fw murnau | It Doesn't Have To Be Right...

January 10, 2019
by iansales Leave a comment

Moving pictures 2018, #66

Another somewhat eclectic bunch of movies, although only one counts as Extruded Hollywood Product. Even worse, it’s Extruded Marvel Hollywood Product. But I actually enjoyed it. It came across mostly as a piss-take, which is a definite improvement over the po-faced bollocks of the Avengers films…

Venom, Ruben Fleischer (2018, USA). As is the case with 90% of the current MCU output these days, I’m coming to this with little or no knowledge of the original comic incarnation. To be honest, I had thought Venom was a Spider-Man villain, although I’ve no idea why, but Spider-Man doesn’t appear here and the story is set entirely in San Francisco and Spider-Man lives in New York city. Tom Hardy plays an internet investigative journalist who pisses off the wrong person once too often – in this case, it’s Musk-like zillionaire Riz Ahmed, who seems to have the secret of interstellar flight which no one on planet Earth in 2018, er, actually has. But, WTF, this is MCU. People with fucking superpowers. So a “space shuttle” that apparently visits an exoplanet, even though no one has apparently colonised Mars, or even spread out into the galaxy, seems completely unremarkable. Unfortunately, said mission to the exoplanet has brought back some sort of weird alien life form. Which escapes and inhabits Tom Hardy’s body. Turning him into Venom, a superhero/supervillain. Sort of. Another alien parasite inhabits Ahmed, turning him into Riot, who is just the same as Venom but, well, bad. It’s all completely risible, but the filmmakers seemed to recognise that and there’s a nice line in piss-take throughout the movie, which is to be honest the only thing that makes it watchable. Thank fuck Joss Whedon didn’t make it. It would be unwatchable. Venom is not a great film. It’s mildly amusing, Hardy puts in a performance judged to a nicety, and the banter is unexpectedly better than is typical for a MCU movie. Unfortunately, the CGI is unexpectedly worse than is typical for a MCU film. Which is the only thing that spoils an otherwise entertaining 112 minutes.

Departures, Yōjirō Takita (2008, Japan). My mother lent me this, and one of these days I’ll persuade her to watch a film by Yasujiro Ozu… But for now, she’s the one lending me Japanese films. and quite odd ones at that. (Take that, David Tallerman.) Departures is a bout a young man who leaves Tokyo when the orchestra in which he was a cellist is disbanded, and in his home town he answers a job ad and becomes someone who prepares bodies for “encoffinment”, usually in front of the family of the deceased. Apparently, this is not an actual Japanese practice – or rather, it is not a separate career, as it’s normally performed by the funeral directors. But in the film, it’s a real job. Takita makes it clear this is not a run-of-the-mill occupation, opening with the dressing of a transgender person, and in which the dressers’ sensitive treatment defuses the obvious tensions in the room. It’s people’s response to the protagonist’s choice of career which drives the film – it’s seen as a slightly shameful job, although as is always the case in such films, attitudes soon change. While not an especially memorable film, Departures struck me as a well-played drama.

Space Raiders, Howard R Cohen (1983, USA). I don’t normally bother to document crap films, even science fiction ones, but Space Raiders is one of several movies Roger Corman cobbled together out of the special-effects footage from Battle Beyond the Stars. And, to be honest, I’m sort of conflicted about how I view Battle Beyond the Stars. Actually, I’m not. I liked it for many years, but I have to admit it is actually shit. It’s The Magnificent Seven in space – and, shockingly, one of them is a woman – and it’s a cheap piece of crap, albeit with some nice model work. And it’s the latter which resurfaces in Space Raiders. Who, as the title suggest, raid a base, only to discover a stowaway aboard: the son of the base’s commander. But they take a shine to him, and while ostensibly holding him for ransom, they look after him, even saving him from a plot by the alien controller of that space opera perennial the lawless where-pirates-meet-up space station that only seems to exist in brainless space operas. Oh wait, I committed a tautology. But you know what I mean. Having said all that, even for New World Pictures Space Raiders is weak sauce. The studio famously tried to make as many feature films as it could out of its rip-off material. Space Raiders is definitely New Worlds second-tier, although for me the studio will never exceed the greatness that is Queen of Blood.

Schloss Vogelöd, FW Murnau (1921, Germany). I do like Murnau’s films, although a friend thinks them over-rated. And it wasn’t until I watched this film I though he might be right. A hunting party at the eponymous secluded schloß is kept in by constant rain. An uninvited guest turns up, uninvited because it’s believed he shot his older brother and so became sole heir of the family fortune. To make matters worse, his brother’s widow also turns up to the schloß, which sort of makes things a bit icky. Flashbacks show that the widow’s marriage wasn’t as smooth as she claims, but also casts doubt on the brother’s guilt. While the film is well-shot, and some of the close-ups are really quite astonishing in their detail, at 70 minutes the story feels stretched beyond its natural length. Had it been made 20 or 30 years later, with, you know, sound, perhaps the slower scenes – and there are plenty of them – might have been a bit more interesting. But when you have characters sitting around mouthing silently, with only the occasional revelation or plot twist, attention quickly flags. Of course, the cinema experience was entirely different back in 1921, and while I don’t believe attention spans are actually any shorter now than they used to be, film audiences in 2017 have been trained over several decades to watch movies in an entirely different way to audiences in 1921. I do like Murnau’s films, but watching them is definitely an exercise in experiencing an historical document – some more so than others…

Women, Stanley Kwan (1985, China). This is one of many Shaw Brothers films that have been dumped on Amazon Prime. It is also Chow Yun-Fat’s first starring role. And Kwan’s first go at director. Make of that what you will. Which is, er, probably not much. Cora Miao plays a newly-divorced wife who is trying to make a new life for herself and meets up at regular intervals with a group of female friends. Who occasionally bring along male friends. Mostly to treat them in a nicely subversive way, much as men would treat women. But the woman’s husband, play by Yun-Fat, is not so quick to let his wife go. Women is a film that wears its time of making firmly on its sleeve. I’ve watched a number of films that were more 1980s than this one – and it’s strange but I’ve yet to see a film not made in the 1980s, but set then, that has managed to be 1980s – which is a long-winded way of saying that Women is very 1980s. But unless you’re a fan of the 1980s, I can’t really recommend this one.

Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach (1966,UK). In British television history, this is an important work. The fact its message has been entirely ignored – if not at that time, then almost certainly this century – seems almost incidental. As does the fact the heartless government during which its story takes place is Labour. Tories are evil scum. That’s a fact. But Labour have done their best over the decades to match them. Corbyn will in all likelihood make a crap prime minister, but he’ll make a better one than any Tory. But why bother? British politics has fuck-all to do with what either party will actually do, only with some rose-tinted view of what they’re supposed to have done in the past… A young couple end up homeless because the wife becomes pregnant and the husband is injured at work. They’re forced to leave their flat because of the baby and… It all sounds like the heartless consequences of Tory social policies – and in the twenty-first century that would almost certainly be true. But, as mentioned earlier, at the time Cathy Come Home was broadcast, Harold Wilson was prime minister and Labour had been in power for two years. But then, when you compare Cathy Come Home and I, Daniel Blake… The latter film is more immediately affecting because it shows the consequences of evil policies we can see for ourselves pretty much anywhere in the UK. The earlier film might well have been the first people saw of Labour’s policies of the time but, because they couldn’t map the experiences of Cathy and her husband onto what they thought they knew of the country… Of course, some people have been quite vocal in expressing a similar disconnect with I, Daniel Blake – but they’ve all been entitled Tory wankers, like Toby Young. Cathy Come Home is considered a landmark piece of television, but it does feel like its message has been lost over the decades since it was first broadcast. I, Daniel Blake, on the other hand, is an equally important film, but it feels like its message has been lost in only a year or two, or has been wilfully ignored…

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 933

February 26, 2018
by iansales 1 Comment

Moving pictures 2018, #10

I’m trying to get up to date with these. Despite spending a couple of weeks watching mostly television series – including Agent Carter, Star Trek: Discovery, The Expanse and, er, Silent Witness – I still seem to have built up a backlog.

Diary of a Chambermaid, Luis Buñuel (1964, France). This film saw a change in pace for Buñuel, and a change in fortunes. It was his most realistic film to date, and based on a popular 1900 novel of the same title by Octave Mirbeau, which had been adapted in Hollywood in 1946 by, of all people, Jean Renoir, and before that in Russia in 1916. The Mexican star of Buñuel’s Viridiana, Silvia Pinal, was originally intended for the title role, and even learnt French to play it, but the part went to Jeanne Moreau. Who plays a young woman who is hired as a maid at a country house in the 1930s that seems to be populated by oddballs and eccentrics. Her name is Célestine but they all call her Marie. The groom is an anti-semitic right-winger, the husband chases anything in skirts and takes out his frustrations on small game, the father-in-law is a shoe fetishist with a cabinet full of women’s shoes, and the next-door neighbour is fond of throwing rubbish over the fence. But then the father is found dead in bed, and a young girl who visited the house is found raped and murdered. The chambermaid suspects the groom, and promises to marry him in an effort to make him confess… The film plays like a farce set in an upper-class home, with a mix of belowstairs and abovestairs scenes and characters from several classes. For Buñuel, it’s also played straight. Moreau is precisely what her character seems to be, a chambermaid, although as the focus of the film she displays more character than the rest of the cast. Having said that, this is closer to La Règle du jeu than it is Downton Abbey (hack spit), and not just because of the language. There’s a slightly mocking tone to it all and, watching it, it’s easy to see how Buñuel, and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, began re-introducing surreal elements into “straight” dramas, as in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty. I will admit to preferring the latter films, but this is still excellent stuff. A box set worth owning.

Die Finanzen des Großherzogs, FW Murnau (1924, Germany). I still think David Tallerman is being unfair in his characterisation of Murnau as an uninteresting director, although to be honest I’ve yet to get a handle on what makes a good director of silent films. True, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is really quite astonishing, but I don’t see much difference between the silent films of Murnau, Lubitsch or Lang, since all three were working in the same country around the same time. And yet… Murnau’s Die Finanzen des Großherzogs – The Finances of the Grand Duke – was mostly filmed on location in Montenegro and Croatia – whch is not typical of German silent films. And it’s a gentle comedy too, where other silent comedies from Germany I’ve seen have tended to be broad – although certainly not like slapstick like Hollywood silent comedies. Die Finanzen des Großherzogs is set in an invented Mediterranean duchy, whose finances have pretty much given up the ghost. A US industrialist offers a large payment to mine the island’s sulphur deposits, but the grand duke turns it down as he rightly thinks it will affect the quality of life of his subjects… And that’s pretty much the plot: impoverished grand duke in danger of losing duchy to predatory capitalist interests because of lack of cash, but is saved at last minute through unlikely series of events. These events are in the person of a loaded Russian princess whom the grand duke doesn’t want to marry, but she ends up pretending to be the wife of a travelling salesman, or something, and gets to meet the grand duke in that guise, and they fall in love, and everyone lives happily ever after. The end. There’s a few other bits and pieces going on in there, like the finance minister aiming to seize the duchy for himself. It’s all very, well, Ruritanian. Fun.

