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Moving pictures 2018, #63

I’m a bit behind on these, chiefly because I’ve been busy with other things during the last couple of weeks. Such as getting a new job. In Sweden. So those few nights when I’ve been at home, and not celebrating, I’ve been mostly watching TV series, such as season two of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, season three of Lost, and the first season of Dollhouse. I’ve got three or four of these posts to get out before the end of the year. Not to mention picking the best five movies – I’m dropping the documentary split I used in my best of the half-year post (see here) – out of the 600+ films I watched in 2018…

Anyway, aside from the last two films here, and they’re hardly twenty-first century commercial Hollywood extruded movie product, this post goes on a bit of a global tour, with a film from Europe, two from Asia and one from Africa.

Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2014, Turkey). It took me a couple of goes to get into this, but once I was twenty or so minutes into it, something clicked and I found myself engrossed – for all of its 196 minutes. True, I’ve seen films by Ceylan before, and I know he’s an excellent director. His cinematography distinguishes him, but I’ve found the tone of each of his films very different. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, for example, is almost Tarantino-esque. And Winter Sleep very definitely isn’t. Aydın, once a famous actor, now owns a cave hotel in Cappadoccia and several properties in the town. The film opens with Aydın accompanying his agent to collect rent from a tenant… who has no job and no money, and reacts angrily to threats of more of his possessions being taken by bailiffs. But not as angrily as his young son, who throws a rock through the window Aydın’s Land Rover. That starts off an ongoing feud, in which Aydın cannot understand why the tenant is so angry and so uncooperative. Meanwhile, his relationship with his wife is deteriorating, to the extent that he muscles in and rubbishes her charity campaign to fund local schools. So he decides to head to Istanbul, to work on his pet project, a history of Turkish theatre. But he gets sidetracked because one of his friends has been badmouthing him… And this is one of those films where things follow on naturally from one to the other but there’s no real story as such, except perhaps some form of realisation by Aydın over how badly he’s treated his friends and family. And tenants. A slow-mover, but definitely worth watching.

Prison, Ingmar Bergman (1949, Sweden). Bergman made a shitload of films – some for the cinema, some for television, some released on both media. Prison is Bergman’s first film both directed and solely written by him, and it’s notable because of its film-within-a-film narrative structure. Bergman apparently later disowned Prison, although there’s no good reason I could see while watching it why he should have done. It’s an early work, sure, and he used similar techniques, and covered similar topics, much better in later films. But Prison is still a good piece of drama, and if its story feels a bit belaboured at times that’s likely a consequence of Bergman’s lack of experience, although he had directed five films before this one. A film director is approached by an old teacher who tries to sell him a very obvious and very belaboured story of good and evil. The director has his co-workers discuss the story, but they pass on it… only to find real life sort of illustrating the old teacher’s story. But there’s another level of film-within-a-film, and that’s an explicit take on an early silent comedy, with people jumping in and out of windows and closets, all at faster-than-normal speed. Though its subject matter is as weighty as anything Bergman made, Prison didn’t feel especially grim or humourless. Perhaps that was why Bergman disowned it…

Let’s Make Laugh, Alfred Cheung (1983, China). This was apparently the most successful film in Hong Kong in 1983, and one of the most successful comedies in China for that decade. Shame then that it’s not at all funny. And I don’t think it’s an 1980s thing, or a Hong Kong thing. I mean, I’ve seen enough Hong Kong films to get the gurning thing, and the physical comedy, but while there’s plenty of the former there’s very little of the latter and much of the movie seems more focused on its romantic subplot. Idiot security guard is asked to guard a house because its owner has substantial debts, not knowing that owner has abandoned his wife and she’s still living in the property. But then the woman’s parents turn up, and she asks the guard to pretend to be her husband… The problem is the guard is such an idiot, and so useless, that he ever seems to achieve anything. And the wife is completely self-centred. Which means the romantic sub-plot, er, isn’t. I’ve seen some successful and very funny Hong Kong comedies – anything by Jackie Chan, for example – so the success of this one as a comedy is baffling.

Mandabi, Ousmane Sembène (1968, Senegal). I’ve now seen six films by Sembène, and have a seventh yet to watch, and I really do think his films are bloody brilliant. I’m astonished they’re so hard to find. He made eleven films, and only three are available in the UK, two on a single dual release. And if there’s one thing I’ve noticed from the films I’ve watched, a theme that unites them, it’s that, in Sembène’s world, when men run things it’s absolute chaos, and it’s only when the women take over that things run smoothly. I can go for that. In Mandabi, a postman approaches the two wives of Ibrahima Dieng, who has been unemployed for several years, and tells them there is a money order for 250 Francs waiting for him at the post office. So he heads off to collect it. But the post office won’t give it to him without ID. And when he goes to the police station to get himself an ID, he needs another piece of paper… Meanwhile, his friends and family all want a piece of the money, and have started spending it. None of them realising, because none of them have read the letter accompanying the money order, that 30 Francs of the Fr 250 is for the nephew’s mother, Fr 200 to kept for the nephew, and only Fr 20 for Ibrahima… So on the one hand you have everyone spending money that isn’t theirs, while on the other Ibrahima gets himself further into debt in his efforts to persuade the post office to hand over the money order. The sight of Ibrahima, in his shining boubou, strutting down the street, convinced his fortunes have finally turned is one of the great comedy visuals.

The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles (2018, USA). This is one of those movies which has a more interesting production history than it does a plot. Welles, of course, was a true Hollywood maverick, and would finance his films himself, shooting them in parts over an extended period as he worked to raise the money to continue filming. And yet, in most cases, the films that resulted are pretty damn seamless. I came to Welles late, but I became a fan after seeing his later films rather than because of his more famous earlier ones. The Other Side of the Wind was not Welles’s last film, but it was locked in legal limbo for so long it’s only just finally been re-edited and released, thirty-three years after Welles died. And, in fact, pretty much the entire cast of The Other Side of the Wind are also now dead. It’s a mockumentary about a great director, played by John Huston, and the film he is working on, which appears to be the worst sort of New Hollywood soft porn director-as-auteur excess. It doesn’t help that the supporting cast – which comprises a number of familiar faces – all play pretty horrible Hollywood stereotypes. Movie industry stereotypes, that is, rather than the usual simplistic Hollywood characterisation. The end result is… an interesting historical document. But not a good film. Thee are good bits, of course – Welles was one of the best directors the US has produced – but this doesn’t feel like Welles at his best, and this version here – edited by Peter Bogdanovich, who plays Huston assistant – does its best but it’s not Welles’s vision and you can’t help but wonder how Welles would have put together the footage, especially when you remember other of his films, such as Mr Arkadin…

