104 in 2009 Week 35: Silent Film Week!

Welcome to SILENT FILM WEEK! All silents, all the time. No talkies here, nosirree.

Okay, that's not entirely true. I also watched Persepolis - but that was a movie club pick, so not my fault.

Then I watched the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Just because. But I still watched five silents, so I'm still calling this SILENT FILM WEEK! Let's begin, shall we?

Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin)
Sergei Eisenstein, 1925

Fed up with eating maggoty meat, the crew of the Potemkin rise up against their captain, which inspires the rest of Russia to do the same.

I’ll say it here, and I’m sure I’m not the first: Odessa Steps. The massacre on the Odessa Steps is such a towering achievement, such an incredible and influential sequence, that it renders the rest of the movie kind of redundant. After all, it’s really not much of a story. Even those who laud it tend to view the plot as cartoonishly simple, at best. The lack of characters contributes to this – There are very few identifiable individuals. After the half hour mark, I don’t think anyone even has a name. This is clearly a deliberate choice, and a perfectly legitimate one – the movie is about the uprising of the proletariat, as a collective force. Focusing on individuals would undermine that. At the same time, though, it doesn’t leave much to focus on or develop. No, the pleasures of Potemkin lie purely in the details – Eisenstein’s sense of rhythm and editing skill, his innovative use of montage – or, to put it simply, everything that is on display on the Odessa Steps. Sadly, this also means you wind up with a movie that is more important than it is watchable.

5.5/10

Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera)
Dziga Vertov, 1929

Plot? We don’t need no steeeenking plot.

It does not inspire confidence when a movie starts off with several pages of text explaining that it’s a little different from other movies, because they’re all soooo conventional and it’s time to break free of blah, blah, blah.

Fortunately, my apprehension was somewhat misplaced, as Man with a Movie Camera is actually quite good. Granted, it suffers from the lack of plot and characters – my feeling is that the beauty of film is that it’s a composite art form, which takes elements of theater, literature, photography, etc. . . and if you deliberately set out to exclude some of those elements, you are ignoring your full potential. But it’s hard to be too upset about that limitation when what the things that do wind up on screen are just so. . ..neat. From slice-of life scenes of contemporary Russia to strange stop-motion sequences to a trip inside the editing room, where this very movie is being created, Vertov manages to keep the imagery novel throughout the running time. If there is anything that resembles a plot or a through-line, it’s Vertov’s continual focus on the movie as an element of itself (ooh, how meta!). We are repeatedly shown footage of cameramen recording the footage that we see immediately before or after, and the titular man with a movie camera is frequently composited into shots as a sort of supernatural, almost god-like being. Then there’s the afore-mentioned visits to the editing room, which capture the sense of a movie being created from the inside better than anything else. I’ve ever seen.

I’m starting to sound more enthusiastic about this movie than I really am. That’s bound to happen, the more I get into the details of the piece. Ultimately, though, I don’t think Vertov’s experiment was entirely successful. Sixty-eight minutes is a long time to go without something to focus on, and by the end, it’s hard to be certain what was really accomplished. It’s important that the effort was made, though, because this is sort of experimentation is what ultimately lead to modern film. And even as (partial) failures go, it’s a very enjoyable and interesting one.

7/10

The Son of the Sheik
George Fitzmaurice, 1926

Ahmed (Rudolph Valentino), the son of the Sheik (Valentino again), falls in love with Yasmin (Vilma Banky), a dancer. Her father and his associates rob and torture Ahmed, who mistakenly believes that Yasmin lured him into a trap. He kidnaps her in order to exact revenge.

This one didn’t really work for me. Part of that is the odd story, which progresses in fits and starts and skips over important parts (like Ahmed and Yasmin’s initial budding romance). Part of it is the generally cheap look – there’s some great desert photography, but most of the movie takes place on a few small-ish sets. Mostly, though, I just don’t but Rudolph Valentino in the lead. He looks like a petulant high-schooler and can’t seem to move any part of his face very much except for his eyebrows, which go into overdrive to compensate. He’s a total screen presence vacuum, and wanders through most of the movie relying on his friends/bodyguards/enforcers for the muscle to turn his whiney requests into action. Less of a leading man, more of a captain of the football team. You know, the douchey one that everyone hated. The kind that would kidnap a girl and rape her (that’s what it looks like, anyway) as revenge for a betrayal. I’m talking about Ahmed, not (necessarily) the football captain on that last point.

