. I have to give Cocteau credit for that.

Overall, though, it was a pretty big disappointment.

4/10

Hori, ma Panenko (The Firemen’s Ball)
Milos Forman, 1968

The fire brigade in a small Czech town throws a ball to honor their former chairman, who just turned 86. Everything goes wrong, and they are powerless to stop it.

The Firemen’s Ball was a daring, subversive film in its day – to the point of being banned in its native country. The pathetic attempts of the firemen to exert control over the masses are an obvious metaphor for the oppressive government, and viewed in that light, this is a brutally satirical film. Unfortunately, time has not been kind, and what once seemed dangerous is now kind of quaint. Normally I wouldn’t hold that against a movie – but the problem is that The Firemen’s Ball doesn’t really offer much beyond its governmental critique. There are a few laughs, to be sure, but no distinctive characters to speak of and it drags, even though it runs less than 90 minutes.

3.5/10

The Quiet Earth
Geoff Murphy, 1985

A scientist (Bruno Lawrence) wakes one morning to discover that every other living being has mysteriously disappeared – and that it may be related to the project he was working on. As the guilt and isolation slowly drive him to the point of suicide, he begins to notice that he’s not alone. . .

This is not your typical sci-fi epic. It’s basically a three-character piece. There are other actors and characters around, but only as corpses. And for the first half of the movie, it’s a one-man show. Fortunately, Bruno Lawrence has the chops to pull it off. Conceptually, a lot of what we see during this segment is kind of standard end of the world fare, recalling (just off the top of my head) Day of the Triffids and Dawn of the Dead, among others – but it remains compelling and distinct due in large part to Lawrence’s performance. Murphy also manages to generate some fantastic images of an empty world, with the saxophone/rain shot as a standout.

Once the other characters begin to enter the story, it becomes considerably less interesting. It’s never bad, but there seems to be a distinct lack of inspiration at this point, with the two men and one woman falling into exactly the sort of conflicts you would expect them to. Fortunately, things swing back around in the last twenty minutes, as we delve into the dimensional shift (or whatever it was) that caused the disappearance in the first place. Things start to get kind of strange at this point, and it all leads to an ending that doesn’t entirely make sense, but makes just enough sense to be satisfying.

It’s a flawed film overall, but interestingly so, and I liked it a lot.

8/10

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
Steve Oedekirk, 2002

No.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA
HOOOOOOOOOOHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That was the sound that I didn’t make during this movie.

Yes, that is hyperbole. No, I don’t want to discuss it further.

1.5/10

The Man Who Never Was
Ronald Neame, 1956

The true story of a British plot to mislead Nazi intelligence by planting the dead body of a man who never really existed, carrying forged documents.

The Man Who Never Was is two movies in one. The first is essentially a procedural, detailing the development of the misinformation campaign and the struggle to avoid exposing the truth after the plan is enacted. It’s a terrific story, well told, and surprisingly suspenseful given the low-key nature of most of the events that take place. There’s a wonderful sequence in the middle of the film where the corpse is prepared for service in an underground morgue while an air raid (played out as sound only) takes place. If this is all there was to The Man Who Never Was, I would be very enthusiastic about it.

The problem is, there’s another movie interspersed into it – a terrible melodrama about a librarian who is in love with a doomed pilot. Gloria Grahame, who is usually very good, overplays the librarian role horrendously, and seems to have refused to wear makeup during the shoot (they could have lit the entire set with the shine from her face). She can’t be solely blamed, though, because the material is also extremely florid and overblown. Eventually she plays a key part in the procedural, but this whole plotline does far more damage than good. This, coupled with the over the top music (noticing a pattern here?) and the portentously intoned poetry that bookends the piece (how about now?) drag a movie that would otherwise be an 8 or an 8.5 quite a way down the scale.

6/10

Progress: 64 (Par +8)

104 in 2009 Week 27: The Illusionist, Tsotsi, Last Year at Marienbad, and Saturn 3

We kick off the second half of the year with four movies, putting us that much farther ahead.

The Illusionist
Neil Burger, 2006

A stage magician (Edward Norton) butts heads with the crown prince of Vienna (Rufus Sewell) – first over a shared love (Jessica Biel), later as an attempt to avenge her murder at the Prince’s hand.

When The Illusionist was released, I completely overlooked it. After all, it was the “other” period piece about magicians that came out around the same time as the superior The Prestige. It may not be a match for Christopher Nolan’s film, but it’s a decent, if unexciting piece in its own right, and is certainly worth seeing.

The film’s greatest strength is the cinematography. Everything is bathed in shades of yellow and brown, with lots of blown-out, gauzy highlights and deep shadows. It’s all quite lovely to look at. The acting is a bit more of a mixed bag. Edward Norton is terrific as Eisenheim the performer, but never seems to quite get a handle on his off-stage persona. Rufus Sewell is effective but a little hammy, and Jessica Biel is kind of a non-presence. Surprisingly to me, Paul Giamatti, as the inspector caught in the middle between Eisenheim and the Prince, runs away with the picture, though. I’m not really a fan, based on the typical Giamatti persona that seems to show up in nearly all of his movies, but he impressed me quite a bit here.