After the Thin Man, WS Van Dyke (1936, USA). The thin man of The Thin Man was actually the villain of that original movie, but it proved so successful a film, and the characters played by Myrna Loy and William Powell so popular, that a sequel was made, with the perfectly understandable title of After the Thin Man (as in “following the previous film” or “following on from the villain of the previous film”), but which served only to confuse audiences into thinking Powell’s character, a semi-retired PI, was the Thin Man. And so the moniker sort of became his as the film series progressed. Otherwise, there’s no link between the story of After the Thin Man and The Thin Man. Loy and Powell are returning to their San Francisco home after a holiday away when they’re contacted by Loy’s tearful sister, whose playboy husband has vanished. He proves remarkably easy to find. Unfortunately, he’s involved in an extortion scam, and gets murdered for his pains. And the chief suspect is Loy’s tearful sister… Watching this film, you have to wonder how much of the boozing was acted, because while the dialogue between the two leads was certainly witty and snappy, and occasionally sounded ad-libbed although it may not have been, Powell did seem to have a shit-eating grin on his face for much of the film. The Thin Man was popular enough to spawn a series, but this follow-up felt weak, perhaps because it spent more time exploring Powell’s and Loy’s relationship than it did its mystery plot. Still, worth seeing if you like 1930s Hollywood movies…

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 933


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Moving pictures 2017, #66

I managed to knock a few off the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list and despite them both being US films – one Hollywood, one independent – I thought they earned their place on it.

Mr Arkadin, Orson Welles (1955, Spain). After making Macbeth, most of Welles’s remaining films were made in Europe with international financing. It’s perhaps a bit of a cheat to describe Mr Arkadin as a Spanish film, given it was English language, had an American director, and featured a cast including Americans, Italians, Germans, Brits and Spaniards, among others… but it was shot mostly in Spain, and Welles was resident there at the time, so… The story opens with a private plane flying into Spain with no one aboard and presents it newsreel-fashion as a mystery, which the film will then solve… by telling the story leading up to that moment. Robert Arden is an American knocking about in Spain, who inveigles himself into the affections of the daughter of reclusive billionaire Arkadin, played by Welles in a bad wig and beard. When Arden finally meets Arkadin, he’s offered a job – Arkadin cannot remember his life before 1927, and wants Arden to research it for him (the reason given is so that no nasty surprises turn up when Arkadin bids for military contracts). So Arden tracks down past associates of Arkadin, ending up in Mexico, where he discovers the truth about the man. And the truth about why he was asked to research the man’s past. Arden heads back to Spain to tell the daughter, Arkadin charters a plane in an effort to stop him. He fails. Apparently, there are several cuts of the film knocking about, some better than others, and none what Welles really intended. The end result is something that tries to be The Third Man, with bits of Shakespeare thrown in, all shot in Welles’s inimitable style, and then edited so it teeters on the edge of sense. Welles overplays his role, Arden is not a sympathetic hero, and the supporting cast  are more like circus performers than actors. But it’s Welles, so it’s worth seeing.

Roger & Me*, Michael Moore (1989, USA). I know of Michael Moore, of course, and the career he has carved out for himself. I’ve seen seen a couple of his films. But I’d never seen the one that started his career, and since it was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list… So I bunged it on the rental list. I wasn’t expecting much of it – Moore has tackled much more contentious subjects in later films, and given that this was his first too, I expected it to be crude and simplistic. And while it was certainly the latter, it was never the former. It’s a surprisingly polished piece of work. Unfortunately, recent events have pretty much underminded it. Flint, Michigan, was the town where the automobile production line was invented, and it has relied heavily on car manufacturing ever since. But in the 1980s, the automobile corporations decided to cut costs by closing down plants in the USA and opening them in much cheaper countries. This is known as “making the product cheaper while taking away the spending power of the market which buys it so your business eventually collapses and oh look guess what happened…” Around a third of Flint’s carworkers found themselves out of a job. This is painted as devastating to the community, well, some parts of the community, the country club set are completely oblivious of course… which is why Moore wants to beard GM chairmain Roger Smith and ask him to defend his decision. In the film, the workforce is cut from 80,000 to 50,000 over slightly more than a decade. True, this is bad for any community which relies on a single industry. But as of 2015, GM has 7,000 workers in Flint. And, of course, the city is better known now for its poisoned water supply. A city in the US without fit drinking water for much of its population the three years and counting. And the US still think it’s a world leader. Ha.

Zardoz, John Boorman (1974, Ireland). I think I last saw this back in the 1980s, but it’s one of those sf films you tend to know a lot about if you’re into sf without actually having to have seen it all that often. I mean, you either absorb the plot – or major points of it – through osmosis, or it’s extremely memorable. I’m noty entirely which is the case. Okay, so Sean Connery in a Zapata moustache and red nappie is pretty memorable. And so is the flying head which appears on the Blu-ray cover-art. Connery is Zed, an Exterminator, whose job it is to, well, exterminate Brutals, who are the debased remnants of the population after some catastrophe (although they seem to wear 1970s clothing). Meanwhile, there are the Vortexes, safeguarded by forcefields and in which live the Eternals, the immortal descendants of a group of scientists who chose to safeguard all human knowledge. Zed hides away in the floatibng head and is taken to one of the Vortexes. During the flight, he kills Arthur Frayn, the Eternal who controlled the floating head and looked after the Exterminator/Brutal programme. In the Vortex, Zed is studied, and discovered the be more intelligent than the Eternals. Because they’re sort of Eloi, they’re weak and decadent and many of them have drifted into catatonia. But Zed shakes them up. And they needed it, because they were going nowhere. I know plenty of sf fans count this as a favourite, and it has sort of dippy 1970s charm to it – and I’m a fan of many things from the 1970s – but it’s hard not to reach the conclusion Zardoz is more style than substance. Bits of it are borrowed from all over, not least the book/film it directly references. And asking the viewer to believe Sean Connery is more intelligent than Charlotte Rampling or John Alderton… Well, suspension of disbelief only stretches so far. On the other hand, some of the shots of the Irish countryside are really impressive, and the production design does a lot with very little – although does a look bit like a BBC production at times. I’m glad I watched it again – and can do so whenever I want, as I bought the Blu-ray in the eureka! sale – and it’s certainly true there are shitloads of worst sf films. But there are also a lot of better ones, and it’s never going to make it into my top ten.