Le Pont du Nord, Jacques Rivette (1981, France). I’m not quite sure what to make of Rivette, as he tells fantastical stories in real-life settings, but the fantasy is all in the minds of the characters – with the occasional bit of help from the director. In other words, he finds games and conspiracies and quests in the ordinary, in such a way that the games and conspiracies and quests seems perfectly real without in any way upsetting the ordinary. And so too in Le Pont du Nord, in which two two young women meet up and follow a quest involving several different men called Max, which leads to a dragon, which is actually a playground slide, which one of them then defeats by loudly challenging it. Everything happens in and around Paris, in the quotidian world, and some of it you suspect was guerilla-filmed, even though the two women plainly don’t entirely occupy it, and there is enough strangeness in the events which befall them to suggest something other than the ordinary world. And yet the bulk of the strangeness is supplied by the two main characters, who seem to be operating in a world that doesn’t entirely exist on screen. Rivette has form in this: Merry-Go-Round is a conspiracy story with no real conspiracy in sight; Noroît is a fantasy presented with such a light touch, it might as well be mainstream. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all, and the lack of reviews seems to suggest others feel the same way. At 129 minutes, it’s short for a Rivette film. (And no, I still have not tackled Out 1, all 760 minutes of it, despite owning a copy for two years.) I came to Rivette through La belle noiseuse, which is on the 1001 Movies you Must See Before you Die list (2013 edition), and that inspired me to seek out more of his work. At which point I found myself watching films that were not like the one that had inspired me to seek out that director’s films… And yet, I find myself drawn to Rivette’s films, that are unlike La belle noiseuse, and more inclined to put in the time to watch the really long ones… Which I really must do, one of these days.

The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn (2016, France). Refn is lauded as a talent in Hollywood, although apparently not so much after all, since he needed French money to make this film. His movies certainly look very pretty, and this one is no exception. But the stories he tells really aren’t very nice. In this one, an ingenue moves to LA, is picked up by an agency, and becomes a a successful model. Which does not go down with the two models she spends her time with. One has had a number of cosmetic surgeries to improve her looks and career, but is castigated for it. For all that it’s about a beautiful woman, this is not a film that treats women well. They are pretty much all victims. Even the young model who is the central character – she has zero agency, and her only act is to walk away from it all at the end. The other models are driven by their obsession to be admired by men, even though the men in the film are just as much ciphers as the women are. The Neon Demon is a film that’s all about how it looks, which seems apposite given it’s about the modelling industry… but it also seems to be based on misconceptions and clichés about modelling. It has its central cast of three models, including the ingenue, and it uses them to tell a story of excess, and the cannibalistic nature of the industry, making the latter real rather than metaphorical, to no good end. A film best avoided.

Cemetery of Splendour, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2015, Thailand). I have no idea what these films are about, but I really like them. They’re sort of slow cinema, in as much as very little happens in them. But they also exhibit little in the way of plot – and nothing in the way of a three-act structure (hack spit) – and yet… things happen. Weerasethakul also has a tendency to use the same stable of actors, so the more of these you watch the more faces you recognise. And there are other commonalities: the military seems to always play a major part, as do hospitals or clinics; some of the cast are disabled; there’s always mention of Isan province, usually self-deprecratingly; and there’s always an element of the strange, or supernatural. Weerasethaskul has a shtick. Which does not detract from his films, I hasten to add. There is an oddness to his movies that I don’t think any other director quite manages, a sort of New Weird sensibility I’m not sure any other director is currently using. In Cemetery of Splendour, a sickness is causing soldiers to suddenly fall asleep, and there is a clinic with a ward full of sleeping soldiers, all lying in beds under weird blue lights. But then one soldier wakes, but can remember nothing of the time he was asleep. There’s also the cemetery of the title, which is a wood in which people have left mythic objects… It’s one of those films that, when it’s finished, you’re not entirely sure what you’ve watched. I’ve now seen five of Weerasethakul’s and I’m no closer to understanding them. He’s a singular talent and his movies, for all their glacial pace and enigmatic stories, are fascinating. If someone released a Weerasethakul box set, I’d buy it like a shot. I only own a copy of his first film, Mysterious Object at Noon, but all of them bear, if not demand, rewatching.

The Milky Way, Luis Buñuel (1969, France). And speaking of shtick, I sort of feel like I have a handle on Buñuel’s, except… have I really? I mean, he was making films way back in the 1930s, all the way through to the 1970s, in a number of countries, and in a variety of styles. That’s one hell of a career. But The Milky Way feels like a Buñuel film. Even based on my limited exposure to his oeuvre. The title refers to the route taken by pilgrims from France to the Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the Wat of St James. Two travellers follow the route and, en route, witness events which map onto the history of Christianity, especially its so-called heresies. It is very much the product of a Catholic mind, and I say that inasmuch as Catholicism is much more embedded in its followers’ lives that Protestantism, which is what I was nominally brought up as, but I’m completely atheist, and neither hold a candle to the integration of Islam in daily life… All of which means that not only do I not have a dog in this fight but I have a dog-free worldview (which pleases me, as a cat owner), and I suspect Buñuel, for all his mockery, was considerably more religious than I am, as it takes a certain degree of familiarity with the material to mock as much as is the case in The Milky Way. But for all that, religion is, to me, a soft target. I don’t believe a single bit of it. It’s also a completely pointless target. We l;ive in a world in which truth and facts and experts are routinely attacked because they don’t match the narrative of the authorities. There is no such thing as “fake news”. There is propaganda, which is unsupported by facts; and there is news, which is supported by facts. And the least trustworthy sources are those who are quickest to label something as “fake news”. Religion, and all the fucking tragedy it’s caused over the centuries, feels lightweight in comparison. Although, to be fair, The Milky Way does a good job in pointing out how shortsighted that view is. It’s not the best film in the box set, but, like Diary of a Chambermaid (see above), its presence is welcome. The box set doesn’t include some of Buñuel’s best films, but what it does include is bloody good. Worth getting.