Unfortunately, despite the beautiful cinematography, the interesting story, and the strength of Giamatti’s performance, things just never really come to life. This is a classic example of a whole that is less than the sum of its parts. There’s a sort of malaise over the whole thing – events just kind of happen, and the dramatic moments don’t really have any drama. This is a problem, because the lengths that several characters go to require a certain degree of passion, which just never comes across. To some degree, this is by design – there’s a very deliberate old-fashioned feel to the filmmaking – but something went wrong between intent and execution.

6.5/10

Tsotsi
Gavin Hood, 2006

A young thug (Presley Chweneyagae) nicknamed Tsotsi (which literally translates as thug) accidentally kidnaps an infant and becomes a better person because of it.

Two facts about Tsotsi immediately come to mind. First, it’s an academy award winner for best foreign film. Second, it comes from the director of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. These two facts create very different expectations. The truth, of course, lies in between. What we have in Tsotsi is an interesting story that isn’t as fully fleshed out as it needed to be, probably a result of compressing it down from the original novel.

The main issue in that regard is that Tsotsi only interacts with the child in a few scenes, which reduces it to a life-changing symbol. The story still makes sense because we know that a child represents innocence, and that in order to care for it, he has to take on a new role he’s uncomfortable with, but it remains abstract. This is compounded by the fact that Chweneyagae’s performance is (by design, most likely) somewhat inscrutable. Tsotsi’s friend Aap actually had a more fully realized and motivated arc.

On the plus side, most of the scenes are very effective when taken individually, with the murder on the subway and Tsotsi’s terrorizing of a crippled man as standouts. The lighting is very aggressive, in that 80’s era Joel Silver production sort of way. I definitely enjoyed looking at it. In the end, I can’t quite recommend it, but you could do far worse.

4.5/10

L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)
Alain Resnais, 1962

I’m not even going to try.

This movie is pretty damned unsettling. From the constantly prowling camera to the dissonant organ score to Sacha Pitoeff’s Karloff-like glowering and Giorgio Albertazzi’s Lugosi-stare, one could be forgiven for thinking this was a horror movie, rather than a French art film. Throughout the film, I had a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if something terrible was about to happen or – even worse, that it was already happening, and I just didn’t recognize it. And perhaps I was right – after watching the whole thing, I am leaning toward viewing it as a ghost story. There’s as much evidence for that as there is for any other interpretation, although to be honest, it probably doesn’t matter very much.

Aesthetically speaking, Last Year at Marienbad is pretty terrific. The hotel in which it takes place is filled with long, ornate corridors that the camera continuously roams through, which are complimented by a series of paintings that represent additional space – a room, a garden, another corridor – that illuminate the artifice/reality dichotomy that pervades the entire picture. The garden that serves as the central location looks almost like a painting itself – if I didn’t see the actors walking through it in three dimensions, I’d be tempted to assume that’s what it was. Really, I could go on and on about all of the fascinating things in this movie. I haven’t even touched on the frozen people, the matchstick game, or Delphine Seyrig’s bizarre poses.

That’s not to say the movie is perfect – it is one of the artiest of the art films, filled with surrealistic imagery, a plot that falls somewhere between perfunctory and non-existent, and no easy answers to any question you might have (no answers period, really). This isn’t necessarily a problem – in fact, I tend to enjoy that sort of thing - but it took almost a half an hour before the movie started to work its magic over me. For that half hour, all of the artistry tended to feel a lot more like wankery, and it was pretty rough going. Once I got over the hump, it was very rewarding – but I can’t really fault anyone for giving up before that point.

8.5/10

Saturn 3
Stanley Donen, 1980

Alex (Farrah Fawcett) and Adam (Kirk Douglas) live alone at the remote hydroponics lab Saturn 3. Their peaceful life is disrupted when Captain James (Harvey Keitel) shows up with an experimental robot that is programmed directly from his brain. Unfortunately, the programming in the captain’s brain includes murderous rage and an uncontrollable lust for Alex.

Hoo-boy. This one’s a stinker. The first shot of the movie manages to rip off not one, but two more successful films, with a lengthy overhead flyby of a large spaceship (a la Star Wars) and a score that’s trying its best to be Also Sprach Zarathustra. Things get a little more original after that, but they also get considerably more boring. The pacing grinds to a halt and the dubbing of Harvey Keitel’s voice keeps him from ever feeling like part of a scene, which makes it hard to get immersed. Not that there’s much to get immersed in – the characters all have one dimension, at best. And that’s being generous. I would expect a lot better from Stanley Donen and Martin Amis (yes, you read those names right).

This movie ultimately leaves me with only two thoughts – first, what kind of twisted spaceship designer would put a hatch to the outside in the locker room, and then string razor wire across the opening? Second, of all the ways I could eventually die, being strangled by a naked 64-year-old Kirk Douglas is somewhere near the bottom.

2/10

Progress: 59 (Par +5)