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Moving pictures, #39

Well, slightly less than half of this post are US films, although I’d prefer it to be no more than one or two per post. But we’re getting there, as our national railway famously once said only to be privatised and then completely fail to get anywhere…

only_live_onceYou Only Live Once, Fritz Lang (1937, USA). This was a cheerful movie. Henry Fonda plays a habitual criminal who decides to go straight – mostly thanks to the love of a good woman, in this case Sylvia Sidney, the secretary of the local public defender. But not everyone is so forgiving. Although the public defender (who is secretly in love with his secretary) gets Fonda a job at a delivery company, he’s fired when he takes time out to look over a new house with his new wife. And no one else will employ him because he’s an ex-con. Absolutely no one. And then someone robs an armoured car, and a hat is left at the scene which points to Fonda as the culprit. He’s found guilty (the trial is off-screen, probably because it sounds so much a travesty of justice Lang was too embarrassed to show it), and Fonda ends up on Death Row. But an opportunity for escape presents itself, he takes it, but accidentally kills the prison priest… seconds after the warden has received news that Fonda is innocent and has been pardoned. Too late! Fonda collects his wife, and the two go on the lam. To be honest, I’d expected more from Lang. I’ve seen a fair number of his noir movies, and I expected this to be as good as they were. And certainly the scene where Fonda escapes from prison is very atmospherically staged and shot. But everyone is so horrible to Fonda, and the odds are stacked against him so strongly, the set-up to justify Fonda’s abrupt shift from optimism to desperation feels forced and completely implausible. So, not one of Lang’s better films.

zabriskieZabriskie Point*, Michelangelo Antonioni (1970, USA). I’m a big fan of Antonioni’s films, and his Red Desert is one of my all-time favourite movies; but I also like late 1960s/early 1970s hippy films – or, at least, ones that comment on the hippy condition. It’s not just the direct rebellion, nor the questioning of society, but also that so many of these types of films throw in an additional dimension – which might well be typical hippy occult bullshit, but at least adds something a little more interesting to the story. And so to Zabriskie Point, which opens with semi-documentary footage of a protest at a California university. But when the police turn up, the protest takes a violent approach and several people are killed. Including a policeman. The film then abruptly switches to two characters: a young woman who is looking for a man in the Mojave Desert who works with emotionally disturbed children. Meanwhile, a young male student from the university protest, and a prime suspect in the death of the cop, steals a plane and flies off to Arizona… where he meets the young woman. And they go to Zabriskie Point, a real place just east of Death Valley, Nevada, where they have sex – well, actually, a full-blown orgy kicks off… and this isn’t really a film where you can describe the plot, or where such a précis would do the film any favours. But it is by Antonioni so it looks absolute fantastic and, to be fair, he makes just as good a fist of depicting the culture he’s filming as Demy does in Model Shop – they’re neither part of the culture, but their outsider status allows them see more than might be visible from inside. Antonioni made several excellent movies – I’d put Zabriskie Point in the top five of those; in fact I think I’d call it my third favourite after Red Desert and Blow-Up.

hired_handThe Hired Hand*, Peter Fonda (1971, USA). Sigh. Another 1970s Western on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. But… well, this is a surprise. I’m not a fan of the Western, and have only three in my DVD collection – and I’ve probably seen more than I ever really wanted to because they’re on the 1001 Movies list… Certainly I’d never have considered watching this one: an early seventies Western, directed by Peter Fonda… (Even though I liked Easy Rider a lot.) But in fact it turned out to be pretty damn good. For exactly the same reasons why it flopped on release back in 1970. It’s slow, its cinematography is poetic, and it has a great soundtrack. Its story, to be fair, is not very interesting, and its characters are not very strong… but the whole works because the pictures and story go together exceedingly well. Fonda plays a drifter who decides to return to the wife who kicked him out years before, and asks only that he be taken on as a “hired hand” in order to prove he has changed. But a stop-off en route had made enemies of some nasty sorts and they track him down, and your typical Wild West showdown ensues. Where The Hired Hand really scores, however, is in its opening third: the cinematograhpy goes mad for dissolves and montages, and it works wonderfully well. The bluegrass score by Bruce Langhorne is also really well done – and I’m not a person who really notices incidental music (I have, like, three original soundtracks in my music collection… er, except for all those ones by Andrzej Korzyñski). Altogether, this is good stuff, and I’m tempted to pick up a copy for myself.