1001 Movies you Must See Before you Die count: 895

February 6, 2018
by iansales 1 Comment

Moving pictures 2018, #6

I don’t seem to have been making much traction with the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list recently. True, there’s a film from the list – Alphaville – in this half-dozen, but it was a rewatch as I first saw the film many years ago.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!, Alain Resnais (2012, France). It had never occurred to me the director of Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour had made films into the twenty-first century, but after stumbling across Muriel (see here), I looked further, discovered Resnais’s last film was released in 2014… and added a bunch of those available to my rental list. And the first to be sent proved to his last-but-one film, Vous n’avez encore rien vu, with its dumb Bachman Turner Overdrive title. Happily, the title is the only dumb thing about it. A famous playwright invites a dozen or so actors with whom he has worked during his career to his funeral. The actors are all billed as themselves. On arrival at the late man’s house, they are sat in front of a screen and asked to watch a performance of the playwright’s most famous play, Eurydice, put on by a young theatre collective. And as the collective act out the play, so those at the wake begin to act out the parts they took in past celebrated stagings of the play. For some of these scenes, Resnais lays in CGI scenery, intended I think to represent the scenery of the play when those actors were in it. The play-within-a-play has been around for a long time – Shakespeare even used it in Hamlet – but making the cast of the main play complicit in the staging of the embedded play is a new twist. And it’s cleverly done. Resnais apparently had another person direct the version of Eurydice watched by the cast, so that it would be different in style to his own direction. Having only seen three films by Resnais prior to this one, the distinction was lost on me. But never mind. A good film, worth seeing.

Level Five, Chris Marker (1997, France). Marker these days is probably best known for La jetée, an experimental film from 1962 which was freely adapted as Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys in 1995. Marker actually made a shitload of films, most of them short and most of them experimental. Level Five is feature-length, at 106 minutes, but very much experimental. It has a single cast member, Catherine Belkhodja, who views the world through a variety of computer screens. The Wikipedia plot summary refers to these last as “virtual reality”, but they’re not. And even for 1997, the computer graphics are crude. If anything, they remind me a little of Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World from 1991, which I first saw in 1992 or 1993 and thought a good presentation of the future at the time. Viewed from the twenty-first century, it’s not, of course. And Level Five feels somewhat similar in that regard. It’s not just the software or the hardware on display, but also the geopolitics, the social concerns… For all that it’s trying to be prophetic – deliberately so, it makes a feature of its analyses – Level Five seems to miss far more often than it hits. And having the film consist solely of either close-ups on Belkhodja or the computer graphics she is either watching or discussing doesn’t exactly make for gripping drama. I suspect this film needed another watch or two, but unfortunately it wasa rental and it’s gone back. Ah well.

McLintock!, Andrew V McLaglen (1963, USA). Yes, that really is John Wayne spanking Maureen O’Hara on the cover art. And while art like that, and the offensive tagline, “He tamed the Wild West… but could he tame her?” might have been acceptable in 1963 (in some parts of society), they are no longer (Presidents Club notwithstanding). Even worse, a quick google shows that the film posters of the time used the same image, along with equally offensive taglines like “He’s a tender loving guy!” and “Wallops the daylight out of every Western you’ve ever seen!”. The sad thing is, is that for half of its length, McLintock! is actually an amusing comedy Western. McLintock! was a Wayne project, the first of many movies he used to promote his conservative Republicans values – although present-day Republicans may consider those values dangerously liberal in some respects. Wayne developed the script, he hand-picked the director, one of his sons played the young male lead, another son produced, and he insisted on a supporting role for Yvonne De Carlo because her husband had been injured filming How The West Was Won. The film is set in the town of McLintock, named for Wayne’s character, a local cattle baron, who owns pretty much everything in sight. His wife, Maureen O’Hara, left him two years earlier to live in New York, but now she is back – because their daughter, Stefanie Powers, is about to return from college. Meanwhile, homesteaders have arrived in McLintock, ready to settle land they’ve been given on nearby Mesa Verde. The US government has also released the chiefs of the local Comanche tribe, only for a locally-held commission to tell the tribe they must leave their land. All this is good drama, and Wayne’s character is even-handed, if overly paternalistic, and keen to see everyone is treated equally, Comanche or homesteader. But not the women. Twice in McLintock! women are spanked using coal scuttles, and on both occasions such disciplining is seen as both normal and required. In fact, Wayne and O’Hara are at loggerheads for much of the film, until he spanks her. And then she turns all loving and decides not to return to New York. Bah.