On the other hand, though, once they slap some old-age makeup and a fake beard on him to play the Sheik, it’s a whole different story. Suddenly there’s a touch of gravitas. I thought for a moment that maybe the filmmakers were engaging in a bit of misdirection, and that Ahmed was turning out to be such a little turd because the Sheik was going to step in and be the true hero of the story. Alas, this was not to be – The Sheik remains tangential to the plot, providing little more than an opportunity for some (admittedly very impressive) split-screen shots and a helping hand in the fight scenes. So we’re left with Ahmed as our hero. I think I might have preferred a movie about Ahmed’s friend/bodyguard, who looked like a cartoon rendition of Jayne Cobb and loved to strangle things. He was certainly the most memorable thing about the movie.

3/10

Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, 2007

The animated story of Marjane Satrapi’s (Gabrielle Lopes Benites and Chiara Mastroianni) childhood and teen years growing up in Iran and Vienna.

Persepolis features simplistic but beautiful hand-drawn animation, which does a lot to add interest to what is, ultimately, a fairly standard biographical tale. This is not to say that the story itself is completely uninteresting, but the animation gives it a more expressionistic feel, which in turn provides a more direct view of how Marjane thought and felt about the events portrayed. The details are better able to come to the fore, and it comes to life in a way that a live-action version, for instance, would not. After all, in basic terms, what really happens? Marjane grows disgusted with Iranian culture and leaves for the west, is unable to cope with life there, returns to Iran, is unable to accept life in Iran (again), and finally moves to Paris. Not much there. But when you start throwing in bread swans and snake-like nuns and magically transforming memories of her boyfriend in Vienna, you start to have something.

I suppose I should also mention that it’s quite funny in a lot of places, and how nice it is that Marjane is so not-idealized. What I’m ultimately saying is that the story may not have much drive, but the telling of the story goes a long way toward making up for that. And the animation isn’t the only part of that telling that helps. It’s just the most important part.

7/10

The Shock
Lambert Hillyer, 1923

Wilse Dillman (Lon Chaney), a crippled, cold-hearted hitman, is hired to stake out a small-town banker (William Welsh). He falls in love with the banker’s daughter (Virginia Valli), turns over a new leaf, and decides to defend them against his former employer. Earthquakes ensue.

This movie has one thing going for it, and that’s Lon Chaney. He’s a strong actor and always interesting to watch, even if the script doesn’t provide him much support – and this one doesn’t. Key stretches are skipped over (like Dillman’s conversion from evil to good) and there’s an extremely heavy over-reliance on title cards to tell the story. Their frequent use, great length, and ridiculously florid language make the whole thing feel more like a moving picture book than a movie. Other than Chaney, the only thing of interest throughout most of the running time is the occasional bit of bizarre hilarity, such as the scene in which a doctor, emerging from the room in which he is tending to the banker’s daughter, who was recently caught in an explosion, walks straight up to her fiancée and says “you better call it off, son. It’s not looking as pretty as it did.” Hell of a doctor.

Things do pick up in the second half, when Dillman must infiltrate the criminal underworld to steal some incriminating documents. This material plays out much more smoothly, with far fewer intertitle summaries, and the difference compared to the first half of the movie is night and day. Unfortunately, it all leads up to nothing, as our heroes are saved by a fortuitous earthquake. Yes, you read that right. Even the movie itself has to throw in the suggestion (without committing fully to the idea) that it was a response to Dillman’s prayers because there’s no other even remotely dramatically satisfying way to justify it. To make matters worse, the earthquake doesn’t just give Dillman an opening to turn the tables – it just kills the bad guys and saves the good guys. We have earthquake, we have brief romantic coda, and we’re done. The plot completely disengages from the characters.

At least Chaney got the girl this time.

2.5/10

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
Julian Schnabel, 2007

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) struggles to find meaning in life after a stroke leaves him paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking his left eye.

I liked it quite a bit, particularly the technical aspects. Had some trouble telling several of the female characters apart, which is strange. Unfortunately, I wound up watching the English dubbed version instead of the original French, but at least most of the actors dubbed themselves. For some reason, I don’t feel like I have a lot to say about it. But it was good.

8/10

La Chute de la Maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher)
Jean Epstein, 1928

Sickly Madeleine Usher (Marguerite Gance) dies just as her husband Roderick (Jean Debucourt) finishes painting her portrait. Or does she?