24_city24 City, Jia Zhangke (2008, China). I had been seriously impressed by Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, so of course I added the rest of Zhangke’s oeuvre to my rental list… and this was the first sent to me. And, I’m happy to report, I did not choose wrong. Zhangke is a name to watch and a new director to join my favourites. The title refers to a new suburb built on the site of an aircraft factory. The film covers several decades in a semi-documentary style, first interviewing workers in the aircraft factory (whose location and purpose is a state secret because the aircraft are military). The film is divided into three sections: one during the days of the plant’s operations, another after it has closed and the plant has been mothballed, and one after the site has been redeveloped and a dormitory suburb now occupies the location. The mix of staged interviews, informal interviews (one scene consists entirely of a man at a bar reminiscing about his career at the factory), and small family dramas which illustrate the personal histories affected by the history of the factory and the town which springs up in its place, is extremely effective; and I especially like the factualness of it. 24 City is, apparently, a real place, and the story of the film is no doubt based upon, or inspired by, real events; but the mix of fact and fiction I find quite compelling – much as I did in A Touch of Sin. Excellent stuff.

mournfulMournful Unconcern, Aleksandr Sokurov (1983, Russia). This was another work by Sokurov that remained underground for many years – it was banned by the Soviet authorities – before finally being publicly screened after glasnost… and was promptly nominated for a Golden Bear. It’s based on George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, but is intercut with documentary footage. The cinematography is, surprisingly, straightforward, but the whole thing feels ike an unholy mix of David Lynch and Peter Greenaway, albeit put together in an entirely Sokurovian way. That documentary footage, for example – it’s contemporary with the setting, the 1920s, and features Shaw himself, a zeppelin, World War I, an Antarctic expedition, the River Ganges, and various places in Africa. The choices of incidental music is also typically Sokurovian, and often anachronistic. Heartbreak House, subtitled “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes”, which is apparently a reference to Chekhov, whose plays inspired Shaw’s, is set in the home of Captain Shotover – played by Ramaz Chkhikvadze as half Falstaff and half Lear – and is partly a drawing-room farce and partly an Edwardian sex comedy. Gunfire and explosions can be heard on the soundtrack throughout the entire film, which ends with a zeppelin dropping a bomb and blowing up the house. It’s… an odd beast. The story seems well-suited to Sokurov’s feelings about the Soviet Union. The use of documentary stock footage is perhaps more intrusive than in the other films in which Sokurov uses it, but it works really well (some of the inserts provide clever and amusing commentary on the main story). I’m not so sure about the story itself, however – I don’t know what changes Sokurov made to Shaw’s play, though the setting seems to be as described. Still, like all of Sokurov’s films, it’s one that will require repeated viewings.

brooklynBrooklyn, John Crowley (2015, Ireland). This was one of those films of the last year or so which received lots of positive buzz and reviews, and didn’t involve superheroes, so I thought might be worth watching. It’s also an adaptation of a novel (winner of the Costa Novel Award, but only longlisted for the Man Booker) by Colm Tóibin, who, I admit, I’ve never read. The story is relatively simple – a fact stressed by several of the reviews: young Irish woman in the 1950s travels to New York in order to build a new life. She lives in a boarding-house and works in a department store, but she is shy and unassuming and very homesick. Then she meets a young man, of American-Italian extraction, and the two enter into a relationship. She is is now much happier and more settled. But then her sister in Ireland dies unexpectedly, so she returns to succour her mother. And now life back in Ireland seems much more attractive than it did when she left for New York. That is until the town gossip reveals something the young woman had been sort of trying to forget… and so she returns to New York. It’s a very pretty film, the cinematography is quite lovely, and the cast are uniformly good. Julie Walters as the landlady of the Brooklyn boarding-house, however, is a scream. But the story all feels a bit drab and low-key and devoid of any real insight, which makes the movie feel more like well-shot wallpaper than actual drama. I enjoyed it, but I think it was over-praised.