Alphaville*, Jean-Luc Godard (1963, France). Although I’d seen ten of the thirteen films in this collection before, for some reason I saved Alphaville to watch last – despite working my way through the others chronologically. I think perhaps it was because I’d last seen it nearly a decade ago and perhaps felt I’d not appreciated it as much as I should have done… I don’t know. But I do know, however, that I liked it a great deal more this time. Eddie Constantine plays a secret agent posing as a jurnalist who visits Alphaville from the “Outer Countries”. It takes a while before his purpose there is clear, but he has been sent to bring back Professor Nosferatu, now known as Professor von Braun, the inventor of Alphaville and the Alpha-60 computer which rules it (it was not unusual in 1950s and early 1960s sf to assign AI-like capabilities to very large computers). Constantine meets up with Anna Karenina, von Braun’s daughter, and she gives him entry to the sections of Alphaville society his (fake) journalistic credentials cannot provide. None of Alphaville is filmed on sets. Godard made no effort to build a future city – and Alphaville‘s universe is implied to be galactic and not just planetary. Contemporary Paris provides the backdrop. At the time, some of the buildings used may have appeared futuristic, but now they appear mostly otherworldly, which has more or less the same effect. Some parts of the film haven’t aged so well. The seductresses, for example. Or the execution scene in the swimming pool with the sycnchronised swimmers. But there’s a lot that remains impressive. I especially liked a tracking shot following Constantine and Karenina as they travelled down in a lift, which continued in one take from them entering the lift cabin until they exited the hotel. An excellent film.

Tartuffe, FW Murnau (1925, Germany). I don’t know how many silent films I’ve watched, but I learn something new about cinematic narrative each time I watch one. I suppose I expected silent dramas to be completely different to films with sound, as if the use of intertitles laid a constraint on cinematic narrative which sound had removed from movie-making. And perhaps that’s true to some extent. But it didn’t mean silent cinema was completely unadventurous narratively. As Tartuffe demonstrates. It opens with a venal housekeeper gaslighting her employer so that he leaves his fortune to her and not to his actor grandson. Which the grandson learns on a visit to his grandfather. After being thrown out of the house, the grandson addresses the camera and insists he is not giving up. He returns to the house disguised as an impresario and puts on a private cinema screening for his grandfather and the housekeeper of… Tartuffe, the play by Molière. It’s a simplified version of the play, but the cut-down story is more than adequate to make the grandson’s point. In the film-within-a-film (explicitly so, unlike the Resnais above), Orgon returns from a trip and brings with him a religious man whom he greatly admires: Tartuffe. In fact, he admires him so much he changes every aspect of his life to accommodate Tartuffe. Orgon’s wife, Elmire, however, suspects Tartuffe is a fraud, and sets out to entrap him by seducing him. And she succeeds… I’ve seen several of Murnau’s films, and liked them, so this box set of his early works was a good buy. And a bargain too, as it was cheaper than the individual versions of the films in it.

Thor: Ragnarok, Taika Waititi (2017, USA). I am not a fan of superhero movies. The ones everyone praises, I generally think are terrible. I mean, I’d always liked the Guardians of the Galaxy since first reading them in an Marvel anthology comic back in the 1970s, but the movie wasn’t even based on those Guardians of the Galaxy but a later reboot, and, for all its hype, it was pants. And the sequel was worse. So I had pretty low expectations for Thor: Ragnarok, especially given how forgettable the two previous Thor films were… And yes, I was aware Thor: Ragnarok had been directed by Taika Waititi, a leftfield choice for a MCU film, but I wasn’t convinced the addition of Kiwi humour to MCU bombast would work. But. I was actually entertained. Which was unexpected. Thor: Ragnarok is not a great film by any means, and it’s not entirely sure what it should have been. You have the pure Kirby-vision of the Asgard sections, but the part set on Sakaar feels more like a reject from a Star wars prequel. But the film has a number of good lines and some entertaining comic set-pieces. For example, when Thor is about to leave Dr Strange’s mansion and puts out his hand for Mjolnir and you hear the sound of glass breaking, I laughed out loud. I wasn’t convinced Waititi’s rock-creature deadpan humour worked all the time, but Cate Blanchett did make an excellent villain. I could live without most of the plot, and the final battle on Bifrost went on far too long. I’d certainly describe Thor: Ragnarok as one of the better films in the MCU, although that’s not a hard bar to clear. Perhaps its success might lead Disney to experiment a little more with who they choose to direct their films… What am I thinking? It’s Disney. They’re as corporate as you can get. They’ll either flog their new formula to death, or strangle whatever creativity their chosen director tries to put into their film…

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 895

September 12, 2017
by iansales Leave a comment

Boxsets!

Well, not really. Only two box sets. And these days the word tends to be used more in reference to seasons/series of television dramas. My box sets are collections of films, and in this post, it’s the two by Godard…

Both the 10-DVD collection (French-published, but with English subtitles) and the 14-DVD collection were purchased from third party sellers on a large online retailer’s website. I’m currently working my way through the 10-DVD set. And I’m starting to really appreciate Godard’s movies.

Three Blu-rays. Nosferatu and Hawks & Sparrows / Pigsty I bought from eureka! during a recent sale. I also pre-ordered the new edition of Metropolis, but that has yet to arrive. Privilege I bought after watching it on rental because I wanted my own copy (see here).

Actually, there’s another box set in this post: Japanese Masters, bought on eBay, which contains two films by Yasujiro Ozu – Floating Weeds and The End of Summer – and two by Kenji Mizoguchi – The Life of Oharu and The Lady of Musashino. I already have Floating Weeds, but The End of Summer is no longer available. Container is Lukas Moodysson’s experimental film. I watched it several years ago, but decided it needed a second try – so I bought a cheap copy off eBay. Joi Baba Felunath popped up on eBay and I thought it was a hard-to-find film but it turns out it’s in the Satyajit Ray Collection Volume 2. Oh well. And Footprints on the Moon I watched on rental, but I liked it so much I bought my own copy (see here).