Varsity Show, William Keighley (1937, USA). So  I tracked down a copy of the Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2 on eBay, and it was cheap – and, when it came, it has to be said, a bit battered, but never mind. It’s also not as good as the first collection. But I knew that going in. In Varsity Show, Dick Powell is a washed-up Broadway writer who is co-opted into helping out his alma mater with their annual variety show. He’s doing it because he needs the money, and they want him to running things because the fuddy-duddy in charge is sure to produce a piss-poor show. Powell is on form, and some 0f the female cast shine, but it’s also one of those films where twenty-somethings are referred to as “kids” and the musical numbers aren’t especially memorable. The “kids” rebel, of course, and end up occupying a theatre in New York in order to put on their show. Which is where it turns into your typical Busby Berkeley number. And they really were astonishing. Okay, there’s a leap of imagination required when a dozen dancers on a tuny stage suddenly turns into hundreds of dancers on a massive soundstage… but the way it does that kaleidoscope thing with the dancers is often mind-boggling. Equally mind-boggling is the final scene, in which the theatre’s owners send the police, who sit down to listen to the show, and then the National Guard, who takes seats to watch the show, and, well, you can guess the rest. Varsity Show has a weak story but it manages a good Busby Berkeley extravaganza at the end.

The Phenix City Story*, Phil Karlson (1955, USA). This was a hard film to track down. Despite being on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, it doesn’t appear to have ever been released on DVD, and certainly not in this country. But I found a copy on eBay, from one of those sellers who sell DVD rips of out-of-copyright movies, and it proved to be a pretty good transfer. And a pretty good film. There are two cities either side of a river: Columbus, Georgia, and Phenix City, Alabama. There is a street in Phenix Citty lined with casinos and brothels, and the gangs who run them pretty much control the town. That is, until they inadvertently convince a popular lawyer to run for state attorney general on a ticket to clean them out. And when they kill him, his warhero son takes them on instead. Interestingly, the film opens as a documentary, with a journalist interviewing people involved in the clean-up of Phenix City. It’s only about 15 minutes in that it becomes a traditional narrative cinema film. The gangsters aren’t very convincing, and it’s all a bit Wild West in places – although apparently it’s based ona true story. It’s also pretty brutal, far more than you’d expect from a mid-1950s movie. That aside, and despite a somewhat sensationalist tone, The Phenix City Story proved a lot better than expected, and might just about deserve its slot on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

Scenes from a Marriage, Ingmar Bergman (1973, Sweden). I bought the Criterion edition of this a while ago, which includes both the international movie release and the original Swedish television series. And it was the latter I watched. Of course. Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson are a happily-married couple. He’s an academic, she’s a family lawyer. At least, they’re happy when the series opens. They’re being interviewed by a magazine and they discuss their marriage openly. And later, when friends comes round for dinner, the friends’ unhappy marriage is contrasted with that of Ullmann and Josephson. Except, as the following five episodes show, it’s not all sweetness and light. There are several shocking incidences of violence, which really should not have been acceptable even in 1974. Josephson leaves Ullmann for another woman, but then tries to rekindle his marriage – and he’s really quite horrible about his girlfriend. Eventually, the two separate, and then meet up years both married to other partners… and they have an affair. Josephson’s character is quite a nasty piece of work, and Ullmann seems far too accepting of his actions – although she does use them to advantage when they agree to divorce. Scenes from a Marriage was apparently blamed for the rise in divorce rates in Europe, although it was most likely coincidence. The film/series is highly regarded, and it does seem in places like the epitome of Bergman, but I can’t really say I liked it. It looked bland – perhaps deliberately so – but neither of the main characters were pleasant, or sympathetic, enough to hang a 281-minute TV miniseries on. There were some good bits, true, and it times the marriage did actually feel genuine. But it was a bit like a gory autopsy, and unpleasant to watch more than it was intertaining.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 890


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Moving pictures 2017, #61

I’m still not sure what to make of Ken Russell and his oeuvre – as a film-maker that is; his sf novel, Mike & Gaby’s Space Gospel, was fucking dreadful. Valentino was, at least, a very Russell film, but in good Russell ways rather than bad Russell ways. Welles, I am becoming something of a fan of (and there’s a construction us writers just love), and Puenzo too is proving a name to watch. Guzmán, on the other hand, just makes brilliant documentaries.

Valentino, Ken Russell (1977, USA). The title is the plot – it’s the life of Rudolph Valentino, silent movie star, played by Rudolf Nureyev. But it’s also a Ken Russell film. So it opens with Velentino’s funeral, and the invasion of the funeral parlour by the hordes of fans waiting outside. There’s a artificiality to the staging which spoils it a little, but when the mourners manage to barricade themselves in the parlour, and each tells their story about Valentino, it starts to make sense. Valentino started out as a dancer at a dance-hall, then toured the country in a dance act, before catching the eye of an actress out carousing with Fatty Arbuckle, and so being introduced to Hollywood. Valentino’s sexuality is addressed in the film – by all accounts, he was straight, but his dandiness (is that a word?) led people to suppose he was gay – in as much as Russell has others characterise Valentino as gay despite presenting ample evidence he wasn’t. Those who loomed large in Valentino’s life loom large in the film, especially his original Hollywood patron, over-played by Leslie Caron, and both the staging and acting give much of the film a sort of fevered intensity that makes the subject seem, well, pure fiction. Having read the Wikipedia article on Rudolph Valentino, he seems to have had a more interesting life and career than is laid out in Russell’s film, but I suspect Russell had other concerns. Of the films Valentino actually made, I’ve only seen The Eagle… and I couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about. As for Valentino the movie… I’d put it in Russell’s top ten, but then he only made twenty-one feature films…