While a fairly poor adaptation of Poe’s story (what’s this husband/wife nonsense?), Epstein’s version of Usher is a terrific piece when considered on its own terms. The visual design is a bizarre mix of the abstract and impressionistic, with light bulbs serving as stars in the sky and a very Caligari-esque mausoleum, and the more realistic but still otherworldly interiors of the Usher mansion, which are cavernous open spaces that stand mostly empty with only a few small pieces of furniture. Debucourt’s Usher is at times terrifying to look at – insane, but with a strange childishness that makes it very creepy. Watch for the way his eyes glaze over near the end, as he awaits Madeleine’s return. I think he even surpasses the great Vincent Price in the role. Of course, he’s helped by Epstein’s innovative camera tricks, including extreme close-ups, double and triple exposures, and even something that looked almost like a snorricam.

The (sadly OOP) DVD features an interesting translation as well. Rather than replace the French intertitles, which are hand-drawn and very striking, with English ones, or subtitle the intertitle screens, the producers have opted to have an actor read the titles in English when they appear. A sort of inverse subtitle, you might say. It’s actually quite effective, both in keeping the audience off-balance (that’s not how you present translations!) and in establishing a fantastic, storybook sort of mood. The score, produced in 1990 and featuring medieval orchestration, is fantastic as well. If the damn thing wasn’t out of print, I would absolutely be adding it to my collection.

8.5/10

Progress: 84 (Par +14)

104 in 2009 Week 34: Never on Sunday and Je T'aime, Je T'aime

Keeping pace. . .

Pote tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday)
Jules Dassin, 1960

Homer (Dassin), a snobbish American philosopher, decides that it is his mission in life to improve the life of Illia (Melina Mercouri), a famous local prostitute in Greece.

Never on Sunday is an overly simplistic parable about the clash between intellectual elitism from the developed world and the simple, earthy pleasures of the native-folk. To be honest, it’s kind of condescending – and it fails dramatically because the central conflict isn’t really resolved, it’s sidestepped – Illia returns to her earlier, carefree ways not because she realizes that she prefers it that way, but because she finds out Homer made a deal with a local mob boss.

That said, it’s still a very beautiful movie with a strong central performance from Melina Mercouri and a memorable title song. Dassin, as Homer, can’t hope to match her performance – but I do have to give him credit for casting himself in such a thankless, unlikeable role.

4.5/10

Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime
Alain Resnais, 1968

Claude (Claude Rich), who has just recovered from an attempted suicide, is recruited by a team of scientists to serve as a guinea pig in a time-travel experiment. The experiment quickly spins out of control, and he finds himself jumping around to various points in his life, particularly those involving his relationship with Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot).

As I did several weeks ago with Anna, I’m going to have to throw in a disclaimer here – Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime is not officially available. . .well, anywhere, actually. As such, I was not able to enjoy such features as an official translation – and the subtitles I did have were somewhat. . . sparse. That said, enough of it was translated that I do feel justified in giving a rating this time.

Like Resnais’ earlier Last Year at Marienbad, most of the running time of Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime is devoted to the non-chronological presentation of moments that cover an extended period of time. This time, however, the narrative is much easier to follow, with the clearly presented sci-fi context and the single-minded focus on a single character. It’s also more effective and more emotionally resonant, and the central conflict (guilt and regret vs. Marienbad’s persuasion) feels weightier.

At the same time, though, it lacks the aesthetic pleasures of Marienbad. Resnais generally eschews the bright primary colors and gleeful artifice that one typically associates with the French New Wave in favor of a bland, dingy, even ugly palate of browns and tans and greys. It’s a logical choice – the earthy look keeps things grounded, and makes the occasional splash of color more prominent, but compared to the gorgeous deep focus and crisp shadows of Marienbad, it comes up short. The design of the time machine, though, is great. All in all, it’s a solid, interesting piece, even if it lacks that crucial bit of pizzaz, and I suspect that I might like it better on a repeat viewing, especially with a more complete translation.

7.5/10

Progress:77 (Par +9)

104 in 2009 Week 33: Fahrenheit 451 and L'Age D'Or

And we're late again.

Fahrenheit 451
Francois Truffaut, 1961

In the future, where books are outlawed, a fireman (Oskar Werner) is drawn into the underground world of reading, which leads to the complete destruction of his comfortable life.