A bunch of out-of-copyright films bought on eBay, of varying quality, both of the transfer and the film itself. I forget why I bought most of them, but they are: Sleep, My Love (forgettable Sirk thriller, see here), Black Tights (anthology film of ballet routines, terrible transfer), Beneath the 12-mile Reef (unmemorable Robert Wagner drama about sponge divers), The One-Eyed Soldiers (bad Euro-thriller set in invented Balkan country) and Long John Silver, The Secret of My Success (terrible sixties British comedy), and Criminal Affair (dreadful Italian thriller, directed by and starring one of the stars of South Pacific, another poor transfer too).

May 23, 2016
by iansales 3 Comments

Moving pictures, #25

I catch up… then I get behind. But I’m staying reasonably on top of these posts for now… possibly because I’ve been rewatching Battlestar Galactica so I’ve not been watching movies all the time.

Le trou*, Jacques Becker (1960, France). As I was watching this, I kept on thinking I was watching a Robert Bresson film, because it could just as easily have made by him – in many ways, Le trou reminds me a lot of A Man Escaped, at least more than just “man escapes from French prison”. Which is pretty much the plot. A group of prisoners in a cell dig a hole in the floor, which leads them into the prison’s cellars. From there, they find their way into the sewers… except the sewer tunnel is blocked, so they must dig around the concrete plug blocking it. The story is based on a real prison escape and, in fact, one of the original escapees plays himself in the film (well, sort of, the names are all changed, although I’m not sure why). There’s a matter of factness to Becker’s direction, despite which the film remains too… personal, too readily creates a narrative from its cast’s back-stories… to come across as a documentary. It makes for an odd disconnect. True, Le trou can be watched as a work of fiction and, in fact, that’s probably the easiest way to watch it, and the way most people are likely to watch it. (I can’t remember if the film opens with text explaining it’s a dramatisation of real events.) It’s the opposite, I suppose, of the 1980s penchant for dramatising documentaries, making something with a fictional format of them.

City Girl, FW Murnau (1930, USA). It’s the age-old story: farmer’s son goes to the big city to sell the corn harvest, meets a young woman, falls in love, marries her, doesn’t get the expected price for the corn, goes back home with new bride, but farmer is not happy – at the reduced price for the corn or the new wife. Things get worse. But then they realise the errors of their ways, and everyone lives happily ever after. While the cinematography and direction are up to Murnau’s usual standard, where this film really scores is in depicting life on a US farm in the late 1920s. The harvesting scenes are especially fascinating, because the technology used is sort of halfway between how you imagine it was done in the nineteenth century or earlier and how it’s done now. I do like Murnau’s films – they’re straightforward, the characters are well-drawn, if somewhat broadly so, and for their time they’re cutting-edge, which makes them interesting as historical documents. Murnau is also a good example of those German directors who crossed over to Hollywood and, you would like to think, caused Hollywood to up its game and produce serious films instead of endless variations on the Keystone Cops. It’s not as if Murnau was on his own – Lang, Lubitsch, Wilder, von Stroheim, Sirk, even Hitchcock, who cut his teeth in the German film industry. Not all of them stayed, of course. Lang’s last films were made in Germany (well, India – but they were German films), and von Stroheim retired to France. City Girl is by no means Murnau’s best – that would have to be Nosferatu or Tabu – but it’s still worth seeing. [dual]

Through a Glass Darkly*, Ingmar Bergman (1961, Sweden). Two couples – father, son, daughter and son-in-law – are holidaying on Fårö, a Swedish island in the Baltic (which Bergman loved so much, he ended up moving there). Father is a novelist and has just returned from working abroad. Daughter has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, but refuses treatment. Son-in-law is a doctor and is having trouble persuading father of the severity of his wife’s condition. And son is not happy about his father’s absences. If films were books, then Bergman’s movies would be literary fiction. And watching one of his films is like reading a polished literary short story, the sort that fifty years later is studied in schools. Even the stark black and white cinematography of Through a Glass Darkly feels like a deliberate choice to create a precise atmosphere, much as a writer crafts sentences. Bergman’s use of ensemble acting and a stable of actors only heightens the likeness: three of the actors in Through a Glass Darkly – von Sydow, Andersson and Björnstrand – were all part of Bergman’s stock company at some point in their careers. [0]

Laura*, Otto Preminger (1944, USA). I had high hopes for this famous noir film – not just because of the genre or director, but also because it starred Gene Tierney, who appeared in several classic noir films. But… the film opens after Laura’s murder, with a detective trying to find out who the killer is. He interviews Laura’s patron, an effete newspaper columnist, and Laura’s boyfriend, a louche playboy. The detective learns so much about Laura that he begins to obsess over her… so he’s somewhat flabbergasted when he falls asleep in her apartment and she walks through the door. Turns out it wasn’t Laura who was killed, but one of her models (the body’s face had been destroyed by a shotgun blast, but since it happened Laura’s apartment they assumed it was her). Preminger directed some killer noir films, and Tierney was the epitome of a 1940s Hollywood femme fatale – no matter the role, she seemed to take into herself all the baggage associated with the character. I suspect this was due to the fact she wasn’t actually a very good actress. She had screen presence, certainly; but she never seemed especially convincing – not that it was a requirement at the time, cf Ava Gardner’s career – and the same is true in Laura. Tierney is more of a centre around which the story revolves, in which position she does quite a good job. But Laura the character is about as convincing as a unicorn, and the story of the film is not much better. Had I been putting together the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list myself, I would have chosen a different Preminger noir film – Whirlpool, perhaps, or Fallen Angel. Not this lacklustre affair.