Macbeth, Orson Welles (1948, USA). After my comments on Welles’s Othello (see here), I feel a little embarrassed because his Macbeth is pretty much a rehearsal for Othello. This is how Welles did Shakespeare and, it seems, Othello, rather than being a unique perspective on the play, is actually just a follow on from Macbeth. It has the same stark black and white cinematography, the same brutal scenery, the same use of intense close-ups… but it doesn’t do it quite as well as Othello, for all that Macbeth is, arguably, the more powerful play. Unfortunately, Macbeth does suffer from a cast putting on bad Scottish accents, and that’s a major distraction. (Welles blacking up as Othello is offensive, but not distracting per se.) I’ve never been a fan of “the Scottish play”, and I much prefer Shakespeare’s ludicrous comedies (and the occasional romance). But Macbeth has a presence in popular culture that Shakespeare’s other plays cannot match, and I can understand why Welles might have staged it. (But, let’s face it, Falstaff – Chimes at Midnight, a film whose narrative is a combination of Falstaff’s appearances in Shakespeare’s plays is a much more interesting idea. It’s also a great film (see here).) Welles’s Macbeth, crap accents aside, is a pretty good staging of the play. Although, to be honest, I’ve only seen it twice before – the BBC adaptation, and a school trip to the Crucible back in the late 1970s, about which the only things I remember are: everyone in the cast wore Edwardian uniforms. the sets consisted of giant grey sheets of metal with holes in them, it starred Cally (Jan Chappell) from Blake’s 7, and our headmaster fell asleep during the play and snored loudly.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Mamoru Hosoda (2006, Japan). Since I couldn’t find a copy of the original movie adaptation of the novel, I put the anime remake on my rental list and, in the way that sometimes you’re convinced rental firms like Cinema Paradiso take the piss, they sent it out the week after I’d watched the sequel (see here). And, after all, that it seems the anime film takes a few liberties with the source novel and isn’t much of a prequel to Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, despite their shared origin. For a start, the leaping through time bit here seems mostly accidental and unconscious. It starts when a teenage girl loses control of her bicycle and and is pitched in front of a train at a level crossing. Once she learns how to do it consciously, she uses it for small trivial things. It’s all down to a small device she found at school, and which prioves to be a time-travelling device from the future… which she is abusing. I really like Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, it was a fun poke at 1970s youth culture in Japan, but The Girl Who Leapt Through Time seemed more like bland anime fodder for the international market. The animation was high quality, but nothing stood out. And the story is hardly memorable. From the cover alone, comparisons with Studio Ghibli’s output are inevitable, but if you’ve seen all the Ghibli films you’d be better off checking out Makoto Shinkai than The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán (2015, Chile). If you’ve not seen a Guzmán documentary, then you really should. And The Pearl Button is as good a place as any to start. In the UK, we know Chile chiefly because Maggie Thatcher was chummy with its dictator, Pinochet, and we knew Pinochet was a Bad Sort. But then, that’s the sort of fingers-in-ears la-la-la we’re so very good at in the so-called Western world. Pinochet was a monster and his regime was appalling. And yet he was not unique in the history of Chile. Guzmán riffs on water, its ubiquity, its presence in the universe, its uses on Earth, to tell a story about Pinochet’s regime, what happened to supporters of Salvador Allende, and Chile’s shameful history when it comes to the indigenous peoples of Patagonia. The Disappeared, the politicial prisoners who were tortured to death and their bodies dropped in the ocean from helicopters… these are horrible but not entirely unexpected given Pinochet’s regime. But the way the Chilean government of the nineteenth century treated the peoples of Patagonia… They “Christianised” them and gave them disease-ridden clothing… and if that didn’t kill them, they put a bounty on their heads: so much for a man’s genitals, a woman’s breast, a child’s scalp… Of the four peoples mentioned in the film, only one survives, and that only in a handful of old people in a reservation. And yet the photographs of all four from the eighteenth century, before they were killed off, show vibrant and fascinating peoples, with abilities, in navigation especially, that merited study. The Pearl Button is a fascinating meditation on Chile and its history and a horrific condemnation of certain aspects of the country’s past. There are, I suppose, two types of documentary: those which make you a fan of the human race, with good reason; and those which make you wish for an asteroid strike, with good reason. The Pearl Button definitely falls in the latter category, but it is nonentheless required viewing.

The Fish Child, Lucía Puenzo (2009, Argentina). I first came across Puenzo several years ago when I watched XXY, but it wasn’t until I watched Wakolda (see here) and thought it very good that I decided to explore her oeuvre… And now I’ve seen The Fish Child, which means I’ve seen all of her feature films, and which I didn’t enjoy as much as the other two. A young woman from a well-off family in Argentina is having a love affair with the young woman who has worked as a maid for the family since her early teens. The two plan to run away to the maid’s home in Paraguay. So they steal some jewellery, but the maid is caught and imprisoned. The other woman goes to Paraguay, and meets the maid’s father, a television star, and learns of the legend of the Fish Child in the lake near their home. The climax of the film is a prison-break, but there’s plenty going on in and around that. The narrative jumps backwards and forwards in time – using that old trick of signalling different time periods through hairstyles – and it takes a bit of getting used to. It felt a bit cnbfused in places, which undermined its thrillerish plot. But Puenzo is definitely a director worth watching, and I hope she has something new out soon.

The Idealist, Christina Rosendahl (2015, Denmark). My mother lent me this one; she found it in a charity shop – and she’s keen on anything Danish as we have family there. The Idealist is dramatisation of a true story, about a journalist who investigated the high incidences of cancer among men who had worked at the Thule USAF base during the 1960s… and ended up uncovering an abuse of government power by the then prime minister. In the late 1950s, the Danes had voted to refuse nuclear weapons on their territory, and HC Hansen’s government had been voted into power on that platform. In 1968, a USAF B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed. The US and Denmark instituted a clean-up operation, and it is cancer among the Danish men involved in this that journalist Poul Brink investigates. The Danish government refuses to acknowledge the crash site was contaminated enough to cause the cancer, despite evidence to the contrary. But while looking into the events of 1968, including clues that one of the bombs did not break apart on impact but fell through the ice and still lies on the ocean floor, Brink learns that Hansen secretly allowed the US to store nuclear weapons on Danish territory in Greenland. When the Danish government threatens him with jail if he reports what he has learned, he goes ahead and reports it – and spends several months in prison. It’s an interesting story, but when you consider what journalism was like then – the film is set in the 1980s – compared to what it is now… Newspapers stopped being fit for purpose several years ago – and the term “investigative journalism” is now starting to sound like an oxymoron. Worth seeing.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 885


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The endurance of the human bladder

As Alfred Hitchcock famously said, “the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”, but some of the films below stretch that endurance somewhat – happily, not as much Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó… which is 432 minutes long! Of course, these are DVDs and Blu-rays, so there’s always the pause button, a boon to the bladder….

I’ve started to become a bit of an Orson Welles fan, even though I’ve had a DVD of Citizen Kane for a couple of decades… but it’s his other stuff I’m now finding more interesting. Macbeth was cheap on eBay and and Touch of Evil was a charity shop find. La note bleue, on the other hand, is the latest Mondo Vision release of an Andrzej Żuławski film, and I ordered it from their website.

I liked Pakeezah so much (see here), I wanted my own copy. It wasn’t expensive (I see it has now gone up in price). And the rental copy of Mughal-e-Azam I watched (see here) was the original black and white, but I wanted to see it in its colourised version. Which I now have done. And my eyes are still burning. Ran was a charity shop find. I’m not a big Kurosawa fan, so maybe I need to watch some of his films again.