land_freedomLand and Freedom, Ken Loach (1995, UK). I thought this was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but not apparently the edition of it I’m using. Still it’s by Ken Loach and the subject matter – the Spanish Civil War – made it seem worth renting. And so it proved. An old working-class man in Liverpool collapses in his council flat, the ambulance comes, but he dies en route. Later, going through his things, his granddaughter discovers he had sailed to Spain in the 1930s to fight for the Republicans against the fascists. She reads his letters… and these are dramatised, with Ian Hart playing the young Scouser. On arrival on Spain, it all seems a bit haphazard, but Hart joins POUM’s milita and is soon out fighting (which basically seems to involve taking potshots from the POUM trenches at fascist soldiers in their trenches). At one point, the militia oust a troop of fascist troops from a village, and the villagers then conduct a fierce discussion on private ownership and collectivisation. After Hart is injured training new recruits – a rifle explodes when he fires it – things take a turn for the worse as the various left factions begin fighting amongst themselves, and even start killing those whose idealogies are not approved. It hardly comes as a surprise the fascists win (even for those who don’t know their history). The right always will… because the left seems happier fighting among itself than showing a united front to the enemy – just look what’s happing in the UK now. You look at Trump, and it’s 1930s Germany all over again; you look at the UK, and it’s 1930s Spain. Neither, of course, bode well… I’ve watched the occasional Ken Loach film over the years and enjoyed them, but have never really made an effort to seek them out. However, I find myself appreciating social realism in movies much more these days than I used to (and consequently despising fascistic sfx-heavy tentpole movies). I see there are three box sets of Loach’s films available – Volume 1, Volume 2 and At the BBC. I might well avail myself of them…

1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die count: 792


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Moving pictures, #34

Damn, more American films. Bit of a relapse here, although to be fair four of the US films are from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

pattonPatton*, Franklin J Schaffner (1970, USA). George C Scott won an Oscar for his portrayal of the title character in this biopic, although he famously refused to accept it. But the rest of the cast and crew were happy to accept Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Art Direction. In Best Film, it was up against Airport, Five Easy Pieces, Love Story and M*A*S*H, so not an especially strong year (although the smart money would likely have been on M*A*S*H), because there’s not much in Patton that actually seems like Oscar-material. The script was written without the approval of the family and mostly from the memories of Patton’s friend and aide General Omar Bradley – and despite that still invented a number of incidents. It was filmed in Spain, and not in North Africa or Italy. The historical details are often inaccurate – it’s not just the use of tanks that weren’t built during WWII. but that the Luftwaffe only appears to possess two Heinkel bombers… and they weren’t capable of strafing the ground, which they do multiple times during Patton. Admittedly, the film was made before CGI – in the twenty-first century, they’d no doubt fill the skies with zillions of Luftwaffe bombers and fighters (which would, of course, be just as ridiculous). Patton was by all accounts an odd bloke, and Scott manages to get that across… but much of the film seems like little more than a spat between Patton and Montgomery as each chases after the glory of defeating the Axis. Hardly the most edifying motivations for waging war, but I guess it plays better than tactical and strategic opportunism. There are a vast number of WWII films, but there only a handful I’d rate, and this isn’t one of them. Watch Das Boot instead, or The Big Red One.