Love One Another, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1922, Germany). What an odd film. I say that having seen – and even liking – any number of odd films. I am, I admit, a fan of Dreyer’s films, and the more of his films I watch, and the more times I watch each of them, the more my admiration grows – but, let’s face it, most probably know of him only from his three Danish films of the 1940s, Day of Wrath, Ordet and Gertrud. But they’re products of the end of his career, and his earlier stuff is also very good (to be fair, The Passion of Joan of Arc is also pretty well known) but even so, the BFI aside, Dreyer’s entire oeuvre is not that readily available. He bounced around in his early years – working in Denmark, Norway and Germany… and it is the last country where this film was made. It’s based on a novel – Elsker hverandre by Aage Madelung from 1918 – and is set in Russia in the late nineteenth century. The central character is a Jewish girl who experiences anti-semitism on a daily basis but falls in love with a Gentile, Sasha. When news of the affair surfaces, she is expelled from school and flees to St Petersburg to stay with her brother, who converted to Christianity. She becomes involved with underground revolutionaries and, against the backdrop of the Tsar’s pogroms against the Jews, she manages to get back together with Sasha, and they join the Jew fleeing Russia. Although set in Russia, Love One Another was filmed entirely in Germany. It is, in its way, as important an historical record as Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World, even though it’s fictional. (Apparently, some of the extras in the films were actual survivors of the Jewish pogroms in Tsarist Russia.) Worth seeing. [0]

Man of the West*, Anthony Mann (1958, USA). I can’t help comparing this film with Shane, released five years earlier, and not to Man of the West‘s advantage. Gary Cooper plays a retired outlaw who, en route to Fort Worth by train to find a teacher for his small town’s new school, finds himself caught up with the outlaw gang to which he once belonged. He has a saloon singer and a con artist in tow, and tries to protect the two from the outlaws (led by his uncle), but only manages by reluctantly agreeing to help them rob a bank in Lassoo. But when he gets to Lassoo, it’s a ghost town and the bank has long since closed. Cue shoot-out. To be honest, Cooper makes a more convincing cowboy than Ladd did in Shane, and even though it’s been a dozen years since he hung up his black hat, at 57 he was probably a little too old for the part. But that’s a minor niggle. The photography is not as impressivas in Stevens’s film, but the story is at least not quite so… melodramatic. It feels like a Western from a later period. After watching Shane on rental DVD, I bought myself a copy of the Master of Cinema edition Blu-ray. I don’t think I’ll be doing the same for Man of the West, although a Masters of Cinema edition has been released.

The Phantom of Liberty, Luis Buñuel (1970, France). I rented this to test if my Theory of Godard could be applied to Buñuel, even though it had already failed several times. I have this theory, you see, that Godard’s films in colour are better than those in black and white – at least, the Godard fims I’ve seen which I like have all been in colour. But that’s not strictly true for Buñuel – I liked The Exterminating Angel a lot (black and white), but not Tristana or Belle du jour so much (both colour). I did like Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (colour)… but did that mean I’d like The Phantom of Liberty… especially since it’s considered amongst his most surreal films (or rather, most experimental plot-wise)? The easy answer is… yes, I liked it; and no, it seems the theory only really applies to Godard. The Phantom of Liberty does not have a plot, it’s just a series of vignettes linked by characters, none of which are actually resolved. Some feel like failed comedy sketches – the Carmelite monks who play poker using holy relics as chips, Michael Lonsdale throwing an impromptu room party and then his wife dresses up in her dominatrix outfit and whips him on the arse, the dinner party where the guests sit on toilets at the table and shit but go to a private room to eat; others are not remotely comedic, such as the sniper in the Tour Montparnasse, or the police chief who gets a phone call from his dead sister. They are all, however, mostly surreal – like the emu that wanders through a man’s bedroom as he tries to sleep. On balance, I think The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie the better film, but I did enjoy The Phantom of Liberty, and I plan to watch more of Buñuel’s films.

1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die count: 768

September 25, 2015
by iansales 3 Comments

Moving pictures, #25

I should really get into the habit of reading a book in the evening. The TBR is shrinking far too slowly, and the DVD collection is growing far too quickly. And, sadly, not every film I’ve watched was worth the hour or two it took to sit through it. This is hardly a surprise, however. As some of the films described below might attest.

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas*, FW Murnau (1931, USA). I’m a big fan of Murnau’s Nosferatu, and I’ve been picking up copies of his other films – in the excellent Masters of Cinema series by eureka! – on DVD. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas was Murnau’s last film (he died a week before its opening) and, despite the year, it’s a silent film. The film apparently had a troubled gestation. Murnau joined forces with Robert J Flaherty, who had experience filming in Tahiti. Neithr could raise sufficient capital, so Murnau financed the bulk of the movie himself. In order to save money, Murnau trained locals as crew. He also rewrote the script, which caused problems with Flaherty – and their relationship subsequently worsened to the point where Flaherty no longer co-directed. The movie makes a point of its cast also being native to the region – an opening intertitle states that “only native-born South Sea islanders appear in this picture with a few half-castes and Chinese”, although the second half of the film is set at a French colony and features some French characters. A young woman of Bora Bora is is declared sacred to the gods, which somewhat upsets her boyfriend as she is now “tabu” (er, taboo). So they escape and settle at a nearby French colony. But, of course, the course of true love never runs smooth, not even in the South Seas. And so it proves here. There’s some remarkable photography, and I can only imagine its impact back in the 1930s when the nearest most movie-goers would get to Polynesia is a poster in a shipping office in their nearest port city. Worth seeing.