I’ve been trying to complete my Bergman collection – hence, Crisis and Prison. I’m still nine short, although seven of them don’t appear to have ever been released on sell-through… The Beast in Space (see here) was a whim purchase – I’d enjoyed a couple of other Shameless releases, so I chucked this one onto an order.

I pre-ordered the new Metropolis 90th anniversary edition from Eureka’s own website. It arrived recently. The  Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was a charity shop find. A Brighter Summer Day I bought because it’s on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list and wasn’t available for rental. I seem to have picked up a few Edward Yang films now. And Oedipus Rex, well, 2017 has been the Year of Pasolini for me…


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Moving pictures 2017, #54

A couple more posts and I’ll be caught up with my viewing.

Othello, Orson Welles (1951, Italy). I’ve always felt a bit ambivalent about Welles – he was a true Hollywood innovator (and, later, a Hollywood outsider), who made some notable movies and some that were less notable… But then I saw his Falstaff – Chimes at Midnight, and was much impressed. Enough to want to see more of his Shakespeare adaptations – his thrillers suffer from over-complication, but his simplifications of Shakespeare to make the material fit his runtime actually seem make them more powerful. Othello is… probably the best adaptation of the play ever put on celluloid. Er, that I’ve seen. I did wonder if it was Welles’s best film… but I think its troubled production tells against it. It contains some of Welles’s most striking cinematography, but it never quite hangs together as a single vision. It was famously a difficult production – begun in 1948, but Welles ran out of money and used his salary from acting jobs to fund more filming, so it went in fits and starts over a three-year period… And yet, the end-result is… really quite astonishing. For the record, I profoundly disagree with blacking up, and no matter that Othello has been played since Shakespearean times by countless white actors in black make-up, or that Welles cast himself in the title role – one of Shakespeare’s juiciest, by all accounts – it still seems off to deny the part to an actor of colour. Even in 1951. But as director, Welles has put together an impressive film, making astounding use of the constraints he encountered while filming. The stark black and white silhouettes of the opening scenes are among the most arresting images I’ve seen in a movie’s opening minutes. And Welles’s use of lighting and shadow in subsequent scenes is borderline genius. I suspect Welles is the closest Hollywood ever came to a true auteur, and even then he was forced to make films outside the system, and even outside the country. He produced an enviable body of work – not just in cinema – and I’m surprised no one has ever thought to collect it: perhaps the wide spread of financing and production companies prevents it, but from Citizen Kane to F for Fake, that’s an oeuvre ripe for celebration.

Limite*, Mário Peixoto (1931, Brazil). This is on the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list, and I’d pretty much come to the conclusion I’d never get to see it as no copies were available on DVD, nor any other format. According to Wikipedia, the single nitrate print of the film had degraded so badly it could no longer screened. So I did wonder how the makers of the list had managed to see it. But then Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project picked it as one of their films to restore – although some parts of the print were too badly damaged to fully restore, and one scene was missing altogether. But it did mean I got to see it. And… It’s an interesting film, but not especially strong on narrative. It opens with a couple lost in a boat, which is then interrupted by a series of flashbacks. Parts of it reminded me of Maya Deren’s work (which it predates), other parts of some of the early French silent films. Much of the scenery appeared very similar to that in Vidas Secas, which was made thirty years later, so not much had changed during the intervening years. I’m not sure how much of Limite‘s reputation rests on its rarity – it was only shown publicly three times, but was privately screened for Orson Welles in 1942, who greatly admired it. It was certainly worth seeing, but there are films which impressed me more in this collection.

Music in Darkness, Ingmar Bergman (1948, Sweden). Bergman directed this, but the screenplay by Dagmar Edqvist is based on his novel of the same title. A classically trained pianist is blinded after being shot by accident at a shooting range during military manoeuvres. The only person who treats him like a human being is the servant girl in his parents’ house. But any sort of liaison is very much discouraged. The blind pianist decides to train as a church organist – it’s a better career than piano tuner, or piano player in a restaurant, for a person of his training – but even then is discouraged. He bumps into the servant girl, who is now training to be a teacher, and must win back her love. None of this is especially subtle, and while the actor who played the blind pianist – Birger Malmsten, who appears in many of Bergman’s early films – was never entirely convincing as a blind person, he was certainly convincing enough as an upper class Swede to handle that aspect of the plot.

Attenberg, Athina Rachel Tsangari (2010, Greece). I found this on Amazon Prime, which has thrown up the odd gem every now and again, and I admit I hadn’t realised it was Greek until I started watching it. And it’s a bit odd Greek, like a Yorgos Lanthimos film rather than a Theo Angelopoulos film – which is hardly a fair comparison as they’re the only two Greek directors I’ve seen recently, and the latter may be from an older tradition of Greek cinema. But, to be honest, I plan to explore Angelopoulos’s oeuvre further, and if Lanthimos and Tsangari are examples of twenty-first century Greek cinema, then I’m happy to explore that too. Providing, of course, such films are available in editions I can watch. (I studied Ancient Greek as a thirteen-year-old, but my command of modern Greek is non-existent, and I don’t remember what I learnt back then anyway.) There’s not much in the way of plot in Attenberg – a young woman’s father is dying, she enters into a relationship with a stranger who visits the small town where they live, her best friend has sex with her father. The characters are… a bit strange. The film opens, as shown in the DVD cover art, with the young woman and her best-friend ineptly teaching each other how to French kiss. And then sort of ambled along from there. I think I sort of liked it.

The End of Summer, Yasujiro Ozu (1961, Japan). For some reason, this film – Ozu’s penultimate movie – has not been released  by the BFI in one of their nice dual edition releases… although now I’ve hunted down a copy, they’ll probably go and do so. The End of Summer is, like every other Ozu film I’ve seen, an ensemble piece, about family, about business, about marriagable daughters who need husbands. It strikes me as a more Westernised film than his others, in as much as some of the characters are quite Westernised, and their Westernisation is part of the tapestry of family life Ozu weaves. A patriarch has an unmarried daughter and a widowed daughter-in-law and wants to finds husbands for them both. He runs a sake brewery which is starting to fail. The daughter-in-law – Ozu favourite Setsuko Hara – has no real desire to remarry; the young daughter would sooner marry a young man she knows who recently moved to Sapporo. But in the travelling back and forth between his offspring, from Kyoto to Osaka and back, the old man strains his his heart and is stricken with a heart attack. He survives the first, but not the second. And all his match-making counts for nothing. There’s a a sense in Ozu’s films of one generation ensuring the next is well settled for their life, so they too can ensure the same for their children. Mostly this comes across as patriarchs trying to find husbands for their daughters. In mid-twentieth-century Japan. Most fathers’ minds, it seems, when not filled with business deals, were exercised with ensuring their children were well settled for their own journeys into retirement. The idea that the previous generation has sufficient “float” to get the next generation started – either in social capital or financial capital – seems quaint at best these days. None of which invalidates Ozu’s movies. They’re well shot ensembles pieces – his technqiue of cutting from speaker to speaker during a conversation may be crude but remains effective – and his choice of domestic plots that illustrate elements if Japanese life of the time of shooting still resonate today. I still maintain Ozu is better than Mizogushi, and maybe one day I’ll convince David Tallerman of that too.

Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott (2017, USA). Back in the 1970s, you used to be able to buy LPs of chart hits, usually published by K-Tel, which featured recent hits but performed by artists who only sounded like the original artists. Alien: Covenant should have been named Alien: K-Tel. It’s like a run-through of all the best bits of the previous Alien films, but done with less quality. And, following firmly in the footsteps of Prometheus, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense or go any way to building a logical narrative out of the franchise. And yet, according to Wikipedia, most film critics in the press were mildly approving. Really? Have they forgotten what a good film looks like? Because this isn’t one. The plot is cobbled together from bits and pieces of earlier Alien movies, it introduces fifteen characters and makes no effort to let the viewer get to know them – compare and contrast with the cast of Alien – and said cast also behave completely unprofessionally and fall to pieces at the first opportunity. There’s so many things wrong with this film it seems churlish to list them. That the eponymous ship is caught in a neutrino storm which is detected shortly before it hits (handily ignoring that neutrinos pass through everything without effect – so they’re fucking difficult to detect – and also wouldn’t actually cause any damage) and yet you can’t detect a storm of light-speed particles before it hits because by definition the first evidence of it is when the storm hits… Or the character who intercepts a radio message from a planet in his spacesuit because he is at the time “outside the communication buffers” of the Covenant, which is not what “buffer” means at all. Then there’s that really annoyingly stupid mistake perpetrated by all the Alien films, in which craft drop from the mothership while it is in orbit. It doesn’t work like that. Everything is in microgravity. Sadly, it’s also a major part of the plot in Alien: Covenant – because that’s how they manage to finally kill the alien. Oops. Spoiler. And a plot which blithely skates over genocide, with no apparent moral consequences, well, that’s no good either. This is the dumbest film in a franchise which has grown increasingly dumb with each new instalment. Avoid.

1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die count: 883


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Films do furnish a room

In these days of streaming, and obsessive de-cluttering, DVDs probably no longer furnish a room – which I guess means the days of judging a person from their collection of VHS cassettes, DVDs or Blu-rays has passed. Judging someone by their book collection, on the other hand, was never especially useful – if they had more than a dozen books, then they were a reader and that was good. But even then, back in the 1970s and 1980s, people used to have several coffee table books on their wall-units (remember those?) – but they’d probably been given as gifts and never read. Most of the people I knew who collected VHS cassettes collected episodes of television sf series – Dr Who, Stargate, Star Trek, etc. Films never really felt like they were worth keeping. So why do I have nearly 1000 of them? Oh well. Here are a few more that have recently joined the collection…

I still consider Alien one of the greatest sf films ever made, and if the franchise has been on a downward slide ever since I can always hope it might one day match the brilliance of that first film. Sadly, Alien: Covenant doesn’t. It’s even worse than Prometheus. And yet it was given mostly approving reviews. John Carter, on the other hand, was a genuinely good film, one of the best sf films of the past five years, and yet reviewers slagged it off. It has its faults – name a sf film that doesn’t – but it’s both a gorgeous piece of cinema and a really clever script. I decided it was time to upgrade my DVD copy to a Blu-ray. Othello is possibly Welles’s nearly best film – it has some of his most striking cinematography, but it was filmed in bits and pieces over three years and that tells against it. Personal Shopper (see here) is another idiosyncratic movie from Assayas, a director worth following, and a charity shop find.

After watching The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers (see here), which I had rented, I went and bought everything available by the director, Ben Rivers. Which is A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (co-directed with Ben Russell; see here) and Two Years at Sea. Totally worth it. A director whose career I will be following from now on.

An international bunch here. Splendid Float is Tawianese (see here), Kurotoage is Japanese (see here) and Se Eu Fosse Você 1 and Se Eu Fosse Você 2 are so-so Brazilian comedies (see here).

The Mizoguchi Collection was a gift from David Tallerman. I am not as enamoured of early Japanese cinema as he is – except perhaps for Ozu – but I certainly recognise the quality of the films. Possession was the first of the Mondo Vision re-releases of Żułwaski’s films, and proved quite difficult to find. I now have five of the Mondo Vision limited edition DVDs. A sixth, La Note Bleue, was released earlier this year – it’s on order. Żułwaski is an aquired taste, but Mondo Vision have done a sterling job on their releases of his films. Finally, Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project is an excellent film,er, project, and its first volume included a beautifully-restored version of one of my favourite films, A River Called Titas. So no matter what Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2 included, I was going to buy it because it was likely to include important films – and so it does, by: Lino Brocka, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Yermek Shinarbayev, Mário Peixoto, Edward Yang and Ömer Lütfi Akad.

 


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From silver screen to silver disc

I’ll continue to post these DVD hauls posts, I think, since I seem to be spending as much time on this blog writing about movies as I do books. Er, actually probably more about movies, this past twelve months or so. And so here are the latest batch to join the collection…

I decided it was about time I completed my collection of Bergman DVDs, so I went hunting on eBay… and found myself cheap copies of The Virgin Spring, Port of Call, Three Strange Loves, To Joy and Music in Darkness. Some of them are currently deleted. And I’m still missing about a dozen or so titles. I’ve only watched To Joy so far. It was not very joyful.

A pair of sf Blu-rays picked up in the recent Amazon Prime Day. Colossus: The Forbin Project, a classic giant-computer-starts-WWIII movie, was on my rental list. Mars, a National Geographic docudrama about the first mission to Mars, clearly designed to cash in on the success of The Martian, was already on my wishlist.