I would have loved to have seen a half-hour version of this story. An episode of the Twilight Zone, perhaps. Basically, what I’m saying is that it’s a story that revolves almost entirely around its central conceit, that of a world where firemen burn books instead of put out fires. It’s a fun idea, an interesting one, but it’s also a very simple inversion that doesn’t have enough nuance to sustain an entire movie. The rest of the running time is made up of fairly standard thriller material, which is only moderately effective. The penultimate scene, though, in which our hero is introduced to the book people, is fantastic and inspired.

6.5/10

L’Age D’Or
Luis Bunuel, 1930

There’s a documentary about scorpions, and then there’s some catholics, and a kid gets killed with a shotgun and a cow walks through a bedroom and – ah, hell, it’s a surrealist movie. Let’s just say weird stuff happens.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the last Bunuel/Dali collaboration, although I did find things to like about it. Several of the images were quite striking, but without some sort of connection between the vignettes or a real sense of forward momentum, it quickly became kind of tiring and dull. Fortunately, the movie was extremely short, so this didn’t become a huge issue. My feelings about L’Age D’Or are basically the same, except that it’s a lot longer.

To be fair, Bunuel and Dali make a lot more of an effort to link the events over the course of the movie, and there are even a few characters that are involved throughout. Nonetheless, it’s still basically a series of non-sequiter vignettes of varying interest filled with surreal images that are all over the place in terms of effectiveness. The surrealism is hurt, I think, by the general crudeness of the production (typical of the era, not particular to this movie). To make that sort of thing work, you need a real sense of reality that you can then distort. With effects, editing, and especially sound that are as rough as this, things that don’t mesh with what we expect to see don’t feel surreal, they just feel wrong – like mistakes. Of course, I can intellectually understand that they aren’t mistakes, but I can’t get that important visceral reaction that makes surrealism so compelling. It’s the same sort of problem I tend to have with Cocteau’s work, particularly Blood of the Poet.

3/10

Progress: 75 (Par +9)

104 in 2009 Week 32: Blast of Silence and Wild Strawberries

Blast of Silence
Allen Baron, 1961

You (Allen Baron) get hired to kill a low-level mob boss and spend a few days around Christmas time tailing him in preparation. Will you be able to go through with it? Will your high school girlfriend deter you? Do you etc? You! You! You! You!

The most interesting thing about Blast of Silence is the narration, which is delivered in 2nd-person form (“you walk into a bar, you wonder if someone is following you,” etc). This is quite arresting, since you almost never hear that sort of thing in a movie. It also gives the proceedings a fabulous sense of immediacy right off the bat. Unfortunately, it also makes Baron's Frankie Bono feel like a bit of a cipher, despite the fact that you are given a whole mess of information about him – the narration makes him seem like a stand-in for – well, you. The audience. I guess that makes it pretty clear why this type of narration is so rarely used, but as an experiment, it’s fairly interesting.

Otherwise, the plot is pretty standard, but the performances are strong, particularly (Larry Tucker), who has a shockingly naturalistic air about him. The best scenes belong to him.

7/10

Wild Strawberries
Ingmar Bergman, 1957

Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom), an elderly doctor, travels with his daughter in law (Ingrid Thulin) to receive an honorary degree. Along the way, through flashbacks and hallucinations, he confronts the choices he's made in his life and the effect they've had on the people he loves.

Dr. Borg is the nexus around which everything in this movie orbits. He’s in nearly every scene, and the few that take place without him are his flashbacks/imagination, so he’s still present in an authorial capacity. It takes a particular sort of presence to support a movie in that way, but Bergman found himself just such a presence in Victor Sjostrom. He’s so good, in fact, that it renders the ever-present narration entirely superfluous.

Bergman has always had a way with creeping, surreal dread (see Persona or Hour of the Wolf), and he indulges that side of himself here with a terrifically disquieting dream sequence that opens the picture and a less terrifying (but perhaps more upsetting) dream at the midpoint, both of which set the stage and create the context for the events that follow.

Honestly, there’s not much I could complain about, other than the unnecessary narration, and a lot that I could praise. Nonetheless, I wasn’t really moved emotionally to the degree that I think I should have been. Maybe the point was a little too simple and was hit too many times, or maybe it’s something in me. Maybe it’ll look a little different in 40-50 years.