whiplashWhiplash, Damien Chazelle (2014, USA). Numerous positive reviews persuaded me to add to this my rental list, despite the subject not appealing. A student at a famous New York musical school is training to be a jazz drummer. He is talent-spotted by one of the lecturers, a well-regarded composer – and an abusive arsehole. And the film is all about how he abuses the student – and the other students in his jazz band. It’s one of those films where you can recognise how well it was played by its cast, and how well-written the story, but you still wonder why the fuck you watched it. JK Simmons – probably best-known in this country as Dr Skoda from Law & Order – plays the composer, who is a real nasty piece of work… and he thinks his methods are justified because only by driving people to breaking point are true muscial geniuses made. Which is, of course, complete bollocks. But, of course, the student initially responds to Simmons’s abuse, before eventually being pushed too far and cracking. And dropping out of music altogether. Only to later bump into Simmons, accept his flattering offer of drumming for his band at a jazz festival – but it’s all a trick to humilate the ex-student on stage, except he then turns the tables, which segues into one of the longest and most boring drum solos ever recorded (and I say that despite being a fan of prog). Whiplash was not a film I would normally have watched, and I can’t say I’m glad I watched it. Put it down as one of those films or books that you don’t like even though you recognise that they’re good (because, of course, how you respond to a work is an entirely different thing to its actual quality). Meh.

wingsWings*, William A Wellman (1927, USA). This was the first film to ever win an Oscar, which is of course about as much an indication of quality as winning the first ever Hugo. And yet… I believe Wings has a somewhat mixed critical legacy, but I admit rather enjoyed it. True, Clara Bow was somewhat clumsily inserted into the plot, and it showed. And, bizarrely, although it’s Gary Cooper’s first appearance on film, he looks pretty much the same as he did throughout his entire career. Basically, two rivals for the love of the same woman join up when the US finally decides to enter WWI (please don’t call it the 17-18 War, it erases the three years of fighting by all the other nations that were involved). During basic training as pilots, the two beat each other to a pulp and so become fast friends. They are shipped to Europe, where they begin flying sorties against the Germans. On one such sortie, one of them is shot down. But he manages to steal a German biplane to return to the allied line… only to be shot down and killed by his best mate. Wings is justifiably praised for its aerial sequences, which are pretty impressive for a 1927 silent movie – and, I suspect, would still have been impressive had the film been made fifty or sixty years later. Perhaps the romantic triangle – the two male leads and Jobyna Ralston; Clara Bow is the over-looked love interest – is hoary and clichéd, even for the 1920s, and perhaps the trench warfare doesn’t resemble depictions since put on celluloid or, er, televisual æther, but those are minor quibbles – the film is called Wings because it’s about a pair of aviators, and in that area it scores highly. Worth seeing.

educationAn Education, Lone Scherfig (2009, UK). I stumbled across this on Amazon Prime, and since it’s on at least one edition of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, I gave it a go. It’s based on a memoir by a British journalist, who, apparently, was seduced as a sixteen-year-old by a thirtysomething con man and so was introduced to a life she had only previously dreamt of – sort of. Teacher-pupil romances are nothing new, and have been a staple of literature and cinema for centuries (well, at least one century), but there is still something skeevy about a man in his late thirties in a relationship with a 16-year-old schoolgirl. An Education is set in the 1960s, when, we are supposed to believe, “things were different”, as if that’s supposed to excuse them… Although, of course, such relationships likely still happen today. I note that only recently – in 2016, for fuck’s sake! – has Virginia made it illegal for men to marry 12-year-old girls. Anyway, the heroine of An Education, Carey Mulligan, is clever and plans to go to Oxford – but after falling for the oleaginous charms of smooth talker Peter Sarsgaard (who does a pretty good British accent, it must be said), she drops out of school. After several adult adventures, including a dirty weekend in Paris, she learns he is already married – and tries to return her previous life, except it’s not that easy (but she succeeds anyway). An Education was slick and sixties and about as believable as an episode of Danger Man. It feels like a watered-down version of The Servant, without the menace, the suspense or the commentary on class and society. Meh.