After watching Arabian Nights (see here), I wanted to see more Pasolini, although I’d been tempted back in January when I’d watched Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom… But I’d managed to resist temptation then. Except, well, you know how it goes… relaxing of an evening in front of the telly, laptop on your knees, bottle of wine… and oops I’ve gone and bought Six Films 1968 – 1975 by Pasolini on Blu-ray. But I don’t begrudge buying films on a whim that I know I’ll watch several times. Having saidthat, I’m not sure why I bought Orson Welles’s Macbeth – well, I put a bid on it, and actually won it – but I do like Welles’s films.

A pair of out-of-copyright Fritz Lang movies, bought on eBay for a couple of quid. Neither are especially good. I wrote about Clash by Night here and Moonfleet will be in the next Moving pictures post.

This set was a lucky find on eBay. Second Run have released several films by Miklós Jancsó, but these six Pepe and Kapa movies are from the end of his career and are unlikely to ever be released in the UK (these are Hungarian editions, with subtitles in a variety of languages, including English). The titles translate, approximately, as The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest, Mother! The Mosquitos, Last Supper at the Arabian Grey Horse, Wake Up, Mate, Don’t You Sleep, The Modhács Evil and Eddie Has Eaten My Lunch.0


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Moving pictures, #20

A nice geographical spread this time, although only two films are from the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list.

entranced_earthEntranced Earth*, Glauber Rocha (1967, Brazil). I watched this while drinking wine, as you do, and liked it so much I drunkenly went and bought it on Amazon, along with the other two films with which it forms a trilogy – Black God, White Devil and Antonio das Mortes. Oh well, these things happen. I’ve since watched it again – sober, of course – and… I still loved it. It’s a very political film, set in the invented country of Eldorado during an election, in which a journalist tries to decide between a conservative candidate and a populist candidate, both of which are corrupt. The narrative skips back and forth in time and place – it opens at the governor’s palace, but there are also scenes with one of candidates out meeting the public, as well as scenes of the other candidate ranting about the natural superiority of the upper classes. The journalist is also a poet, so we get to see some of his poetry as well. And there’s an astonishing series of shots from high up on a radio mast beside a villa built on the top of a mountain. Plus a hot jazz score. And I hate jazz. It’s clearly influenced by France’s New Wave, but not to its detriment. I loved it. A damn good film. A plot that’s all politics, a non-linear narrative… Great stuff. As I said earlier. Obvs. [0]

late_autumnLate Autumn, Yasujirō Ozu (1960, Japan). And speaking of buying films from Amazon, I’m pretty sure I was sober when I purchased this but I’d actually meant to buy An Autumn Afternoon, which is on the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list, and not Late Autumn, which isn’t. Still, it’s Ozu and you can’t really go wrong with his films. Admittedly, I wasn’t all that taken with Tokyo Story, his most famous film, but I did like Floating Weeds, a later film, a great deal. And, having now watched Late Autumn, which I also liked a great deal, I think I ought to watch more of his films. Such as, er, An Autumn Afternoon. In tihs one, four middle-aged men turn up to the memorial service of a friend of theirs from college days, and decide to find a husband for the attractive daughter of their dead friend. It does not go well. Partly because the young woman does not want to leave her widowed mother alone, but also because the four blokes bungle their attempt at match-making. Late Autumn is a beautifully understated study of professional Japanese life. There are no theatrics, no histrionics, no need for special effects, just people going about their lives… and filmed with no pretensions by Ozu. [dual]

demyPeau d’âne, Jacques Demy (1970, France). Imagine a muscial version of Cinderella with Catherine Deneuve in the title role, only it’s not Cinderella it’s a story that’s a lot like it but a bit weird in places and, well, very Demy. But pretty much the same. Sort of. Deneuve plays a beautiful princess, whose father shows an un-paternal level of interest in her after her mother’s death. So she runs way to the woods, and with the help of magic appears as a poor and dirty servant girl when wearing the eponymous donkey skin. But the prince of a neighbouring country meets her (all his courtiers are red, whereas hers are blue), and wants to marry her. He has her ring – Cinderella’s slipper, in other words – and calls for every woman in the country to try on the ring so he can identify his one true love. Although the plot is pretty generic, the film is very Demy – the courtiers are completely coloured according to their court, so Deneuve’s retainers even wear blue face make-up; and, of course, there are songs, written by Michel Legrand, so if you’ve seen other Demy films you shold know what to expect. Mildly diverting. [2]

dancing_hawkDancing Hawk, Grzegorz Królikiewicz (1978, Poland). I really do like Polish cinema, butr I’m not entirely sure what to make of this one. Ostensibly, it’s the sotry of a self-made apparatchik, who rises high, only to lose it all in the end. But the opening shots depict his childhood during WWII, through much use of Dutch angles, weird shots and strange colour filters. And there’s an abrupt change to Polish realistic cinema, in that sort of TV drama style they do so well – I’m reminded of Wajda’s Man of Iron and Piestrak’s Test Pilota Pirxa – although that may just be the 1970s vibe. I should really wait until I’d rewatched this film before rewatching, but I’m getting a bit behind on my moving pictures posts… but perhaps I’ll write about it again after a rewatch. I will, however, note that I fancy getting that Królikiewicz box set… [0]

palefaceThe Paleface*, Norman Z MacLeod (1948, USA). There have been a number of films whose presence on the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list I have found baffling, and none more so than this Bob Hope vehicle which manages to be mildly amusing and… well, that’s about all. My own list would include films others might find surprising, but I’d at least defend them; but there’s no documentation on the 1001 web site, so short of buying the actual book I’ve no way of knowing why this film makes the list. It certainly doesn’t deserve to – in fact, every other film in this post not on the list has a better claim to a place than The Paleface. Which may be slightly unfair, as there are plenty of films on the list which don’t belong on it. Bob Hope plays a dentist, and not a very sucessful one, whom Jane Russell decides to use as cover in her mission to travel eadt and discover who is running guns to the nasty Native Americans (who are, after all, trying to prevent their lands from being occupied by an invader; oh wait, the film doesn’t mention that).

strangerThe Stranger, Orson Welles (1946, USA). A war criminal is released so he can lead a war crimes investigator to a bigger fish. He’s followed to a small US town, where the investigator becomes suspicious of one of the local pillars of the community (played by Welles himself). Apparently, te film is notable for a number of reasons – that Welles wasn’t the first choice of director, and that the film incorporates newsreel footage of the Nazi death camps (because the Americans of the time didn’t really think they ever existed; some still don’t). My admiration for Welles’s work has grown over the past couple of years, and although it’s all too easy to forget quite how ground-breaking Citizen Kane was when it was made, so it’s easy to forget that many of his later films weren’t as straightforward as they initially appeared. The Stranger is by no means a highlight of his oeuvre, it is in most respects a relatively straightforward thriller of its time, but there’s lots to like in the less obvious details – such as the characterisation of some of the cast. Welles was never as clever cinematically as Hitchcock, but he was cleverer in other ways. Worth seeing.