7.5/10

Progress: 73 (Par +9)

104 in 2009 Week 31: Contempt, Tank Girl, and Enemy Mine

Here's your Tank Girl review, Nate.

Le Mepris (Contempt)
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963

Paul, A playwrite (Michel Piccoli) is hired by a crass American producer (Jack Palance) to rewrite the screenplay for his production of “The Odyssey,” directed by Fritz Lang (Fritz Lang). Circumstances surrounding this agreement begin to tear Paul and his wife (Brigitte Bardot) apart. Also, Bardot lies around with her naked butt sticking up in the air a lot. A lot.

Contempt was Godard’s first and, really, only attempt at a big-budget (almost a million dollars!), mainstream film. The result, much to the producers’ chagrin, was only one of those two things. Fortunately, it’s also a very good movie. You may remember me gushing over the look of Made in USA last week – well, I could say basically the same things again here (perhaps slightly muted, though). Jack Palance steals most of his scenes as Jerry Prokosch, the spectacularly oily, jackass producer. I almost hate to say this about such a despicable character, but his scenes are all a delight to watch.

Contempt isn’t about Prokosch, however – it’s about Paul and Camille. Their material isn’t nearly as funny as Palance’s, but it’s much more dramatically interesting. The centerpiece of the movie is a long argument between the two, which lasts for nearly a half hour. Amazingly, it doesn’t feel nearly that long – it’s riveting and horribly painful, a masterpiece of performance and staging. Honestly, I’ve never seen the like. After this, the movie plays like a horrible, wonderful slow-motion train wreck that you can’t look away from, and ultimately leads to a climax that is simultaneously irritatingly frustrating and deeply satisfying.

So why only an 8.5? It’s been said that Paul’s troubles with Prokosch were a mirror of Godard’s troubles with the producers of Contempt, and that several elements of the movie (like the copious butt shots from Bardot) were a direct, angry response to them. There’s a slight awkwardness to the movie, a refusal of certain elements to mesh properly, that I think stems from this. The ingredients are all there, but the magic never quite happened – at least, not completely.

8.5/10

Tank Girl
Rachel Talalay, 1995

In a drought-ravaged future, a scavenger named Rebecca (Lori Petty) survives the murder of her adopted family, befriends a captured mechanic (Naomi Watts. . . yes, that Naomi Watts), declares war on The Man, steals a tank, and boom punk rock STONER KANGAROOS! Cole Porter GAAAH BOOM AAAAAAARGH Blood spurt DECAPITATED kablam KABLAM ‘Splode!!!!!!!!!!

What can I say about Tank Girl? It’s terrible in nearly every measurable regard, but there’s a really likable energy and madness to it. Sadly, this is undercut by the decision to use lots of bits of the Tank Girl comic book, from which the movie is adapted, as transitions. This does nothing but demonstrate that whatever charms the movie has, the comic had to an infinitely greater degree. Also, it’s way, way too long – or at least, it feels like it. It’s only an hour and forty-four minutes (still too long), but I would have pegged it at over two.

Really, though, the synopsis pretty much says it all.

4/10

Enemy Mine
Wolfgang Peterson, 1985

A human (Dennis Quaid) and a Drac (Louis Gossett, Jr) shoot each other down over an uncharted planet. Trapped alone, with no chance for rescue, they have no choice but to become friends in order to survive.

Enemy Mine is a decidedly mediocre movie that just kind of plods along, doing its thing, without ever getting particularly bad (until the end) or actually becoming very good. Louis Gossett Jr. does do a pretty good job buried under layers of fairly nice prosthetics, and manages to eke out some surprisingly touching moments. Unfortunately, he disappears around the halfway point of the movie. The sandpit monster is also kind of neat, and even a little scary, but only figures in three scenes.

Up until Gossett Jr. dies, I was willing to say I liked this a little bit – but once he’s gone, the movie loses its biggest asset, and not long after that, a bunch of slave-driving human miners are introduced into the plot in order to allow for more heroics and action. That’s where it really falls apart. The whole thing ends with an over-dramatic omniscient voiceover, which was a particularly odd choice – Dennis Quaid, in character, narrated most of the movie. Ideally, he could have narrated those final scenes (actually, ideally, there would have been no narration and we could have seen the events play out for ourselves. But you know what I mean). Still, it did have its moments.

4/10

Progress: 71 (Par +9)