touch_sinA Touch of Sin, Jia Zhangke (2013, China). This is on later editions of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list (obviously it hadn’t been released when they put together the 2013 edition of the list), but it sounded like it was worth renting… And so it proved. It’s bloody good, easily the best film of the seven in this post. I’ve not seen anything by Zhangke before, but I’ll be adding his other films to my rental list. A Touch of Sin comprises four stories, all based on real events, and linked only by the similarity of their documented effects on those involved. In the first, a man in provincial town rebels against the rich man who has bought the village’s coal mine but not redistributed its riches as promised. The episode opens with a violent encounter and ends with one. The second episode is the slightest of the four and details one man’s murderous robbery spree. The third has a young woman travel to a provincial town, where she ends up working as a receptionist in a massage parlour. But when a local VIP demands she “service” him and tries to rape her, she responds violently. The final story is the most interesting. A young man leaves his job after inadvertently causing an industrial accident – the employer assigns his wages to the injured party as recompense – and ends up working as a host and waiter in a hotel catering to rich businessmen from Hong Kong. He then leaves that job and goes to work in a factory. Shortly afterwards, he commits suicide. China apparently has a very high rate of suicide, and the fourth story is based on one company where 18 employees attempted suicide (14 succeeded) within a year. This is the unadvertised cost of your cheap computers and and smartphones (not to mention the pollution). Western consumers are happy to accept the low prices resulting from company practices which lead to 18 staff suicides in one year, but then have the gall to moan about these products no longer being manufactured in Western countries. But don’t worry, people of the West! Soon, you will have a nation populated entirely by workers on zero-hour contracts with no rights, where only the air is free, and the environment, well, companies won’t have to siphon off funds from CAPEX to make sure the birds and bees don’t fall out of the sky. So you’ll still get your cheap smartphones and tablets, and on the back they’ll say “MADE IN ENGLAND”. Ahem. A Touch of Sin (a daft title, and the deliberate nod to A Touch of Zen does it no favours) is a beautifully-shot and altogether real study of the effects of capitalism on China. Recommended.

living_deadNight of the Living Dead*, George A Romero (1968, USA). I think I did this wrong – I watched Dawn of the Dead before watching Night of the Living Dead. Both are on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and I’ve no idea why I did it in that order. Okay, dawn comes before night, but Dawn of the Dead was released in 1978 but Night of the Living Dead was Romero’s first film and released a decade earlier. Also, I don’t get zombies. I don’t get the appeal, I don’t get the position they occupy in Anglophone 20th/21st-century culture. I didn’t, for example, even realise that the big thing about 28 Days Later is that the zombies run. So fucking what. In Night of the Living Dead, a couple visit the woman’s mother’s grave in a cemetery. A zombie attacks them and kills the man. The woman finds refuge in a house with a black man with a good head on his shoulders (a rarity in US cinema back in 1968). It transpires there are also people hiding in the cellar. Zombies attack the house. They fight them off. An escape attempt goes badly wrong. People die. Yawn. This is allegedly a classic of the genre, and for an independent film it has a couple of things to recommend it. But I suspect it’s one for fans of the director and/or zombie films; and not for me.

vietnamGood Morning, Vietnam*, Barry Levinson (1987, USA). Is there no phrase in cinema more likely to cause the heart to sink than “biopic”? Well, “directed by Chris Columbus”, perhaps. Or “from the producers of…”, as if the ability to bring in a film on time and on budget is any kind of artistic recommendation. Except, well, Good Morning, Vietnam, isn’t actually a biopic. Adrian Cronauer was a real person, and he really was a DJ in Saigon during the Vietnam War. He tried pitching a sitcom based on his experiences to TV networks, but tyey – conveniently forgetting that M*A*S*H was one of the most successful sitcoms of the time, and so proving that television executives have always been remarkably stupid – turned it down as they didn’t think war a fit subject for comedy. So Cronauer wrote a TV movie script, which passed across Robin Willams’s desk, and Williams liked it so much he turned it into a film project. The actual plot of the film, Cronauer has said, bears very little resemblance to his actual experiences; and all of Williams’s on-air performances were improvised during filming. Which does make you wonder why they bothered basing it on a real person. Or insisted it was true. After all, back in 1987 there was no social media, there was no “post-truth” politics; back then, words meant what the dictionary said, expertise was valued, and demagoguery had not been successful since 1930s Germany. Still, at least Williams got a shedload of award nominations out of Good Morning, Vietnam, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 784