1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die count: 758


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Moving pictures 2016, #8

Almost up to date now – so it’ll back to the usual, somewhat irregular, schedule for these Moving picture posts after this one. A bit of a mixed bag this time – three from the US, two from France, and one from Spain (that isn’t actually Spanish); mostly from the 1980s; and mostly drama.

demyParking, Jacques Demy (1985, France). I’m really not sure what to make of this one. It’s like a cross between Cocteau’s Orphée and Xanadu, although without being anywhere near as awful as the latter. It’s actually a retelling, more or less, of Orphée – and Jean Marais, who played the title role in Cocteau’s film, plays Hades in this – but rather than a beatnik poet, Orpheus is a rockstar. Who wears a white jumpsuit and a red headband. And his music is awful – bland, insipid elevator rock, the sort of music Kenny G would sing if he’d been a singer. While rehearsing on stage, Orpheus is electrocuted. But when he gets to the afterlife, Hades can find no record indicating he was due. So he sends him back. Then a woman he met there, Hades’ personal assistant, Claude Perséphone, contacts Orpheus and offers to represent him. He refuses. But Orpheus’s girlfriend, Eurydice, commits suicide, so he tracks down Perséphone and persuades her to lead him back to the underworld in order to rescue Eurydice. The sections set in the afterlife are in black and white, with the occasional red, and the underworld itself resembles either an underground car park or the basement of some huge building. Those scenes are reasonably effective, although they’re not a patch on Orphée‘s, but the movie is completely hamstrung by Orpheus’s music and the baffling success he has apparently had with it. Not one of Demy’s better efforts.

sex_liessex, lies and videotape*, Steven Soderbergh (1989, USA). This film apparently had an enormous impact on the independent film industry in the US, and Soderbergh has always been one of the more interesting US directors… and, to be fair, time has been relatively kind to it… but it’s a type of drama I don’t find particularly interesting. A school friend of a philandering lawyer drops into town to stay for the weekend, but decides to stay on for longer and rents a house. The lawyer’s wife helps him furnish the flat, and thwe two swap personal histories. The friend admits he cannot perform sexually with another person, and has taken to interviewing women on video about their sexual histories. Meanwhile, the lawyer is having an affair with a sister-in-law, and she becomes interested in the friend with the videotapes… and it only really ends badly for the lawyer, who pretty much deserved it. For all its polished dialogue and cast, I found it all a bit dull. But given the film’s impact, I suspect it belongs on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and I can at least now cross it off.

koyaanisqatsiKoyaanisqatsi*, Godfrey Reggio (1982, USA). I knew of this film but had never heard it mentioned all that approvingly, and despite knowing roughly what it was – ie, footage of cities and landscape, with music but no voiceover – and being a fan of James Benning’s films – it had never occurred to me to actually watch Koyaanisqatsi. But it’s on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, so I bunged it on the rental list, and in the fullness of time it dutifully dropped through the letterbox. And I watched it. And, unsurprisingly, I loved it. Using slow-motion and time-lapse cinematography, Reggio filmed various parts of the US countryside, such as the Canyonlands National Park, as well as various cities – including footage taken on the streets of pedestrians, some of whom actually take notice of the camera. Over it all is a repetitive, but quite appropriate, electronic score by Philip Glass. It’s an easier watch than any of Benning’s films – despite the lack of voice-over, there’s a plain narrative to follow, and the visuals are, of course, quite stunning. The rental service screwed up when sending me this – although I suppose it might have been me – and a Blu-ray arrived rather than a DVD. So I got to see it in even better quality than expected. And it came with the sequel Powaqqatsi – see below.

aviators_wifeThe Aviator’s Wife, Éric Rohmer (1981, France). I do like Rohmer’s films – at least those I’ve seen – albeit some more than others. This one strikes me as… middling Rohmer. A young man is afraid his girlfriend is still seeing her ex-, an airline pilot, and witnesses the pilot leaving her flat. Later, he spots the pilot with another woman, and decides to follow the pair. In a park, he bumps into a fifteen-year-old girl, who quizzes him on his behaviour, and the decides to help him trail the couple. Which is what they do. Around Paris. And the two of them discuss what the couple they are trailing might be up to. It’s a typical dialogue-heavy and leadenly-paced Rohmer film, and despite its plot and cast, it’s unfortunately somewhat light on charm.

falstaff_dvdFalstaff – Chimes at Midnight*, Orson Welles (1966, Spain). Welles has done quite well on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, with half a dozen – that’s around half of his feature film output – on the list. Three of them I’d seen many years before, one I watched and liked so much I bought the Criterion Blu-ray… and now there’s the only Shakespeare film of his that makes the list. And I hadn’t really expected to like it as much as I did. Possibly because I hadn’t been that impressed by The Immortal Story, seen only a few weeks before. And, it has to be said, Shakespeare is hard to do well… and Welles not only plays the title role but created his story, and dialogue, from Falstaff’s appearances in various of Shakespeare’s plays. And yet… it works really well. It doesn’t much feel like a Shakespeare play, despite the Shakespearean dialogue – and the scenes depicting the Battle of Shrewsbury are surprisingly brutal and effective. Welles’s make-up, to be fair, does appear a little over-done, much as it did in The Immortal Story, but it’s only noticeable in some of the scenes. I am not really a fan of Shakespeare’s plays, and watching the BBC adaptations was more prompted more by a desire to see what they were like, and I’ve never really found myself all that enamoured of the various film adaptations I’ve seen – such as those by Baz Luhrmann, Kenneth Branagh, etc – but I’ve seen two since I’ve been working my way through the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and was somewhat surprised to discover they’re both very good – this one and Laurence Oliver’s Henry V. Go figure.

koyaanisqatsiPowaqqatsi, Godfrey Reggio (1988, USA). This is the second of three films – the third, Naqoyqatsi, didn’t appear until 2002 – and where the first film’s title translates as “life out of balance”, Powaqqatsi means “life in transition”. It focuses on the developing world, not the US, but follows the same pattern. This time, however, the Philip Glass score is much more intrusive, and seems to work to work against the visuals rather than with them. It don’t think it’s as successful a film as the first, although the cinematography is just as good. But now, I want the entire trilogy – apparently there’s a Criterion Collection Blu-ray trilogy, so that’s gone on the wants list (for some reason the Region B release, by Arrow Academy, only contains the first two films).

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 724