Moontrap, Robert Dyke (1989, USA). I have no idea why I put this on my rental list, but as soon as the film started and I saw it starred Walter Koenig, I knew I’d made a mistake. And Koenig’s hair looked almost real, so the film was a good deal older than I’d thought (that DVD cover makes it look a good deal more recent). There’s some nonsense about ancient astronauts, and one of their derelict spaceships drifts into Earth orbit, and a base on the Moon that was abandoned, as the DVD cover says, 14,000 years ago. But it all ends up as a really crap robot-type thing wreaking havoc in a secret base, and Koenig on the Moon – featuring scenes with model work more obvious even than Michael Bentine’s Potty Time – where he re-awakens a nubile ancient astronaut… leading to a later scene of lunar hanky-panky in an inflatable tent. This is a shit film, the sort of movie that its cast refuse to put on their cv’s, even Bruce Campbell who is a major cult actor. Except perhaps not the director, who probably still thinks it’s really good. He is very wrong.

Le souffle au cœur*, Louis Malle (1971, France). Malle is, I think, another one of those French directors, like Bresson, whose movies don’t really work for me. Others, such as Varda, Godard or Truffaut, I like some of their films but not others; and yet other French directors – Ozon, Rohmer, for example – I like pretty much everything of theirs I’ve seen. Anyway, Le souffle au cœur – better known among Anglophone film-watchers, perhaps, as Murmur of the Heart – is about a fifteen-year-old boy who, while at a sanatorium recovering from a bout of scarlet fever, has sex with his mother. The film is set during the 1950s, although there’s a very 1970s look and feel to it. The movie is apparently notable for its jazz score, but not being a jazz fan the thing that stood out for me was the juvenile objectification of women – which is, unfortunately, something all too common to commercial art of the 1970s and earlier. While the aforementioned fifteen-year-old is the film’s protagonist, and hence point-of-view, there’s no nuance to it – and, in fact, at the sanatorium a pair of teenage girls are presented as little more than targets to be conquered. Disappointing.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!*, Russ Meyer (1965, USA). Back in the 1980s, I remember staying at my aunt and uncle’s and watching Jonathan Ross’s The Incredibly Strange Film Show, an episode of which featured Russ Meyer. In the, er, decades since, I’ve seen Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which was pretty crap; and I can’t honestly say I’d ever bother watching any of his other films, but Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is – bafflingly – on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list so I dutifully added it to my rental list. Much is made of the fact the film features three women as its protagonists, and they are indeed strong murderous women, especially the leader, the scenery-chewing Tura Satana. Three exotic dancers in fast cars head out into the Californian desert, challenge a young man to a race, beat him to death afterwards, then descend on a nearby farm whose owner apparently has lots of money hidden somewhere… where things start to go wrong. The film is shot in black and white, with a mostly unprofessional cast, and whatever energy it possesses is likely a result of financial constraints than artistic agenda. It’s mildly amusing… and somewhat scary that this film stands out because of its gender roles – because, to be honest, stuff like that should not be remarkable.

Ninotchka*, Ernst Lubitsch (1939, USA). “Garbo laughs!” At least so the posters for this movie claimed; and there she is, laughing, on the DVD cover – as if she had never laughed in a film before ever. But I suppose a film about wealthy White Russian aristocrats versus dour Red Russians, even if the latter are mostly comedic, probably didn’t make for an appealing tagline in pre-WWII USA. I know this movie better as its 1957 musical remake starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, Silk Stockings, but other than the latter being filmed in colour, and featuring some singing and dancing, there’s not a fat lot of difference between the two. (Garbo’s Russian accent is, perhaps, a teensy-weensy bit less crap than Charisse’s.) Three Soviets head to Paris to sell off some jewellery for much-needed state cash, but the White Russian original owner of the baubles has other plans. When the title character is sent to learn what happened to the bumbling three, it gets all romantic and the icy Soviet envoy thaws. Meh.

Mortdecai, David Koepp (2015, UK). This is apparently based on a series of books by Kyril Bonfiglioli, originally published in the 1970s. I’m told the books are good. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the movie. You know when you watch something and even though it’s set in the present day (ie, the second decade of the twenty-first century) everything in its seems weirdly old-fashioned – like that Paddington film, for instance. And like this one. I suspect it would have felt old-fashioned if it had been made in the 1970s. Depp plays the title character, a louche art dealer who’s a little too fond of bending the law. One of his previous swindles comes back to bite him, and the plot of the film is basically him running around trying to run a con to save his own skin and his weird rockstar stately home. There are a couple of funny set-pieces, but Depp plays his role like Mortdecai is a grotesque and the whole 2015 mise en scène just doesn’t suit the story at all. You could try watching it pissed but I suspect it would be no better. In fact, it’s so meh I can’t even be arsed to try reading the books…

The Last Picture Show*, Peter Bogdanovich (1971, USA). This is one of those films which launched a number of careers, not just director Bogdanovich’s, but also Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges; and apparently had loads of Oscar nominations (but only two wins – for best supporting actress and best supporting actor). There must be something about the set-up which appeals to audiences but I can’t see it myself. Small US town, lives going nowhere, it’s been covered so many times in US films and books it’s gone beyond banal. I can’t even honestly day that Bogdanovich brings anything new to the cliché. There are a handful of small touches which work quite, most notably some of the character arcs, and the narrative flow through the film is smooth and builds well to the conclusion. I suppose there’s a point to be made in that I found this mostly dull but I love All That Heaven Allows, which is also set in small town USA during the 1950s. And both are, in their own way, tragedies. But Sirk’s film charts a downward trajectory, whereas Bogdanovich’s starts low and continues at that level before sinking even deeper. I also love Sirk’s Technicolor cinematography. The two films, to my mind, don’t really compare.